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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: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday March 08 2018, @12:17AM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday March 08 2018, @12:17AM (#649241) Journal

    But why patents as a general concept?

    First of all, we're talking about software patents here. Not patents as a general concept. Physical products are radically different: development time, costs, risks. You can't make a truly new drug or a truly new motor design without a non-trivial investment. You can make software at home, between dinner and putting the kids to bed. While chortling to yourself. For zero dollars.

    Shouldn't the person who spends many hours of his/her life solving that problem be granted a benefit for it?

    Not if it's software, and either trivial or obvious, no. Or both. If it's neither, the window to make money will open naturally. If it's not, it won't.

    Protip: Don't give away your source code. Or, if you do, accept that you did. You make it public, someone will use it if it's useful. This, IMHO, is a good thing. Unless you want to make money. Because most good software with good documentation can't be easily monetized with "support." Because it isn't broken, and how to use it is well established and easy to understand. So if you give the code for good software away... you'd better have another way to pay the piper.

    Or, you can just make lousy software / documentation. If you can still make people want to use it (which will last until someone makes a good version... and which they likely will because you gave the code away), why then you can monetize support.

    OTOH, if you use a trade secret approach – tell no one it exists until it ships, and tell no one how you did it, ever – it's yours to monetize unless someone else can duplicate or better it. If it's non-obvious, that will take time. If it's non-trivial, they may not even be able to pull it off, or if they do, it might take them a lot longer than it took you. There's your money-making window. One you deserve.

    The guy tries to do exactly what you say, but Ford grabs hints about the mechanism in a demo.

    No, he didn't do exactly what I said, because if he had, there would have been no demo from which the invention, such as it was, was easily lifted: There would have been a non-trivial product that was non-obvious.

    And what did Ford argue in court? That the invention was trivial -- a mere combination of a few simple circuits.

    If that was true, then it was trivial. Furthermore, in a demo of a wiper controller doing something that they could not figure out, how is it that they trivially figured it out? Apparently, this wasn't a demo of the device to a prospective buyer who had never been able to figure it out; this was an exposure of the method, which is just.... dumb. Should have been a black box with a price list for the contents, and a lawyer right there to see to it that no other information transfer took place without a contract. If your assertion is that they would have figured it out anyway... then it was not only trivial, it was obvious. Which I not-so-humbly submit should mean "not worth much, if anything."

    Even so, your example is a physical product, not software, and the unavoidable costs and risks are radically different, as are the benefits to society. Software can move much faster than hardware, presuming it isn't crippled by IP issues. Which is the point. Software patents are crippling. They need to go away.

    Bottom line is that just because something is simple to implement (and therefore could be easily copied and mass produced by a big company as soon as they see it) doesn't mean it's simple to figure out how to make the first one.

    If invention by A is trivial/simple for B once its function or effect is merely described, then I think it is clearly too obvious to patent. Software or hardware. This is a huge problem with the hardware patent system. The software patent system shouldn't even exist but as it does, it's ended up with those problems as well.

    Too much crap is patented. The system is utterly broken. It's holding almost all of us back while a very few moneyed individuals get rich off it. That's terrible.

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