QuentinCallaghanGoogle owes $338.7 mln in Chromecast patent case, US jury says
ReallyActuallyFrankensteinEastern District of Texas: The one-stop forum-shopping choice of patent trolls everywhere.
These aren’t really patent trolls, though. They made a technology, patented it and produced a product. Google met with them, but decided not to pay for the patent owner’s technology and made their own instead.
"Made a technology"
Did they actually make anything, or did the CEO just patent an idea without ever putting it in production?
Because latter would be the textbook description of patent trolls. An idea is just an idea, if you can't execute it, the patent should be null and void.
On another note I have to say that such an obvious solution of "moving content from a small screen to the big screen" should hardly be patentable. It's quite literally just RPC, which has been in use in various shapes and forms for over 60 years.
A couple quick searches and a skim read, they’re offering their technology under their main brand Touchstream as well as another called Shodogg. It’s not the same as Chromecast of course, but as the patent holder they have a right to market the technology as they see fit.
I haven’t looked at the patents themselves, but I reckon it’s a bit more involved than and significantly different enough to a simple remote procedure call. It’s not like a server delivering video to a client, instead it’s switching from displaying on the server to the client. RCP is initiated by the client, while casting is initiated by the server.
Nothing you mentioned even vaguely resembles an invention.
From Wiki:
An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process.
This is a novel method and process. Sure, anyone could imagine putting something on one screen to another, but apparently no one came up with an implementation until 2011.
The patent in question (the articles suggest 3 patents, but they’re all basically the same): patents.google.com/patent/US8356251
So it’s a process that’s a little more involved than just “display this video on that screen”.
US8356251B2 - Play control of content on a display device - Google Patents
A system for presenting and controlling content on a display device includes a network, a server system coupled to the network and comprising one or more servers, a display device coupled to the network and having a display, and a personal computing device operable to transmit a first message according to a specified format over the network to the server system. The server system stores an association between the personal computing device and the display device. The first message identifies user-selected content and a media player to play the content. The server system is operable, in response to receiving the first message from the personal computing device, to provide to the display device a second message identifying the user-selected content and the media player to play the content. In response to receiving the second message, the display device is operable to obtain a first media player needed to play the content, to load the media player and to present the content on the display.
No, it's not unique or novel in any way.
That entire patent is technobabble that means "send content to a display". There is nothing about it that's in any way innovative or that it's even possible that they were one of the first 1000 people on the planet to think of.
The entire premise of allowing people to "invent" extremely obvious, extremely simply things is an obscenely broken system. Submitting a patent application for this shouldn't just get rejected. It should get you permanently barred from ever being able to submit or own a patent until the end of time.
The full patent can be found here (pdf): image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/…/8356251
This goes into many details about the process of synchronising the video between devices, as well as a variety of different methods which the process can be implemented (it doesn’t just cover what Chromecast does).
I haven’t checked the other 2 patents quoted, maybe in the full article they show some differences (the figures are all the same, though).
That entire patent is technobabble that means “send content to a display”. There is nothing about it that’s in any way innovative or that it’s even possible that they were one of the first 1000 people on the planet to think of.
The figures show and the full patent describes a number of processes that define exactly how it’s done. It’s not technobabble, but a process. Overall it does “send content to a display”, but it’s the way it’s done that makes it patentable.
If you were to develop a process that was different and didn’t use the methods claimed in the patent, it wouldn’t be patent infringement. However, apparently Google’s method does use this process - they didn’t even try to argue against this, instead they claimed the patent was invalid. I haven’t seen Google’s specific arguments on this matter so I can’t really comment on it, other than to say the jury didn’t agree with Google.
The entire premise of allowing people to “invent” extremely obvious, extremely simply things is an obscenely broken system. Submitting a patent application for this shouldn’t just get rejected. It should get you permanently barred from ever being able to submit or own a patent until the end of time.
So you just have a bee in your bonnet about patents in general. I see.
The patent system is far from perfect, but it isn’t completely broken, as you might claim. For an example of it working properly, you only have to look at your phone - chip designer ARM designed almost all the processors in your phone; they patent the designs and then license them out to manufacturers such as Samsung and Qualcomm. These other companies lack the technical ability to develop processors, while ARM lack the manufacturing capability to mass produce them. Patents allow the two groups to work together to produce the product you rely on every day.
I think you should try and focus on patents that actually aren’t properly thought out, eg Apple’s design patent for a rectangle inside a rectangle with rounded corners.
No offense, but I think you’re just being dazzled by patent-style writing. For whatever it’s worth on an anonymous Internet forum, I’ve written patents, and litigated patents, related to analogous compression technology.
It is not difficult to write something that sounds complex and novel in a patent, but is in fact a completely obvious, generic solution that any person of skill in the art would immediately and inevitably have upon confronting a task or problem. The patent examiners are overworked, underpaid, and every patent attorney knows this. Thousands of patents are granted that should not be granted every year, because after a few office actions and responses, high-paid attorneys inevitably make it too time-consuming for the patent examiners to fight.
Checking with a server as part of a process to move data is not a patentable invention. And while yes, sometimes tech companies steal tech, you should also be verrrry suspicious of anything coming out of EDTX by default.
No offense taken. While I get what you mean about the language, and while I am a technical person I didn’t digest the full detail of what the patent describes, I do still think there is at the very least a hint of a solid invention in this patent. As I’ve said elsewhere, the key part that makes this novel is the synchronisation of video streams - you don’t just send your video to the TV, you don’t just tell the server to start playing on the TV, the server synchonises a stream between your device and the TV. In particular, this doesn’t just cover basic chromecasting, but the ability to synchronise and stream between a range of client devices and in a range of different topologies, particularly where one device might control the stream for others.
I agree with your statement about EDTX and would inherently be suspicious, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. In the absence of some identical technology that predates this patent, I feel like their ruling is correct in this instance.
However this is a weird patent in that it covers such a wide variety of things. It may well be that some are valid, while others aren’t, yet the nature of the patent is that all are protected as a group.