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from the going-for-a-piece-of-the-pie^W-IPO dept.
A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the way in which Uber operates its business."
In a complaint filed May 31 (pdf) in federal court in Atlanta, Stephen Dickerson charges that Uber Technologies Inc. is infringing on a patent he won in 2004 (pdf) for a "communications and computing based urban transit system."
"The core of Uber's business and technical platforms for its rideshare, bikeshare, and scooter sharing services practice the transportation system of Professor Dickerson's invention; without that system, Uber literally cannot operate. Throughout its existence, Uber has egregiously infringed [Dickerson's] patent without paying any compensation for such use," Dickerson's lawsuit alleges.
[...]Last July, he sued Lyft Inc. in federal court in New York (pdf), making the same allegations he is making against Uber. In a court filing, Lyft denies it infringed on Dickerson's technology (pdf). The lawsuit is continuing. (Read a discussion of the issues in the case here (pdf).)
[Updated 20190605_120341 UTC to fix links and formatting; noted which links were to .pdf documents. --martyb]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05 2019, @07:17AM (1 child)
One asshole suing a bunch of others ... pop me a beer and pass the popcorn, wontya?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05 2019, @07:05PM
But... He reinvented yellow cab!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05 2019, @09:50AM (1 child)
When you have money, you attract all the cockroaches. Just ask Trump's dad.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05 2019, @12:30PM
I couldn't hear him, his voice was muffled by the white hood he was wearing. In his coffin.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday June 05 2019, @12:54PM (1 child)
I suspect the validity of the patent will be questioned. The case will probably depend on details. There have already been ride-hailing services in various cities as part of public transit facilities, especially for low-population areas that still need connection to mass transit. And some of these were computer-scheduled. Yes, even back in the day when computers were the size of refrigerators.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 05 2019, @01:20PM
Here's a better link to the patent [google.com]
The claims are, frankly, a bit bizarre. They include all sorts of things that you would expect to be in separate patents, but much of it turns on automatically billing the customers for usage. Usage of taxi-like services, usage of rental cars, usage of whatever kind of transport they managed to list. They do mention the use of GPS, so that they know where the vehicles and the passengers are. And it's all "an automated system for", i.e., "do it on a computer".
Aside from the GPS aspect, there's nothing here that wasn't being done by taxi and rental companies 30 years ago. And GPS has been used for similar purposes by the trucking industry since it was first made available to the public in the mid-1990s.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 05 2019, @01:27PM (2 children)
As the children of Solomon Linda, the author of "Mbube" (the original song on which "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is heavily based) demonstrated in the documentary "ReMastered: The Lion’s Share", much of society expects that the author/inventor otherwise holder of IP is automatically awarded all the profits from their brainchild.
Of course, that's a grossly oversimplified view. What are profits? Particularly in the world of Hollywood accounting, profits are a rather arbitrary thing. Any IP requires money to develop, and promote, and defend in the real world. That money is often ventured at-risk, and the sources of that money expect return on their at-risk investment sufficient to cover those many cases where they venture money and lose it.
The film implies that Solomon Linda's children ultimately received approximately $750,000(US) in total compensation for his authorship of "MBube", and it clearly demonstrates that they feel ripped off. Perhaps they feel ripped off because the lawyers hid the inner workings of the deal from them, and in this sense I agree with them. The prosecution of that case no doubt cost far more than $750,000 and whatever gross settlement amount was reached, the "Lion's share" of it no doubt went to the lawyers and government ministries who took the risk of suing Disney. I think that gag orders and confidential settlements are almost universally bad things, and the beneficiaries agree with me there, but... it's understandable if the lawyers are embarrassed about how much money they are taking for the case and since we let lawyers make their own rules, this is what we get.
As to submarine pilot Stephen Dickerson, I do hope that prior art and obviousness sink his case. He made an initial investment at-risk in a bad (obvious and previously practiced) patent back in 2004, now 15 years later he's convinced a lawyer to go after the juicy targets who are infringing its claims. If this isn't litigation in bad faith, then the plaintiffs were simply ignorant when staking their claims in the first place, and ignorance of reality should not be grounds for a legal award of damages, imagined or real.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 05 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)
You're assuming that this is the first time he approached them. It may well be that "submarine patent" is not a proper description.
That said, it does sound like another example of patents being granted that would have been "obvious to one skilled in the art".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 05 2019, @07:56PM
Even if he went after them in 2005, obvious and previously practiced still apply, but I have a hard time believing that this has been simmering since 2005 without settlement. Even though lawyers do like to get paid as much as possible, they also like to wrap things up when risk is at a minimum - dragging for too long puts the whole payoff at risk. Uber was a juicy target even before the IPO, I'm thinking that nobody would pursue this for him at risk until Uber was so very large and entangled in other matters that they might be inclined to settle for the cost of a good defense.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/