A Utah Company Claims It Invented Contact Tracing Tech (wired.com) 49
In the fight against Covid-19, contact tracing apps have so far largely been disappointments -- in the United States, at least. Proposed in the spring as a way to help quickly stifle viral outbreaks by tracking down potential exposures using smartphones, they were stunted by technical glitches, concerns over privacy, and the US's fragmented, haphazard pandemic response. Now, they may become mired in a fight over patents. From a report: The challenge comes from Blyncsy, a Salt Lake City-based maker of software that helps cities gather and analyze mobility data. In recent weeks, the company has sent claims seeking the equivalent of $1 per resident to states that have released or plan to release contact tracing apps, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Virginia. The company holds three patents related to contact tracing. One of them, granted in February 2019, for "tracking proximity relationships and uses thereof," describes methods of tracking the spread of "contagion" using technology such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals. Apps launched by public health agencies during the Covid-19 pandemic infringe upon it, the company says.
In April, Blyncsy launched a portal for others to request a license for its technology and submit plans for a privacy review. That was shortly after Google and Apple jointly announced an effort to get contact tracing technology in the hands of state and national governments, using Bluetooth features on the companies' smartphones. Blyncsy did not get any takers. "State governments have taken it upon themselves to roll out a solution in their name in which they're using our property without compensation," says Blyncsy CEO Mark Pittman. He describes the current crop of contact tracing apps as "fly-by-night" efforts and says his patent fight is driven by concerns about their privacy and effectiveness, not an attempt to profit.
In April, Blyncsy launched a portal for others to request a license for its technology and submit plans for a privacy review. That was shortly after Google and Apple jointly announced an effort to get contact tracing technology in the hands of state and national governments, using Bluetooth features on the companies' smartphones. Blyncsy did not get any takers. "State governments have taken it upon themselves to roll out a solution in their name in which they're using our property without compensation," says Blyncsy CEO Mark Pittman. He describes the current crop of contact tracing apps as "fly-by-night" efforts and says his patent fight is driven by concerns about their privacy and effectiveness, not an attempt to profit.
Case Closed - that was fast (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Government patent use law is a statute codified at 28 USC 1498(a)[1] that is a "form of government immunity from patent claims."[2][1] Section 1498 gives the federal government of the United States the "right to use patented inventions without permission, while paying the patent holder 'reasonable and entire compensation' which is usually "set at ten percent of sales or less".[3][4][2] This statute "allows federal agencies and thirdparty government contractors to manufacture and/or use any invention without authorization from the patent holder. The federal government's rights are without an obligation for prior negotiation."[5] Although Congress has the right to waive sovereign immunity for alleged patent infringement claims under the 'government patent use' statute, there are limits to the patent holder's recourse in the United States Court of Federal Claims.[6][7][8]
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Re: Case Closed - that was fast (Score:2)
... or less.
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Did we miss the part where federal, state, and local governments are charging for this software? It's looking like we did not. 10 percent of 0 is 0.
That's not how it works. The government cannot steal your technology and give it away for free and then say sure, 10% of $0 is $0. That would give them carte blanche to do this, and it goes against the concept of sovereign domain which ensures that the taking at least must pay fair market value.
The courts would see it as fair market value of revenue lost. If the government gave away 1,000,000 units but Blyncsy can show even 1 sale at say $10, then the value of what was sold is $10,000,000 and Blyncsy
Re: Case Closed - that was fast (Score:2)
Did you miss where it said "or less"?
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"reasonable compensation" .. God knows that can be interpreted 100 ways from Sunday.
Won't they just go after Google & Apple? (Score:4, Informative)
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Not so fast. Government patent use yes, but how many governments are actually doing this vs just asking private companies to do it for them? Most governments efforts I've heard involve simply rolling out whatever Google or Apple come up with.
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The statute includes government contractors.
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The statute includes government contractors.
Government contractors yes, but from what I can see is there is no contract from a government to build this. I admit they are the wrong target for the suit, but I think there are some subtleties in this case that could generate some lawyer paychecks and it's not as open/shut as it would appear.
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That was my first thought. They should be suing Google and Apple.
But they know that will get them litigated into non-existence, so they hope taxpayers are an easy mark.
Hopefully Google and Apple will be willing to support the targeted states with their outsized legal teams and make an example out of Blyncsy.
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I assume you missed the part where it say the company is seeking claims from STATES and not the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Christ they even list the States right in the summery. Your quoted law means nothing in this context as it is not the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that is creating the tracing apps.
I would mod you Off Topic if I had the power.
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> ...if I had the power.
You have no power here.
