Comments on: Blue Calypso Sues MyLikes, Foursquare, Groupon and Yelp for Infringing Peer-to-Peer Advertising Patents

By: Roland

Roland — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:29:30 +0000

Gene,

Please update us (the IPwatchdog readership) as and when there are developments with the Blue Calypso filings.

Paulos,
Thanks for reminding me about this case, I had totally forgotten about it. By the way I do recommend hanging around, you’ll be surprised just how much you will improve your understanding of the law and how it may impact your work whether we like it or not.

By: Gene Quinn

Gene Quinn — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:28:29 +0000

Paulos-

Your analogy aside, infringement is not acceptable regardless of how you may choose to rationalize it. While you may want the litigant to have to prove that no other solution exists, that is not what the law requires.

You can believe the patents and these types of lawsuits are frivolous, but your understanding of the law is extremely limited. You seem to be a part of the crowd that wants to be able to copy others who innovate without getting charged for infringement. The belief that software programmers have a god given right to copy the work of others is what is fanciful, or frivolous.

-Gene

By: paulos

paulos — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:49:12 +0000

This seems frivolous, as in programming novel solutions are often wanting. Unless the litigant can prove that no other solution exists for the same programming problem, it is like a dolphin suing a marsupial because both have five finger-like bones in each hand or flipper. The reason is that both co-evolved from a single progenitor. In this case, as is so with many programming ‘patents’, both the litigant and the defendants came from a similar background – of being web merchants or brokers for the same. If no other programming solution is apparent then no patent infringement can be established, or even if it can be shown that the defendants arrived at the same conclusion in their coding simply because it is the straightest line between the points in question. I believe both the patents and the lawsuits are frivolous.

By: Roland

Roland — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:50:20 +0000

Having implemented real-time campaigning with location-awareness for a mobile telco using off-the-shelf products back in 2003/4, my initial impressions gained from an quick reading is that the Blue Calypso patents do seem to have a rather large obvious element to them; but as Gene likes to remind us the devil is in the detail.

Given a first filing date in 2005 and the evidence Blue Calypso has put forward in the Groupon case, namely ‘normal’ web referral/endorsement mechanisms, there will be a significant body of prior art …