US Government Owes Over $100 Million For TSA's Patent Infringement 70
The U.S. government owes a patent holding company at least $103 million because of the Transportation Security Administration's misuse of its technology for handling trays at airport security checkpoints, a Washington, D.C.-based federal court said. Reuters reports: In an opinion (PDF) made public Friday, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims said the TSA used SecurityPoint Holdings Inc's patented methods for most of its security screenings at the largest U.S. airports since 2008 without compensating it. St. Petersburg, Florida-based SecurityPoint's founder Joseph Ambrefe offered the TSA a license to his patent in 2005 in exchange for the exclusive right to advertise on the trays at U.S. airports. The TSA had success testing SecurityPoint's technology and equipment, but refused SecurityPoint's offer.
The court said the TSA began using the same method with its own equipment later that year at most or all of the airports under its control, and SecurityPoint sued the U.S. government for patent infringement in 2011. The government conceded that it had used the technology since 2008 in 10 airports including Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston Logan, Phoenix Sky Harbor and all three major Washington, D.C.-area airports. The court rejected the government's arguments that SecurityPoint's patent was invalid in 2015, leaving questions about the extent of the government's infringement and how much it owed in damages.
After a trial last year, Senior U.S. Judge Eric Bruggink of the Court of Federal Claims said in an August opinion unsealed Friday that the government owes SecurityPoint $103.6 million in royalties from 2008 through the date of the opinion. Bruggink said the TSA's checkpoint design guides, employee testimony and expert testimony showed that with a few exceptions, SecurityPoint's tray-recycling method was "universally used as the default method for all lanes" at the largest U.S. airports.
The court said the TSA began using the same method with its own equipment later that year at most or all of the airports under its control, and SecurityPoint sued the U.S. government for patent infringement in 2011. The government conceded that it had used the technology since 2008 in 10 airports including Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston Logan, Phoenix Sky Harbor and all three major Washington, D.C.-area airports. The court rejected the government's arguments that SecurityPoint's patent was invalid in 2015, leaving questions about the extent of the government's infringement and how much it owed in damages.
After a trial last year, Senior U.S. Judge Eric Bruggink of the Court of Federal Claims said in an August opinion unsealed Friday that the government owes SecurityPoint $103.6 million in royalties from 2008 through the date of the opinion. Bruggink said the TSA's checkpoint design guides, employee testimony and expert testimony showed that with a few exceptions, SecurityPoint's tray-recycling method was "universally used as the default method for all lanes" at the largest U.S. airports.
Taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
No worries. Your taxes will pay for that.
Re:Taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. The people who made that decision won't be liable for a damn thing and it definitely won't come out of the TSA's funding.
Re:Taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Patentable?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could someone explain which genius idea about "recycling tablets" (read: bringing them back from one end of the checkpoint to the other) could be patentable? I thought stacking them on a cart and wheeling them back is considered a standard solution.
If someone really wants to improve TSA checkpoints, they should provide some assistance for taking out your shoes and holding them in your hands with all 45 other trays for belt, hand luggage, contents of your hand luggage that need to go seperately. and coins/wallet/phone from your pockets at the same time. All that with pants sliding down cause your friggin belt is in one of those trays, too!
Re:Patentable?? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, the biggest improvement would be to remove the TSA. But leave the xray machines, it may be the closest thing to healthcare many people can afford.
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Could someone explain which genius idea about "recycling tablets" (read: bringing them back from one end of the checkpoint to the other) could be patentable?
Don't worry, I'm sure the government will appeal this ruling on our behalf and get the case dismissed.
Oh, wait...
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This system uses two carts! When the destination cart is full, it is pushed to the beginning and swapped with the now empty cart! Previous systems just used one cart which was unloaded!
Also, the government tried to claim the carts need not have wheels, as there might have been a mini-pallet on the cart that the trays sat on, and they're pretty sure this one time an agent named George might have dragged the mini pallet instead of using the wheeled cart, and so using a wheeled cart wasn't necessary.