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You forgot the most obvious contact tracer, spammers, who used your contacts list to spam other people, contact tracing right there. All the big corporations have been doing it for ever, probably on the illegal side of things and now covid lets them make it legal.
Patent Reform (Score:4, Informative)
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Indeed! Automating (mirroring) prior manual algorithms alone should never be sufficient reason to be given a patent.
Re:Patent Reform (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? How is 'something we already do' + 'common tech' = patent ? This has got to end, the system is long broken.
The patent is not on the thing that is done (contact tracing). The patent is (at least theoretically) on the method of doing it. E.g.
"I trace a contact" - not a patent
"Phones exchange random numbers; when someone gets infected they tell their phone which sends all the random numbers it has recorded" - a patent
If somebody else has ever had phones exchanging random numbers and has published (including patenting) that fact then you can use that as prior art and challenge the patent. If somebody else has been tracing contact in a different way (e.g. exchange a phone ID+serial number) then they aren't subject to the patent and you can use their method.
The real trick and problem is that, if you give your patent above to a patent attorney, a good one will change it completely. It will become much more general. Instead of saying "phones" it will say "electronic devices, in the preferred embodiment phones" and then, more generally "devices with a communication capability and a numeric capability". "Random numbers" will be changed to "identifiers, in the preferred embodiment random numbers" and so on. Finally "when someone gets infected" will be changed to "when it is decided to deliver information from one communications device to another". This means that it will end up covering a whole bunch of things that they never actually thought of themselves.
It's important to understand that the problem with the patent system is not that all patents are stupid; stupid patents are a symptom. The problem is that it imposes unreasonably on your freedom of speech and freedom of thought and that software needs to work on the incremental cost of usage of code being near to zero since otherwise you can't have decent code reuse. The software patents are not earning their keep for the level of imposition they give.
Re:Patent Reform (Score:4, Informative)
We can all claim that it is "non-obvious" when we've seen their implementation in the real world for years. But just about everyone independently came to the same conclusion and probably were not aware of this patent. That would be enough, in reasonable terms, to call it "obvious." It's just existing tech + privacy mitigation = method.
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Currently the definition of obvious is 'wouldn't have thought of it given knowledge of the existing tech' ("skilled in the art"). I think it would be better to add 'and knowledge of the detailed problem definition'. The real life example of this would be the letter box in a door which would be patentable. It's just a hole in a door, but if you were only familiar with doors and mail delivery, what you would probably come up with is a lockable outside box, so it's considered non-obvious. If, on the other
Re: Patent Reform (Score:2)
I imagine that a good patent attorney would avoid making patent descriptions so general that they encompass other processes/products that already exist. I read the original patent application online. Tracking individual phones over time using cell tower logs would seemingly fall under Blyncsy's patent. Problem is that law enforcement has been using cell tower logs to track suspects for many years.
In this case, I believe that Blyncsy would have been better served if they filed a more specific patent to mitig
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I imagine that a good patent attorney would avoid making patent descriptions so general that they encompass other processes/products that already exist.
Actually no. You are allowed to make many independent claims and mostly each one falls separately if challenged. This means that a good patent attorney starts with "a thing that does something" and then adds detail ("a device that communicates a message" / "a portable electronic device that communicates an ID that may change") so that this ends up, in one branch with an exact description of the actual invention really delivered. They have other branches for every variant they ever thought of. Done corre
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Patents are not supposed to be valid if the method is obvious to those "skilled in the art". Thus multiple independent inventions of the same approach should be a clear way of invalidating a patent.
OTOH, do note the "supposed to be" and "should" in that paragraph. I'm not claiming that the patent law as implemented is well described by those claims. You get your choice of incompetence or corruption as the reason.
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Utah (Score:2)
Wasn't it a Utah company that claimed they owned the Linux kernel?
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Software patents are void under Alice (Score:5, Informative)
We wrote about it in May already:
https://ffii.org/covid-19-trac... [ffii.org]
Tomorrow there is an important vote on software patents in Germany and in Europe:
https://ffii.org/open-letter-t... [ffii.org]
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BTW software patents like this are invalid under Alice. Someone should start a crowdfunding, I would tip in.
another patent for do something obvious (Score:2)
or in this case with a pocket computer with a radio transceiver.
There's a reason all the other contact app makers didn't check these patents in order to design their apps, and are undoubtedly surprised that the patents exist.
It's because it's OBVIOUS how to do it, given the structure of the problem, and the capabilities of the underlying tech.
