Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 15 submissions in the queue.
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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:35AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:35AM (#649265)

    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.

    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.

    Despite the Court's avoidance of mention of software in the opinion, the Alice decision has had a dramatic effect on the validity of so-called software patents and business-method patents.[39] Since Alice, these patents have suffered a very high mortality rate.[40] Hundreds of patents have been invalidated under §101 of the U.S. patent laws in Federal District Courts. Applying Alice, district court judges have found many of these claims to be patent-ineligible abstract ideas.[41]

    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.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:03AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:03AM (#649395) Homepage
    > ... USPTO employees are evaluated on "number of approved patents". The incentives are wrong ...

    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