Also, th
Re:Patentable?? (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of stacking trays may be obvious, but only once one has decided to use trays. Here is what a security checkpoint from 1987 looked like:
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-airports-were-like-in-1987 [cntraveler.com]
Note that there are no trays and no place for the pilot to put his jacket. Low security.
The novel points of the patent https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f1/19/ad/aa70828ce5a760/US6888460.pdf [googleapis.com] are:
1. Using trays
2. Having the trays be stackable
3. Using three carts (beginning, end, and middle)
4. Putting advertising on the inside bottom of the tray.
The patent is due to expire November 21, 2023.
Re:Patentable?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank you very much for the link and the summary of the contributions.
While it is a clear improvement, I personally doubt that this new mechanism should be patentable. Point 4 is irrelevant, and points 1-3, while novel, are difficult to be claimed non-obvious [wikipedia.org] by themselves (even if previous systems didn't employ trays). This is clearly my opinion, since the patent was actually granted.
See more about patentability [wikipedia.org]
Re: Patentable?? (Score:2)
I agree. This in a way isn't much different then passing the buckets in old fire fighting or even wheelbarrow unloading cement where you have 3 or more wheelbarrows.
Law != Process (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally doubt that this new mechanism should be patentable.
And you're probably right, but that doesn't really matter because that is not how the patent system works in practice.
What actually happens is that the patent office is too incompetent to do anything more than keyword search their own patent database, and if they don't find anything like your patent, they will pretty much issue you your patent no matter how rubbish it is. A skilled patent attorney can easily front run them on this to make sure they write your patent in a way that avoids this type of 'prior art'.
Once you've gotten your patent, you then have a massive asymmetric power advantage, because it is far more expensive and difficult to get a patent invalidated than it is to sue people for infringement. So you can use your patent to harass people, and provided you offer them settlement terms better than it would cost them to try to invalidate your patent you can keep it up even with a patent that everyone knows would not stand up to scrutiny.
If you are a business, the best protection is to just get your own stack of rubbish patents. You can then counter sue which generally makes the trolls go away. The whole system has become a sort of protection racket run by lawyers. I haven't met an engineer yet who thought it was helping them innovate.
Re:Law != Process (Score:5, Informative)
And you're probably right, but that doesn't really matter because that is not how the patent system works in practice.
What actually happens is that the patent office is too incompetent to do anything more than keyword search their own patent database, and if they don't find anything like your patent, they will pretty much issue you your patent no matter how rubbish it is. A skilled patent attorney can easily front run them on this to make sure they write your patent in a way that avoids this type of 'prior art'.
Once you've gotten your patent, you then have a massive asymmetric power advantage, because it is far more expensive and difficult to get a patent invalidated than it is to sue people for infringement. So you can use your patent to harass people, and provided you offer them settlement terms better than it would cost them to try to invalidate your patent you can keep it up even with a patent that everyone knows would not stand up to scrutiny.
If you are a business, the best protection is to just get your own stack of rubbish patents. You can then counter sue which generally makes the trolls go away. The whole system has become a sort of protection racket run by lawyers. I haven't met an engineer yet who thought it was helping them innovate.
It was initially rejected, but then they added "move the trays to the start on a cart!" and that somehow made it not obvious. From the linked decision:
I'm just at a loss. The system is horribly broken and it's never going to be fixed, it will only get worse.
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And you're probably right, but that doesn't really matter because that is not how the patent system works in practice.
What actually happens is that the patent office is too incompetent to do anything more than keyword search their own patent database, and if they don't find anything like your patent, they will pretty much issue you your patent no matter how rubbish it is.
No - approximately 95% of utility patent applications are initially rejected. If the patent office is blindly rubber stamping anything, they're using a stamp that says "rejected".
