Google Talk Targeted In Patent Lawsuit

JamesAlfaro wrote to mention an Ars Technica story, which goes into the recent filing of a suit against Google Talk. A Delaware corporation claims that Talk infringes on two of its patents. From the article: "You've probably never heard of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), and that wouldn't be surprising since the company has no products and offers no services. By all appearances, RTI is a company that was set up to collect licensing fees and pursue settlements related to the company's patent portfolio. Gerald J. Weinberger, president of Rates technology Inc., once said that the company was 'an enterprise based on patent licensing,' and that much of its business depended on the courts." Certainly seems like there are a lot of those businesses around nowadays, huh?

Crazy folk...

[MrCoke]

They are so gonna get toasted in court.

Following this logic, ancient manufacturers of coaches could sue modern car manufacturers just because they use wheels too.

Different times, different technology.

Taste of their own medicine

[matt me]

Their idealogical allegiances aside, Googles still have a patent on highlighting.

See US Patent 6,839,702 on the following server which clearly doesn't use mod_alias.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm l&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,839,702.WKU [uspto.gov].

A system highlights search terms in documents distributed over a network. The system generates a search query that includes a search term and, in response to the search query, receives a list of one or more references to documents in the network. The system receives selection of one of the references and retrieves a document that corresponds to the selected reference. The system then highlights the search term in the retrieved document.

Re:From the Article

[drpimp]

"and to be King for day"

Sounds more like they want their 15 minutes of lame!
I am standing behind Google.

Over 700 patents and you don't make anything? The best thing I can relate that to are the domain snatching companies that sit on domains and wait for people to want them. Only this company just sits and waits for others to come close to it's technology and prey on them. Since Google is a large company of course they saw $$$$

Re:Who does the law protect?

[angaram]

I agree with the front half of your criticism: the system is broken and makes lawyers rich. Yet without some kind of protection, corporations can cut out the middle man and outright steal ideas and take them to market faster or cheaper than the upstart/mom&pop inventor can. Again, I agree that as it is the little folk have little recourse, de facto. I guess all I am saying is that some kind of legal protection system is not only good in principle, but is actually needed; but a whole brand new, reworked, better system.

Re:The New New Thing

[harks]

I can see complaints about ridiculous patents that have been granted, but what is inherently wrong about an "IP holding company" trying to profit off of the use of its inventions?

Re:Who does the law protect?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

While civilization has been innovating for millennia, but most innovation seems to have come in the last fifty, hundred or two hundred years. That isn't a case to say that patent law works as in causation, but the correllation is interesting and I wouldn't mind seeing whether there is a causal link between the rise of patents and the rise of innovation.

Edsger W. Dijkstra would sue Rates Technology

[nektra]

Dijkstra family needs to sue all those 'suers', this can make the trick.

Why only Google Talk?

[origamy]

Isn't Google Talk based on Jabber? Why are they only suing Google Talk?
Don't Yahoo, AIM and MSN, Netmeeting, Skype also allow voice communication as well as dozens other apps out there? Why are they only suing Google Talk?
Go figure...

Re:The New New Thing

[plopez]

Actually, the original purpose of patents was to help advance technology by forcing the inventor to disclose how something works. In exchange the inventor gets a limited time government granted monopoloy. If you do not patent and someone steals your idea, you cannot sue. If it is patented you can sue.

IP holding companies do nothing to advance the state of the art. They are parasites leeching off of the efforts of the actual inventors and using extortion (threat of law suits) to make a buck, and so they should be destroyed.

usage and abusage

[matt me]

Be it a patent offensive or a perceived pre-emptive strike, it's still contributing to the abuse of the system. Simply saying "we know it's bad, but we're just doing it to help everyone [ESP OURSELVES]" won't get us anywhere. The system won't be brought down while all the players continue to fight each other inside it, rather than moving outside.

If Google had let some jackass patent highlighting, and then when taken to the court used their power and influence to win the case, setting a precedent that "you can't patent the [mouse] wheel" and pushing for more publicity on the "software patents kill innovation" campaign, then some real pressure could be on.

