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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: 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.