If you are a business, the best protection is to just get your own stack of rubbish patents. You can then counter sue which generally makes the trolls go away.
Trolls, or non-practicing entities, can't infringe patents, by definition
The whole system has become a sort of protection racket run by lawyers. I haven't met an engineer yet who thought it was helping them innovate.
The patent system helps innovation by encouraging companies to publish functional specs, schematics, and white papers. Without patents, your only protection is trade secrets and contractual limitations like NDAs, so kiss those public documents goodbye.
Re:Law != Process (Score:4, Insightful)
ok, but you didn't explain how a lousy, obvious patent like this manages to get granted. Clearly something is wrong.
Re: Patentable?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Patentable?? (Score:4, Interesting)
So they should have called you in 2015 (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in a kitchen in the 90s. This is the exact protocol we used with trays and our belt driven dish washer.
So the government should have called you as a witness in the 2015 trial, to show there was "prior art", or could have raised that issue in this trial as well. They argued "obvious" in 2015 and lost, raised it again and the court said that was already decided.
They never claimed "even if it took a smart guy to figure it out, somebody already did and it's been a common practice", and had two chances to do so. IANAL, so I don't know if it's too late to go back to the court and say "Oh, look! It's well-known!", but I suspect it is. I also suspect that, if they did, the court would say "If it was so well known that its application to TSA was obvious, why didn't you bring it up in one of the previous two trials over the last six years?"
If you read the opinion (linked above) the "obvious" question and answer is right up front:
- The patent office initially rejected the application as obvious.
- The inventors appealed, convincing the examiners that this was novel enough to grant the patent (and punt the question downstream to the courts).
- The government argued in 2015 that the invention was obvious.
- But it didn't convince the court that one of the steps was obvious.
If they'd also claimed "somebody else already invented it" in a timely fashion I suspect they'd have prevailed. But after all these years it's hard to claim that "Oh, this dishwashing solution would also solve this airport problem" wasn't non-obvious, making this a separate invention of the admittedly same procedure in a different context.
A lot of stuff is only obvious after somebody thinks of it. As a patent attorney once told me, the standard was set by the litigation over Ray-o-Vac's "Sealed in Steel Battery".
Early dry-cells were a cup of zinc electrode full of caustic paste, with a carbon rod down the middle (sometimes surrounded by a layer of hydrogen-gas absorbing material to avoid voltage droop during heavy load), topped with asphalt, in a cardboard sleeve. The power was generated by the caustic paste corroding the inside of the zinc, using hydroxyl radicals cracked from water by electrons from the rod. As the battery discharged the cup was eaten away, releasing the caustic paste into the metal flashlight, which it was also happy to eat. Further, the corrosion was uneven, so as the battery neared end-of-life the zinc would develop pinholes and start corroding the flashlight, while the battery still put out essentially full power from the thin but nearly-intact remainder of the cup. So you had to throw out and replaced the battery before this happened, and had no warning it was time to do so. Big problem, and lots of rotted flashlights.
The big battery manufacturers worked on fixing this for years. (Also: Eveready / Union Carbide made a guarantee - that worked by giving anybody who complained a cheap replacement flashlight they bought by the boxcar load.) But no solution, until...
One day an engineer came home depressed after another hard day at the lab. His wife, heating dinner, asked him why he was so glum, and he told her about the problems at work. She said "Why don't you put it in a steel can?"
They tried it and it worked fine. With the cell enclosed in a steel can, the caustic could eat the whole zinc cup without leaking into the flashlight. After it got done with the zinc it would take months for the depleted caustic to corrode it's way through the can to start on the flashlight, depleting further, while the voltage generated wasn't enough to run the bulb. So the user would generally replace the battery before any damage occurred, and even when it DID get out the caustic was so weakened that you ended up with a little corrosion you could clean off rather than a rotted-out mess. Problem solved.
Ray-o-Vac patented, sold the improved cells, and became the premier brand. Eveready sued, claiming it was obviou
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But no solution, until...
