

New patent troll Kootol emerges - erickhill
http://www.macworld.com/article/161154/2011/07/kootol_sues_apple.html

======
macrael
Craig Hockenberry, a well known iOS developer, has been hit by this along with
lodsys. He works for the Icon Factory, a small design and app firm. He wrote
Twitterrific for the iPhone before the SDK had been released.

Craig wrote the much linked to article about the fall of the independent
developer yesterday: [http://furbo.org/2011/07/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-
indepen...](http://furbo.org/2011/07/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-independent-
developer/)

and today has been tweeting about how he feels like his ability to control his
own products has been taken from him:

<http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91904807748640770>
<http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91905256870510593>
<http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91940943183347712>
<http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91972743561613312>

It is depressing. And enraging.

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tzs
I am not a lawyer, so run this by a lawyer before acting.

If you get a notice from them, you can just toss it in the trash. They cannot
sue you over a patent application.

Furthermore, their application was filed on 2010-12-20, so even if the patent
issues nothing that was in use in public before 2009-12-20 can infringe.

~~~
dexen
Is there a typo in your nubmers (filed for in 2010, valid from 2009) or is it
really how patents work over there in USA?

Whole year worth of time travel -- i.e., of retroactive monopoly?

~~~
tzs
If you invent something, and then before you get your patent application filed
someone else invents the same thing and puts their version on sale or
describes it in a publication, theirs does not count as prior art against
yours if their sale or publication was within one year of your application.

So, we can divide potential prior art into two groups:

1\. Publications or products from 2009-12-20. Definitely prior art, even if
Kootol actually was the inventor of the technology and invented it before the
prior art. Too bad for them--they shouldn't have waited so long to file.

2\. Publications or products from 2009-21-21 through the filing date. Not
prior art. (That doesn't mean others using the technology in this period might
not be useful against Kootol--it could be useful for showing that they were
not the first to invent the relevant technology).

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cubicle67
Surely if you've got a brand new patent, by a company no one's heard of, and
it's already being infringed by Apple, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL,
Facebook, Twitter, Nokia, Foursquare, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, RIM, Quora,
Salesforce, Twitpic, Ubermedia and The Iconfactory, it's a bit of a stretch to
claim it's novel and non-obvious?

~~~
ams6110
To those of us who are software devs, so many of these patents don't seem to
pass the "non-obvious" test. Who evaluates the novelty of a patent
application? Does the USPTO employ experts in the field to exam these claims,
or is it up to whatever random examiner picks up the next application in the
queue?

~~~
georgemcbay
AFAICT these days they just rubber stamp whatever comes through the door and
let the lawyers figure it out later.

------
zdw
It seems to me developers have the following options regarding this sort of
thing:

1\. Only remake software that has obvious prior art you can refer to,
preferably if the software being replicated is past the age of patent
expiration.

2\. Release anything that might infringe as open source, with a patent
protection license clause (Apache, etc.), using a pseudonym to avoid being
targeted.

3\. Move to a location outside of legal jurisdiction, and use business
trickery to operate in countries. Have fun setting up shell companies and
other ways to frustrate litigants.

~~~
bergie
4\. Get rid of the ridiculous patent system in the US

------
jameskilton
"Application No. US 12/973387 filed on 20-Dec-2010"

One can only laugh. They founded an entire company on a patent put together by
looking at what people are currently doing, and noticing that there isn't a
patent for it yet.

I can't wait to see how hard this one gets smashed into the ground!

~~~
cube13
It looks like they tried to patent Twitter. I'm pretty sure that's existed for
longer than this has been in development.

Good luck with that.

------
impendia
I am annoyed at MacWorld for not using the words "patent troll". The whole
article is depressingly neutral. I realize that there is virtue in reporting
the news objectively, but these people are thieves and MacWorld should regard
them as such.

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fractallyte
I'm hoping this might be 'steam engine time' - in this instance, a self-
organized cue for 'civil disobedience'. If the system is so utterly broken
that innovation is forced into stagnation - fight it! Flaunt the unjust laws,
openly develop cool ideas using appropriate technologies, 'do no wrong' (in a
moral sense), and FIGHT your corner.

Living in the EU, I'm not quite clear on some of the legal aspects - can't
defendants represent themselves in court in the US? It would be a pleasantly
unbalanced situation: nominal legal fees on the individual's side, but many
magnitudes higher on the opposing party's.

Imagine a legal wiki, with shared experiences and legal knowledge... Why not
use our common smarts and networking savvy to take on this biggest of threats
to the independent developer?

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spoondan
My understanding is that if, as the article says, Kootol has received a Notice
of Allowance, this patent has been examined and will be published unless
Kootol abandons it (by not paying the publication fee). Additionally, the
priority date on the patent is July 22, 2005. The priority date is documented
by referencing patent 878/MUM/2005[1] filed in India on that date. I believe
any prior art would have to predate the priority date, not the date of filing.

This does not mean that Kootol is not a patent troll or that this is a
legitimate invention. I don't know what the claims in 878/MUM/2005 are, and
its title reads completely insane in American English ("connecting brains to
equally like brains?"). Kootol has filed for several other, similar patents[2]
that cite 878/MUM/2005. I wonder if 878/MUM/2005 really backs all of these
different claims, or if it is simply a vague-enough tool for them to be using
to make new claims that can be applied retroactively?

[1] <http://india.bigpatents.org/apps/RvhMPZb>

[2] <http://ip.com/patapp/US20100030734>

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technogeek00
It will be a sad day if this patent is actually granted, especially with how
vague of a technology it defines and how much the technology is already used
by current giants (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc) It seems
that what really needs to happen is all of these companies being sued need to
team up and grind these patent trolls into pulp to keep people from doing crap
like this.

~~~
BananaRepublic
Well, some of the companies you mentioned are using the same obvious and/or
prior art laden patents as a weapon against their competitors, so that 'sad
day' has obviously already happened.

------
acabal
This is starting to get scary. An indie developer like me can have their
life's work crushed with a single letter for something as ridiculous as having
a method to transfer bytes from one storage medium to another.

For smaller (i.e. one-person) companies targeted by this kind of insanity,
would it make sense to dissolve the corporation being targeted and simply
transfer ownership of the targeted product to a new business entity instead of
even bothering with investigative legal costs?

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mkramlich
This is like the thousandth time I've heard of a ridiculous software patent.
The USPTO is a horrible, broken farce and more of a bane to software
innovation than a boon. Not technically a bane to true innovation, but to
every day engineers-doing-normal-non-innovative kind of work, applying
standard patterns and techniques in obvious ways.

