{"id":50,"date":"2012-03-28T06:35:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T06:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/116366304"},"modified":"2014-05-31T06:44:03","modified_gmt":"2014-05-31T06:44:03","slug":"116366304","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"A couple of thoughts about patents…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Techdirt has an article about a little girl potentially losing her ability to improve her speech due to a patent lawsuit. Read it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Poor little girl, evil patent-enforcing company… the usual nonsense… and I can’t take it any more.\u00a0 Inventing stuff intentionally, as opposed to sitting in a room with lawyers trying to figure out if there’s a patent in there they can file, is hard.\u00a0 It’s also really expensive.\u00a0 And the odds against a lone inventor are terrible… on the order of well over 90% of the time you’ll never get your money back.[[posterous-content:pid___0]]<\/p>\n

Yes, there are junk patents out there that probably shouldn’t have been issued.\u00a0 This really doesn’t look like one of them. The patent is for a Dynamic Keyboard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve written in the past about my great-grandfather Thomas E Murray, who was a well-respected inventor with 462 patents around the turn of the century.\u00a0 What I never wrote about was another measure of an inventor’s influence – and that is the number of times a patent is cited by other inventors.\u00a0 When you site a patent, it’s like telling people “these are the shoulders I’m standing on”, they’re my prior art.\u00a0 This keyboard patent is cited by 23 other patents.\u00a0 It’s a real patent.<\/p>\n

Another interesting part of a patent are its claims.\u00a0 The number of claims is a good indicator of the complexity or completeness of a patent.\u00a0 Mine have 30 or so.\u00a0 This one has 124.\u00a0 That’s insane.<\/p>\n

Now, to the lawsuit.\u00a0 Semantic is suing the makers of the app “Speak for Yourself” for infringement.\u00a0 Guaranteed this isn’t the first time these two parties have come into contact.\u00a0 The first thing you generally do in this sort of situation is say “Hey – I see you’re using my technology, would you like to purchase a license?”.\u00a0 Only if they’ve been ignored or haven’t been able to come to a satisfactory agreement on the license would anyone file suit.<\/p>\n

One never goes to court lightly.\u00a0 And this suit was filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, which isn’t exactly Troll Country.\u00a0 These lawsuits can be expensive,\u00a0 an infringement suit can be like $5-$10 million dollars expensive.<\/p>\n

The real point here is that the app must be making enough money to make persuing a lawsuit worthwhile.\u00a0 Otherwise it makes no sense to do it.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Off the top of my head, there are a couple of simple solutions to the problem:<\/p>\n