One day an engineer came home depressed after another hard day at the lab. His wife, heating dinner, asked him why he was so glum, and he told her about the problems at work. She said "Why don't you put it in a steel can?"
Yeah, but that's an obviously made up story. It's just like Newton and the apple, or microwave ovens being invented because a soldier noticed that radar melted a chocolate bar in his pocket, or Charles Darrow being a heating engineer who created Monopoly to play with his family. It's a cute little anecdote that people find heart-warming, but really a misrepresentation of reality.
In reality, if an engineer came home depressed after a hard day at the lab and she said "Why don't you put it in a steel can?" He
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Yeah, but that's an obviously made up story.
You'll recall I said "As a patent attorney once told me,".
I make no representations of its veracity. Whether it started out as a true story and is still accurate, got warped, or was just made up out of whole cloth, It's now a "Just So Story". It's a parable to clarify a point of ideological reasoning.
"It's just like ... microwave ovens being invented because a soldier noticed that radar melted a chocolate bar in his pocket,"
Interestingly, I heard a quite differ
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You'll recall I said "As a patent attorney once told me,".
I make no representations of its veracity. Whether it started out as a true story and is still accurate, got warped, or was just made up out of whole cloth, It's now a "Just So Story". It's a parable to clarify a point of ideological reasoning.
Of course. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you'd made up the story, just that as you say it's more of a parable or "Just So Story". Those do bother me a lot though, because too many people seem to take them at face value, and it skews how they see the world and their understanding of how science and engineering actually get done.
The version I heard had the inventor as a low-level tech in a radar lab, who noticed and participated in the practice of detecting the operation of microwave generators, not with instruments, but by sticking a hand into the field and feeling whether it warmed. He got the bright idea that this might be useful as a cooking tool.
So he took a pot, cut a waveguide flange into the side, mounted a magnetron (connected to a power supply) on it, called his boss over, put in a raw egg, and turned it on. Of course the egg exploded, splattering half-cooked egg all over his boss' tie. The boss (being a clueful nerd), reacted not by berating the techie for dirtying his tie, but by also seeing the possibilities. So the company started a program to develop it, and the result was the first commercial microwave oven. (Amana, I think.)
That's a creative one. Raytheon's version of it has the actual patent filer noticing that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted and him testing on an egg among other things, s
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So, you mean, like put things in a box? You can patent that?
Yes you can. And coming up there will be patents for:
Putting things in a box .... Using a computer!!!
and
Putting things in a box, using a computer .... while in VR!!!!
Re: Patentable?? (Score:2)
They're not boxes, they're plastic bins.
So what we have here is a long-standing problem like I showed in the 1987 photo. But then a new technology like plastic bins comes along (just a few years prior to this 2003 patent application - see https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plastic+storage+bin&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cplastic%20storage%20bin%3B%2Cc0 [google.com]), and I agree it's not a big leap to apply this new technology of plastic bins to a
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The patent is due to expire November 21, 2023.
No wonder they're trying to bilk the US govt... they've got 2 years left to do it.
I'm pretty certain that other govts would have just compulsorily acquired the patent if they tried to sue them for it.
I aslo remember flying from the 90's in Australia Most airports didn't even have metal detectors and even if the airport did, anyone was permitted through into the secure area (I.E. your gran would come in to watch you take off... well board and then she'd nip off to the bowls club like most Australian gr
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I flew out of an airport in rural Queensland (headed for Sydney) and the security took one look at my family, said "Now worries, you're right" when I started to put our stuff on the belt for the X-ray, and waved us out onto the tarmac, where we lined up to board.
I love sensible people
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An expiring patent just means nobody can infringe and accrue damages.
The statute of limitations for litigating for infringement that has already happened in the past is a different issue.
Just because a patent expires it doesn't let anyone off the hook for infringement that already happened while the patent was valid.
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You get to patent something like this?
When I was a kid, the grocery store had one of those roller conveyor belts and bins, into which your bags would go at the checkout. Go out, get in your car, drive up to the front and a helpful worker would have the bin (numbered to match a tag they gave you) ready and load the bags into your car. I assume they stacked the bins (because they're moulded plastic, they HAVE to be tapered, and therefore stackable) and recycled them. Prior art from the 1960s.
TFA refers to a
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I still think that should not be patent able. Yes this is a good idea. No, it is not innovative.
Every individual part is simple and in use for thousands of years, with the possible exception of stackable trays only being in use for 100's of years. Combining them is not innovative at all.
It would seem no different than combining the ideas of roofs, floors, walls and calling it a home.
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https://www.cntraveler.com/sto... [cntraveler.com]
Note that there are no trays and no place for the pilot to put his jacket. Low security.
Ah yes, the good 'ol days of flying where people weren't considered as or treated like criminals.
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This is patent-able? I'm willing to bet that stack-able trays on carts with advertising printed on them has been done many times before.
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perfect.. drag this in court for a couple years, and tell those guys that pretend having invented sliced bread to shove it.
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The idea of stacking trays may be obvious, but only once one has decided to use trays. Here is what a security checkpoint from 1987 looked like:
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-airports-were-like-in-1987 [cntraveler.com]
Note that there are no trays and no place for the pilot to put his jacket. Low security.
The novel points of the patent https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f1/19/ad/aa70828ce5a760/US6888460.pdf [googleapis.com] are:
1. Using trays
2. Having the trays be stackable
3. Using three carts (beginning, end, and middle)
4. Putting advertising on the inside bottom of the tray.
The patent is due to expire November 21, 2023.
Note that point 4 isn't in the independent claim, so wouldn't apply there. I'd also argue that it's obvious over basket systems in place at supermarkets for decades: position baskets at the front of the store, customers take one and fill it and proceed through the checkout line, where they're collected and eventually repositioned as a stack to the front of the store. Stacking baskets are interchangeable with stacking trays, so I would think a combination of supermarket and scanner art would render these cla
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The opinion answers your Q. See these pages... (Score:3)
Could someone explain which genius idea about "recycling tablets" ... could be patentable?
The opinion tells you exactly what you asked.
- They already argued that, six years ago.
- The government didn't successfully prove one of the steps was obvious.
This, pointing out the step, is on page 6:
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Could someone explain which genius idea about "recycling tablets" (read: bringing them back from one end of the checkpoint to the other) could be patentable?
The genius part was when someone realized this setup and process might be patentable under the (broken) patent system and actually tried.
Nail Clippers (Score:3)
Fuck both of them... (Score:2)
If this really did involve the TSA and patent trolls beating each other up, I'd cheer until I was blue in the face.
But instead the TSA is just going to pay them off with your money and mine...
WTF (Score:3)
a. positioning a first tray cart containing trays at the proximate end of a scanning device through which objects may be passed, wherein said scanning device comprises a proximate end and a distal end,
b. removing a tray from said first tray cart,
c. passing said tray through said scanning device from said proximate end through to said distal end,
d. providing a second tray cart at said distal end of said scanning device,
e. receiving said tray passed through said scanning device in said second tray cart, and
f. moving said second tray cart to said proximate end of said scanning device so that said trays in said second cart be passed through said scanning device at said proximate end
The final step in the method of claim 1, “moving said tray cart to said proximate end of said scanning device,” was added at the PTO to overcome the examiner’s initial obviousness rejection.
OK so we scan items in trays and if anything needs re-examination it is put in another cart, and the court agreed that's obvious. But then pushing the cart back to the beginning to rescan wasn't, so they got a patent. I'm sure you could find prior art for this in a lot of machine shops.
I swear it's not going to be long before someone get's sued for taking a piss because some troll company has patented zipping up your fly afterwards.
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I swear it's not going to be long before someone get's sued for taking a piss because some troll company has patented zipping up your fly afterwards.
I know how to beat THAT patent :-)
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A plurality of saids (Score:2)
Say "said" again! I dare you! I double dare you, motherfucker!
There are, in fact, a plurality of "saids".
(Pluraility being a favourite patent word.)
Just another reason the gov shouldn't be involved (Score:3)
I see this a just another reason the government shouldn't be performing this role.
it's likely that we the taxpayers will end up paying this. If it were a private organization, something like this would likely put them under and a different company would rise up to take their place, and in the end, taxpayers would not end up paying for this.
somehow I see this going like a lot of other government failures though, where they claim we need more government and more spending around this to make sure it doesn't get happen again.
$9.50/hr rent a cops doing the work is better? (Score:2)
$9.50/hr rent a cops doing the work is better?
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Note that GP didn't say they'd do a better job (though it might not be too hard to beat the TSA missing half the test bombs in their exercises), but that privatizing it would distribute the liability differently, such that the taxpayers might not end up on the hook for it, depending on how that private contractor's contracts are structured.
Privatizing might also have an additional benefit, in that it might get rid of any qualified immunity protection TSA might get as a quasi-law-enforcement agency, such tha
Patents are stupid (Score:1)
Patent trolling the government over obvious thing (Score:2)
This case proves the patent system/law is completely broken and needs to be reformed.
This scenario is actually pretty similar to situation in the The right to read [wikipedia.org] by Richard Stallman.
The law compels certain behaviour but also paying the private entity for following that, the only difference is the the tax payer is paying this as corporate welfare rather than directly.
Patent the Patent Abuse (Score:2)
I'd like to submit a patent for a method of using the patent process to make bogus income on obvious ideas. Anyone want to help me?
I'm rooting for this to get overturned by SCOTUS down the line.
Advertising (Score:3)
St. Petersburg, Florida-based SecurityPoint's founder Joseph Ambrefe offered the TSA a license to his patent in 2005 in exchange for the exclusive right to advertise on the trays at U.S. airports.
Advertising on government property usually is illegal.A federal agency would normally not be allowed to enter into an agreement like this, so there is ample reason not to have taken the "free" license.
Patent anti-vax (Score:2)
Seize it. (Score:2)
The government has the ability to seize patents. This clear abuse of the system seems like reason enough to seize this patent.
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Why aren't they suing ME? (Score:2)
When I last flew (yeesh, a year and a half ago) I am pretty sure that I carried my tray part of the way, and I might have even taken it from a cart and/or placed it on a cart, though I don't remember the endpoints as well as I know I carried the tray. While TSA moved the tray around more than I did, surely they didn't perform 100% of the patent violating. Not only did I unwittingly infringe this patent personally to at least some degree, I also witnessed many other people doing the same thing at the checkpo
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When I last flew (yeesh, a year and a half ago) I am pretty sure that I carried my tray part of the way, and I might have even taken it from a cart and/or placed it on a cart, though I don't remember the endpoints as well as I know I carried the tray. While TSA moved the tray around more than I did, surely they didn't perform 100% of the patent violating. Not only did I unwittingly infringe this patent personally to at least some degree, I also witnessed many other people doing the same thing at the checkpoint that day. I'm not complaining, but I wonder: where's my nasty lawyer-gram?
They should get a list from TSA of everyone who used a checkpoint tray since 2008. Every one of those people acted in concert with TSA to violate the patent. TSA isn't indemnifying us, are they?
It's the other way around, actually - since you performed some of the steps and the TSA performed some of the steps, no individual infringed the patent, and you can only infringe through joint infringement... but that requires an agency relationship between the parties, like employer-employee, or company-contractor. It's unlikely that travelers could be considered an agent of the TSA, so joint infringement shouldn't apply.
According to the opinion, the government stipulated to infringing the patent, waiving
Apparently not obvious (Score:2)
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