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Today on this March 6, 2018, this Reuters article describes:
BlackBerry Ltd on Tuesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against social media platforms Facebook Inc and its units WhatsApp and Instagram.
BlackBerry said Facebook and its companies developed "competing applications that improperly used BlackBerry's mobile messaging intellectual property".
There are more details on the lawsuit at Ars Technica:
BlackBerry, the once-great smartphone maker that exited the hardware business in 2016, is suing Facebook for patent infringement. BlackBerry owns a portfolio of broad software patents that cover some of the most basic features of modern smartphone messaging services—and the company says it wants Facebook to pay up.
[...] BlackBerry began its own campaign of patent litigation in 2016, suing the little-known Android phone maker BLU and the Internet telephony company Avaya. BLU agreed to pay up last year, and BlackBerry is now moving on to Facebook—potentially a much more lucrative target.
BlackBerry is asserting seven software patents against Facebook, and they're remarkably broad:
- Patent 7,372,961 covers the concept of generating a cryptographic key by choosing a pseudorandom number and then checking if it is "less than order q prior to reducing mod q." If it is, the key is used. If not, another key is chosen at random and the process repeats.
- Patent 8,209,634 covers the concept of using icons with numeric badges to signal the arrival of new messages.
- Patent 8,279,173 covers the concept of tagging people in photos using an auto-completing search box.
- Patent 8,301,713 covers the concept of marking a significant lull in a text message conversation by inserting a timestamp reflecting the time of the next message.
- Patent 8,429,236 covers the concept of changing how a mobile device sends messages depending on whether they're being actively read by the recipient's device. For example, if updates aren't being read in real time, then the sending device may be able to conserve power by sending messages in batches rather than one at a time.
- Patent 8,677,250 covers the concept of tying a messaging service and a game application together so that a user playing a game can send messages to contacts on the messaging app that includes updates on the player's progress in the game.
- Patent 9,349,120 covers the concept of muting a message thread.
How fitting it is that today is the 15th anniversary of the SCO vs IBM lawsuit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday March 07 2018, @05:48PM (5 children)
The patent office is just not doing their jobs.
Patents are intended to protect an invention. The concept of invention is that you come up with something new and non-trivial, which makes a significant (positive or negative) difference compared to what was before.
Most of the listed patents fail that test. They are minor experience optimizations, which most engineers working in that field would eventually implement. They are not inventions worthy of decade-long protection.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 07 2018, @08:47PM (4 children)
> The patent office is just not doing their jobs.
I'll say. They have incentive not to seriously vet patents. Their revenue is directly proportional to the amount of patent applications. So if by being very lax they give hope to businesses that getting a patent is easy, and get patent trolls into a fever over a patent rush, a grab to patent every idea under the sun, and also scare others into getting defensive patents, they bring in more revenue.
> Patents are intended to protect an invention.
It's even narrower than that. They're supposed to protect an implementation, a physical device, that does something novel. It was too short a conceptual step between that and protecting an idea, and that step was taken when the US allowed the patenting of software alone. Otherwise, it would. be impractical to patent software. It would have to be separately patented on PCs, MacIntoshes, Raspberry Pis, Xboxes, and maybe even Commodore 64s and Turing machines, as well as every other computer system capable of executing the algorithm.
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Wednesday March 07 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
Too late. That already happened, after a fashion. A software patent on XOR'ing the crosshairs for some old CAD system (so that it can be drawn and moved around non-destructively) is why C64 and relatives have inverse-image portions of their respective character sets, to enable them to fake a flashing cursor (and is why Apple II has a little "checkerboard" symbol for it).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 09 2018, @10:00PM
Huh, that's a bit of computer history I didn't know. Always wondered why an Apple II had 3 ways to display a glyph: white on black, black on white (inverse), and blinking (argh!). Never made much sense. Figures it was patent insanity.
Patents have driven computer system designers to do lots of nutty workarounds. Apple and their "ownership" of the whole "look and feel" of the MacIntosh GUI forced Windows into welding titlebars to the individual windows rather than having a dedicated space at the top of the screen, and using a recycle bin icon rather than a trash can icon, stuff like that.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:35AM (1 child)
Note that the US did not allow patenting abstract ideas, including software. The Supreme Court explicitly ruled against it in the Alice decision [wikipedia.org] (2014), which has since been used hundreds of times to invalidate such patents.
The US Patent Office, however, keeps approving software and business idea patents, acting explicitly against the SCOTUS and patent law itself, because the USPTO employees are evaluated on "number of approved patents". The incentives are wrong, and lead to the billions of dollars of direct economic damage from patent trolls like the current BlackBerry.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:03AM
Yes, absolutely. And there's such a simple solution to this problem.
Incentivise them on the number of *rejected* patents.
They'll still be stamping papers as quickly as they land on their desks, and we get rid of all of the pollution. (Yes, I'm convinced they don't read them.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves