“Apple last week was sued in the Eastern District of Texas for infringing on the patents of Mirror Worlds, a company that used to make desktop search and organization software,” Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek.
MacDailyNews Take: Let’s stop here and take a now familiar detour. In February 2006, Sam Williams reported for MIT’s Technology Review:
In one federal court in East Texas, plaintiffs have such an easy time winning patent-infringement lawsuits against big-tech companies that defendants often choose to settle rather than fight.
East Texas lawyer Michael C. Smith calls it the “rattlesnake speech.” It generally occurs in the early stages of a patent trial in the Marshall, TX, courtroom of Judge T. John Ward, when some attorney has failed to read up on the rules specific to litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Like a scene out of the comedy movie “My Cousin Vinny,” the speech starts with a polite invitation to approach the bench — and ends with a stern warning to pick up the pace or else.
“He gives you a real talking to,” says Smith, a partner with the Roth Law Firm in Marshall and chairman of the Eastern District’s rule committee, a group of local attorneys that works with Judge Ward to set the guidelines for basic pre-trial and trial procedure. “He won’t bite you that first time, but if you don’t get the message, you’ll wish you did.”
Judge Ward’s toughness is a big reason that Marshall, a city of fewer than 20,000 residents, located 150 miles east of Dallas, has become a destination for patent attorneys around the world.
In the rough calculus of intellectual property litigation, tough judges equate with speedy cases — and that’s exactly what you want if you’re a plaintiff with limited cash, but potentially big-time settlement payments or damages from a company you claim is infringing on your patent.
As an example, attorney Smith cites the ongoing case of Laser Dynamics Inc. v. BenQ. It pits a Japanese plaintiff with a patent relating to optical disk drive recognition against a billion-dollar Taiwanese device maker. When defense counsel for BenQ failed to cough up a set of relevant e-mails in the pre-trial discovery phase, Ward, a jurist who has heard more than 160 patent cases in the seven years since his appointment to the federal bench by President Clinton, decided to make an example of the company: BenQ would have to pay a $500,000 fine and forfeit a third of its courtroom time in the upcoming case.
Claburn continues, “The lawsuit claims that Apple’s computers, iPods, iPhones, and Mac OS X operating system infringe on Mirror Worlds’ alternative to the desktop metaphor: organizing files in a time-based stack or stream.”
“While the Eastern District of Texas is notorious in legal circles as the favored venue of patent trolls, Mirror Worlds’ patents appear to have more merit than most because the ideas expressed aren’t obvious, at least compared to controversial patents like Amazon’s 1-Click patent. They reflect the work of Yale computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter, who in the mid-1990s recognized that the desktop metaphor has its limits and proposed to organize computer documents in a time-ordered stream. At the time, there was nothing like it,” Claburn reports.
“Or was there? Though Apple did not respond to a request for comment, it may be able to argue that the HyperCard software it developed in the 1980s represents prior art, thereby invalidating some or all of Mirror World’s claims,” Claburn reports. “A more likely outcome, however, is a quiet settlement.”
Full article here.
This kind of stupidity always makes me glad that we don’t have software patents on the european side of the Atlantic.
The only purpose those have is to lay trivial patents as landmines in the path of any halfway decent developer so that ony the biggest, baddest companies with the richest “defensive” patent portfolios can afford to survive in the long run, even though the “inventions” are really straightforward in most cases.
Just disgusting. (And that applies to many of Apple’s own patents just as well, even if they don’t have much of a choice under the circumstances.)
Don’t give in to hate, Apple. That only leads to the Dark Side.
Next up, the estate of H. G. Wells.
Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, of course.
How can a company that shut up shop in 2004 still be ok with litigation of its patents?
Don’t they have to show that the infringement is damaging their business?
I have been organizing my data in time-based streams since I began working with file systems. Examples include document revisions, series of meetings on a given topic, etc.
Have we have passed the point at which patents are useful/beneficial? Half of the world openly ignores patent and copyright protection, and a subset of the rest are focused on exploiting the patent process for personal gain without ever contributing anything of benefit to society.
Mirror Worlds..Isn’t that down at the strip mall, between Razor Town and The Straw Port?
So let me see. I poop a certain way every time for consistency and patent it, I can potentially sue billions of people infringing on my patented poopee method?
Jubei
Do you think your evidence will hold up in court?
> At the time, there was nothing like it
Sounds very like the way the old VAX VMS operating system worked. It allowed you to retain previous version(s) each time the file was saved, with the number of versions being system configurable. Certainly saved my sorry ass on a couple of occasions.
@TowerTone
I’m pretty confident my claim will hold up in court. I’ll ned to demonstrate of course, and I’m sure I’ll come up smelling like roses to the jury and judge.
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“I’m pretty confident my claim will hold up in court.”
I’ll take that as the straight poop.
mcdeans nails it in one.
This is precisely like the old versioning system in VMS.
Moreover, it’s precisely like Volume Shadow Copy in Windows, and like any enterprise backup system in use in the last fifteen years.
I know that Arcserve has had an interface like this since 2000 or so; possibly farther back.
In other news, descendants of Archimedes are suing all manufacturers of pumps, propellers, screws, windmills, and turbines for patent infringement.
You guys are gross.
Quicktime… time based data.
Mirror Who?
All the fake lawsuits and companies apparently are in Texas! Here’s another one that is trying to get rich quick off of someone else’s hard work.
Apple’s software is based on OSX Unix, so they don’t have a case just reading one line says it all how stupid this is.
Now I’m suing Mirror Worlds for violating my patent. I patented the concept of filing a patent for a vague idea that you cannot even start to bring to market (let alone make work) then to sue whoever actually makes the product sometime in the future. That was MY idea!!!! I want my cut of the action for each of these patent infringing lawsuits!
OK…can we just give Texas to Mexico now?
@RePlay
Given the dollar’s sliding value, that might end up being a good deal for Texas.
MW hard – as in patent lawsuits aren’t
Isn’t it time to give Texas back to Mexico… or, at the very least, just kick them out of the union?
I’ve heard stories going back for decades, that the Texas state constitution reserves for Texas the right to secede from the U.S. That it was a part of the agreement (treaty?) between the U.S. and the Republic of Texas that allowed Texas to become a part of the U.S. If true, maybe Texas should show a little class and remove itself.
While we’re at it, maybe the U.S. could trade Texas for the Baja peninsula.
I’m sure it would be more useful to us.
As long as they take GW and his cronies with them, Texas may secede. “MDN Magic Word” is bed, as in who is GW in bed with now?
Here’s the biggest problem. The patent invalidation and the patent infringement cases take two entirely different tracks that are mutually exclusive.
Apple can appeal to the PTO that they had prior art with Hypercard that would invalidate the Mirror Worlds patent.
And they could win.
But that would do nothing to stop Judge Ward from giving Mirror Worlds a judgment against Apple for infringing the patent since the case would likely go through his courtroom much faster than the PTO appeal.
We really need a patent appeals court that combines the two tracks into a single process.