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Teledildonics Patent Used to Sue Six Nascent Cybersex Companies

posted by takyon on Friday July 24 2015, @09:49PM   Printer-friendly

Phoenix666 writes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/teledildonics-patent-used-to-sue-six-nascent-cybersex-companies/

Patent trolls are so prolific these days that you don't really need to be successful to draw lawsuits. Case in point, a recently formed California company called TZU Technologies is demanding cash from six different players in the "virtual sex" industry—which barely even exists.

TZU is using US Patent No. 6,368,268 to sue six companies working in the touch-over-Internet arena: Comingle, Holland Haptics, Vibease, Internet Service, Frixion, and Winzz.

The patent was invented by Warren Sandvick, president of a Texas company called HasSex, which has an extremely trollish website and licensed the patent several times. Filed in 1998, and granted in 2002, the patent lays broad claim to a remotely controlled sexual "stimulation system," one version of which involved a "second user interface" located remotely from the first.

This year, Sandvick apparently sold the patent to TZU, which has bigger plans for the patent. Earlier this week, TZU filed six lawsuits.

The guys at TZU sound like a bunch of tools.

Teledildonics at Wikipedia.

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday July 24 2015, @11:02PM

    by edIII (791) on Friday July 24 2015, @11:02PM (#213363)

    Just one of the many reasons why SoylentNews makes me happy.... Teledildonics.

    I learned a new word today, although I'm not sure you can put something in double quotes that is being controlled remotely and jammed into a person..... unless it's being done ironically.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday July 24 2015, @11:12PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday July 24 2015, @11:12PM (#213366) Journal

    For you, I will edit away the double-quotes.

    Embrace

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @11:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @11:30PM (#213370)

      Now that's funny. But seriously, how many stories are going to be posted with overly general patents that are neither novel nor advance the progress of science or the arts. The classic example of putting an eraser on a pencil is not a patentable idea. But a remote control for an electrical device is patentable? Even back in 1998 it was fairly trivial to hook up a radio or IR remote to a device. Ug... and the government seems to have no stomach to fix these problems, since there's money to be made by using the patent system.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:45AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:45AM (#213422) Homepage

    Have you been living under a rock? Heck, Emacs has had teledildonics support since 2010!

    https://github.com/qdot/deldo [github.com]

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