I have an idea for that...

[Reziac]

Occurs to me that one solution to the "buy patents, sue everyone" business model would be to make patents protect only the original inventor, and for non-independent inventors, the company said inventor was working for at the time, and only the FIRST buyer thereafter.

Under such a system, patents could only be sold ONCE. After that, the idea would fall into the public domain. That way inventors and companies could make a reasonable return on their innovations, but there'd be no incentive to buy up "used" patents, as they'd have no value.

This might have a further effect in that it would no longer be profitable to buy another company SOLELY to acquire their intellectual property assets, since as of the 2nd sale, they'd no longer have any protected value. This would probably incline the market toward more smallish companies that competed more directly, and a great many more small-scale patent-licensing deals among related companies, which ought to ultimately be all to the good (smaller companies generally being more customer-centric, and less beholden to stockholders).

And it would cut the lawyers, who had nothing to do with the invention itself, out of the profit chain.

Oh yeah... I'm gonna patent this as my business model. ;)

reform the incorporation laws as well

[zogger]

The Patent system is broken, yes, but the process for incorporation and giving legal personhood to corporations is also seriously broken. The two are intertwined. You could eliminate quite a bit of shady corporate behavior by making a human being always responsible for decisions made by a corporation, you could make incorporating a much tougher process and have it come with an automatic timeout, you could insist that corporations must incorporate in the states where they actually do business, not just delaware or nevada, and make any people associated with ownership/management of an international corporation lose their US rights as to voting, etc. Make them choose what is more important to them, US citizen, or citizen of nation x where they have their corporation set up, one or the other, *not* both, and not US if they are globalists. Then apply foreign lobbying rules and immigration/alien rules to them across the management board.

  You could also reform the stock market, such as placing a time limit on holding shares between transactions, such as two years, to really make it an investment and not a speculators casino, etc. And stop allowing "daisy chaining" of corporations, make them pick a name and stick to it, not 85 corporations with slight variables all run from the same tiny office with a lawyers name on the door. Put the human beings back in responsibility, overtly and openly.

    In the political process, you could make it illegal for corporations, or industrial lobbying cartel orgs, to donate any money/goods/services whatsoever to any political campaign or politician, and eliminate the profession of career politician or bureaucrat. No pensions, no lifetime career, make it ten years "government service" then back to the private sector. Then make it so no bureaucrat or politician could accept an industry position that was part of what they were regulating while in government service, and etc, i.e. no Joe FDA doofus getting out, collecting a pension, then going to work for big pharmco. This is just too obvious how this affects legislation and regulations.

  There are a ton of decent theoretical "fixes" out there, most or all of which will never be implemented because the system itself is set-up and run as a large scale criminal enterprise now. It's a racket, not a government, and the transnationals control it. That is my opinion, and it's based on just watching politics and business for a long time. The US was supposed to be "we the people" not "we the faceless nameless international corporations". Real big difference there. We are Humans, not Ferengi. Making the system try to work with Ferengi rules has resulted in the overall crap we have today.

  The entire system is broken, we had a nice experimental run at honest government and letting corporations try to do business without being scumbag crooks, we tried to let the political process proceed without corruption, but it's time to accept reality that it's broken completely and nothing short of a wipe and reinstall is going to "fix" it, IMO.

Patent Trolls / Accelerando

[ansible]

These patent troll companies remind me a lot of what LLCs and other corporations evolved into in Charles Stross's Accelerando [accelerando.org]. You can read it for free, but I encourage you to buy a copy.

It's a very good read. Easily his best work yet. I got quite a kick out of the infovore idea from his "The Atrocity Archives".

What... The... Fsck???

[Andy Dodd]

Even ignoring whether or not the two patents in question which cover Least Cost Routing (LCR) techniques can be blown out of the water due to prior art... Google Talk doesn't do LCR in any form whatsoever! Google Talk only provides VoIP from one GTalk user to another for free (as far as I can tell at least...) I don't know how you can claim that a product does LCR for voice calls when it's only capable of making free calls.