

Where Is Awarded "The Mother of All Geofencing Patents" - dkasper
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/where-geofencing-patent/

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akitchell
Damn, this is frustrating... geo-location is such an exciting technology -
just shocked that one company can own the rights to so much.

Patents that cover ideas this expansive are so illogical.

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waterlesscloud
It encourages innovation, you know.

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mkramlich
It encourages employment for lawyers.

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lwhi
It encourages _hatred_ for lawyers.

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noonespecial
I doesn't seem like it will be long before filing a patent here becomes the
same as "write down something you'd like for the average Chinese to have
cheaply that the average American must pay a great deal for or can't have at
all."

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rlpb
I am not a patent attorney, but I am aware that a patent is only as good as
the claims within it.

All of the claims here seem to depend on the portable device having a
graphical map of the "geofence". The patent isn't relevant at all on a system
that doesn't have this property.

So it seems that the patent is pretty limited to me. Any location based system
that does not graphically show a boundary _on the portable device itself_ will
not fall foul of this patent (as far as I can see).

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ergo98
Agreed. This patent is not the mother of all geofencing patents: They seemed
to have made it specific enough that it is actually not the egregious sort of
patent abuse that we so commonly see.

A patent can have multiple independent claims, independently enforceable. In
this case, however, there are only a few independent claims, each a simple
rewrite that only marginally changes scope. The reset are dependent claims
that are specializations.

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mkramlich
We need to fix or eliminate this whole software patent thing as done by the
USPTO. The whole notion of granting ownership over an idea such that it allows
you to charge others rent for "using" that idea, and of granting ownership
over some particular application permutation to whoever is the first one to
submit a patent application on it to some particular office full of
bureaucrats, is absurd. This is just the latest farce.

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tzs
This looks absolutely trivial to work around. The claims require a "geofence"
at a _user-defined_ distance from a user-selected location, requires that
geofence be sent to a server along with the device location, and requires the
server to determine if the location is within the geofence.

So, first way to work around. Do not let the user define the distance of the
geofence from the user-defined location. Use a fixed distance, larger than any
reasonable distance the user would care about. The server returns all events
inside that geofence, and the device filters it down to a user-defined
distance.

Second work around. Do not send the device location to the server. Just send
the region enclosed by the geofence (which can be used-defined). Let the
device decide whether or not the current location is within the geofence.

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meadhikari
Will this greatest flaw of our time go on forever? What could be the solution?
I think world would be a much better place without software patents.

