Patent Troll Goes After Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Others 171
zaba writes "A company named PersonalWeb Technologies has decided to sue a host of heavy players in the tech industry, including Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo! for patents it holds related to data processing. They have a previous suit against other big names like Amazon, Google and HP. Anyone care to guess where the company is based or where the suits were filed?"
The company is also targeting GitHub, but seems to have accidentally sued Rackspace — GitHub's host — instead. Rackspace has responded, saying, "It’s apparent that the people filing the suit don’t understand the technology or the products enough to realize that Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub are completely different products from different companies."
Enough Already (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to think of patent trolls as no name companies that pop up just to make a quick and sleazy buck. Now I think of all of the big names like Apple and Samsung too. At this point, I say bring it on. Let all companies be destroyed in the name of "intellectual property rights" and lets start over. I'd rather we die a quick death than drag it out forever.
High School Kids? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of their technical staff looks to be about 15 or 16...
http://www.personalweb.com/About.html [personalweb.com]
Re:List of their patents (Score:2, Interesting)
5,978,791 - Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers -UUID
6,415,280 - Identifying and requesting data in network using identifiers which are based on contents of data - CRC Hash
6,928,442 - Enforcement and policing of licensed content using content-based identifiers - See WinAmp and Windows Media player
and so on...
Sounds like any CAS solution would fit all three you listed.
Sue EMC for their Centerra product perhaps?
East Texas (Score:5, Interesting)
This article [thejuryexpert.com] does a pretty good job of looking at the situation in East Texas with regards to patent trials. It is an interesting read. It will be eye opening to some and a confirmation to others.
Re:Enough Already (Score:2, Interesting)
We now have the equivalent of a horse for a senator, how long will this go on before someone grabs his balls and does what needs to be done to fix this nonsense?
Whose....the horses, or the senators?
Re:Let all companies be destroyed? (Score:4, Interesting)
So... much... to... argue... with... there...
If you really want to argue who invented the smartphone market, it was Danger. Say all you want about Palm, but the Sidekick was the device that really proved the model for apps on mobile devices. I mean this in the sense of apps as opposed to applications, where you have over the air updates for the system. The market for smartphones would not be a tenth of what it is were that not the case. Had they not sold out to Microsoft, the smartphone world would be a very different place to day.
The OP does appear to understand what innovation is. Innovation !== features enhancements, however, which are often a natural product of ongoing R&D that make their way into a product. Apple using a retina display is a feature enhancement, Apple building one in the first place is innovation. As you said, this was Samsung.
In regards to the design of the iPad, Jonathan Ives did not have the original idea for it. There were prototype drawings from the 80s describing very similar devices. Just because Apple was able to make the push to actually build the thing and mass-market it does not really mean the company conceived of the device completely from scratch.
I mean, citing the iPad and iPhone as examples of innovation is all well and good, if we were talking about how innovative they were in 2007. It's 2012 now, where are the new products and ideas that are going to make the world more efficient and exciting than it was before? I know they have made bids to get involved in automobile manufacturing, televisions and other consumer electronics, and other verticals. Innovation in these areas would be magnificent to see.
Instead, there are no new products this year, and there is a lot of talk about reducing their line (there is still talk Mac Pros may be going away altogether in the next year or so). you look at Samsung, you see a company that is involved in every major area of consumer manufacturing. They have a strong defense business as well, and their semiconductor unit continues to keep creating new things all the time. Apple is a little too concerned about their stock price to try anything new anymore. I don't see them as capable of producing disruptive technology so long as the fundamentals of their business model discourage risk in their major product lines.
What we are seeing it not technology innovation, it's more like business model innovation.