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It is definitely not obvious. As a proof, there are many different implementations by different countries. Most are location-based and require the citizen to disclose his social graph to the government or to the agency managing the backend services. DP-3T digs into the Bluetooth Low-Energy tech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy) and distributed cryptography (nothing fancy besides being decentralized) to offer a better solution. Both the protocol itself and the implementation on the phones
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It is definitely not obvious. As a proof, there are many different implementations by different countries. Most are location-based and require the citizen to disclose his social graph to the government or to the agency managing the backend services.
You're missing a key part of "given the structure of the problem", which is defining what the problem is. The problem is not "contact tracing", but rather "contact tracing in a manner that does not require users to invasively reveal their location history". As soon as you introduce that requirement, there are very few possible ways to implement it, and all involve devices detecting that other devices are nearby and recording that they were nearby.
And if you further add the constraint "without revealing th
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1 - An absolute location reference history that can be checked
2 - A relative nearness reference history that can be checked
Other than absolute and relative, there aren't to many more options, thus obvious. If you can think of a third I will virtually eat this post.
There's another reason. (Score:2)
There's a reason all the other contact app makers didn't check these patents in order to design their apps, [obviousness]
There's another reason: If it's discovered at the infringement suit that your engineers looked at the patent, any infringement found is deemed "wilful" and the penalties are multiplied by three.
As a result engineers are generally ordered NOT to look at patents when designing new products.
So that's ANOTHER way that the patent system is broken. It was supposed to give a limited-term monop
Some background, and international adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
The original contact tracing protocol is / was DP-3T, described here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The one implemented in iOS and Android is GAEN, Google Apple Exposure Notification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
GAEN is quite a formidable feat both as a privacy-preserving protocol and as an implementation. Google and Apple announced this jointly on the same day in April, just a month in to the real pandemic. GAEN is also a great boon to the international society. It is decentralized (as is DP-3T) and privacy-preserving. Without GAEN, the governments of the world would have buiit their own, centralized, location-based tracking apps. The social graphs of the citizens and their location data would all be exposed to the governments. For US or Chinese citizens, this means nothing as the US government can get this data from Google, Apple or the phone manufacturers anyway. For the rest of the world, this makes a huge difference. My government can currently NOT get my location data easily. And the joint protocol + implementation by Google + Apple will keep it so.
Goverments now do implement their tracking apps based on GAEN, because it is both easy and secure. The protocol is already on the phones, and there are reference implementations available. A country only needs to add the local UI (in a local language & branding), add integration with local health services (to allow citizens to declare themselves as contagious), roll out and be done.
Look at the implementation list in Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. I can only wish governments luck on implementing this.
The thing to notice here is how Google and Apple overplayed all governments of the world by joint and swift action. In the current case, this is a good thing - GAEN is better and more secure / private than the location-based and other approaches that the national govermnents had. In some cases, the GPS-based apps have been pulled and replaced by GAEN-based ones already.
However, in the long run, this is scary. The digital sovreignty of a country (or state) means nothing. What the US-based mobile giants do, the rest of the world will use and follow.
Re: Some background, and international adoption (Score:2)
Re: Some background, and international adoption (Score:2)
I remember the last time (Score:1)
I remember the last time something came out of Utah, it was called "SCO" and yeah it was a scam. Fuckers got off with it too, as in they are still alive even though their "company" is long since dead.
Fails novelty clause (Score:2)
A patent must be a novel [wikipedia.org] solution to the problem; this clearly fails the test given the number of contact tracing apps that have produced the same solution when presented with the same problem.
Prior art -- terrible patent (Score:2)
From the actual patent:
"One embodiment may include a method of converting an electronic device into a tracking device that is part of a system of tracking devices distributed throughout a geographic area to track signal emitting devices travelling through the geographic area."
Police use cell tower information to identify the location of suspect phones retrospectively. They've done this for many years. For example, Bob says he was at home when Sally's house was robbed, so he must be innocent. Oops. Bobs phon
lol (Score:3)
"says his patent fight is driven by concerns about their privacy and effectiveness, not an attempt to profit."
Riiiiiiight....purely selfless.....for the people.
So will 100% of the money collected go towards Covid-19 vaccine research, or privacy groups?
Covid Industrial Complex (Score:2)
Nothing to see here, just one of the gears turning as normal.
Imminent domain (Score:2)
Taking someone's property and bulldozing their house to make way for a better tax revenue generator is bullsh*t. This case, however, could be argued to be in everyone's best interest despite the enormous potential for abuse in the form of privacy violations.
Can I sue them for its failure then? (Score:2)
If the method was inherently flawed and they licensed it for use in avoiding transmission of Covid I think I'm owed a bundle.
Prior Art and Secret interceptions ELINT (Score:2)