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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 07 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the imaginary-property dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:21PM (5 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:21PM (#649125) Journal

    I think software should be protected by copyright and not by patent. Software patents need to go.

    Software patents are ridiculous. They end up protecting very basic ideas that are easy to implement.

    Hold on here..... That's just not true.

    Patent protection has specific OBVIOUSNESS limitations, as well as specific prohibition of patenting an IDEA.
    (I'm not digging up the obvious case law on this, because you already know better than to make that claim).

    There's no such protections or prohibitions in copyright law. So be careful what you wish for.

    If there were such, there would be no more than one trashy Romance novel every 70 years (And the world would be a better place).

    I find it highly SUSPICIONS that TFS and Ars cites each and every patent as "covers the concept", when I suspect that the author (Timothy Lee) knows full well that is specifically NOT stated in any of these patents, they all patent a specific "method and apparatus".

    Note: This isn't a defense of software patents in general, just a rebuttal of a claim and a a false claim in the Ars article.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:52PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:52PM (#649138) Journal

    You're saying patent protection is supposed to work well to protect only actual innovations.

    In practice it does not work and is broken.

    --
    The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday March 07 2018, @08:10PM (3 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday March 07 2018, @08:10PM (#649143) Journal

      Actually, I think if you look around, there have been a number of patent decisions that are slowly bringing patents closer to where they should be, and reducing nuisance law suits. Its not as broken as you think.

      http://www.iam-media.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=e67f38bd-ef61-440d-9877-e1cfe47f59e5 [iam-media.com]

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      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 07 2018, @09:24PM (2 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 07 2018, @09:24PM (#649178) Journal

        there have been a number of patent decisions that are slowly bringing patents closer to where they should be

        At what great cost! And it is a cost borne by victims of patent shakedowns. Not to mention the RISK of losing and incurring huge liabilities.

        You view it as acceptable. I do not.

        It is broken. Seriously broken. I wouldn't mind software patents being burned to the ground. We seemed to get through the 80's and some of the 90's without software patents. I remember when I could just write code without needing a lawyer.

        I don't understand what you see about software patents is worth defending? I seem them as being a gigantic net drag on innovation. Not something that promotes innovation. The rewards and who gets rewarded is perverse and wrong. Ancient, obsolete and useless abstract paper patents (without any demonstratable invention) get used a couple decades later to shake down innovative businesses. And some ridiculous patent lawsuits are now in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

        It should all end in fire.

        --
        The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:39AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:39AM (#649268)

          I wouldn't mind software patents being burned to the ground.

          From the legal standpoint, they've already burned down. [soylentnews.org] It's just that the US Patent Office is doing a terrible job and keeps approving them even though it really, really shouldn't, and challenging those patents in court to get them invalidated costs a lot of money.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:30AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:30AM (#649364) Journal

            There should be a penalty for the patent office if they grant patents that are later invalidated. So that they have an incentive not to grant them to begin with.

            --
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