Oh, good Lord, when the patent was filed, RunwayFinder was already online. Talk about prior art! This kind of abuse just boils my blood, especially when it involves this kind of penny-ante bullshit, the whole rent-seeking mentality of identifying a niche market that could really benefit from more open information and then trying to dominate it for chump change.
I was somewhat taken aback to realize that for all the talk at EFF about their patent busting project (http://w2.eff.org/patent/wp.php), there doesn't seem to be any public database of bustable patents, suggested prior art, or documented harm done.
This is a divisional of application Ser. No. 09/919,672, filed Jul. 31, 2001.
means that it was effectively filed on that date, so you would need prior art predating 2001. (Though it might be more complicated than that, it depends on a couple of things.)
This story is big news in the little world of general aviation. RunwayFinder was an excellent free product, well loved, and a lot of pilots are angry about it being bullied offline. RunwayFinder says they don't infringe. It seems likely to me, between the prior art, the obviousness of the patent, and the specificity of the patent claims (including language about using "housekeeping frames"). But they lack the means to defend themselves. I blogged some more analysis at http://www.somebits.com/weblog/aviation/flightprep-patent-76...
They won’t talk to me. Instead I’m stuck dealing with their lawyers who twice said that if RunwayFinder pays a license fee (would you like 10% or 20% of zero?) or removes the website that they will drop the lawsuit. Unfortunately, they are now reneging on that and posturing for more. They are claiming damages of $3.2M per month.
FlightPrep stands by its offer to grant a free-license to RunwayFinder to operate its website during this negotiation phase of our legal dispute. We are not asking RunwayFinder to shut down and in-fact are offering them a temporary free-pass at our technology in hopes that this gesture of goodwill will better enable both RunwayFinder and FlightPrep to constructively work toward a mutually beneficial long-term solution.
Doesn't absolve them of hefting lawsuits around, but there seems to be some sort of communication gap here...
What's the betting that the terms of that "free" licence involve some sort of admission of RunwayFinder's guilt, or of the validity of FlightPrep's patent?
Software patents are so infuriating! It's amazing how something that was designed to encourage creativity and innovation is effectively stopping innovation.
Suing someone is expensive and risky. If the "victim" can just be bossed around with scary numbers like "33 million dollars per month", then that's excellent; they get what they want without even having to work for it.
(Personally, that amount would be more than I could ever pay off in a lifetime, so I wouldn't worry about it. I would just join some teach-kids-to-read-in-Africa chairty, leave the world of material wealth behind forever, and never pay a dime of the settlement. Just to spite them.)
To summarize: it's a patent on the idea of overlaying a flight plan on a map using a website. The general case of this is drawing line-segments on a background, something every trivial paint program can do. This patent clearly fails the obviousness test.
So there are patent defense companies like Allied Security Trust, RPX and the Open Invention Network but it seems like these are for major players and/or have very limited scopes.
Is there anything similar out there for smaller businesses, particularly for those in the software industry?
Wouldn't it be nice to have an Open Invention Network type entity that can build up an arsenal to defend against these types of existential threats?
I could see paying a monthly 'licensing and services' premium that would go toward maintaining a patent portfolio, retaining defensive legal services and maintaining a database of prior art and other useful information that can be brought to bear in these kinds of situations.
I know there is regular patent insurance (I have never used it) but it seems more offensive rather than defensive in nature and is expensive.
you can presumably purchase before-the-event insurance anyhow. There just isn't a big market. But can you seriously EFF/etc to be that insurance, and have any money left over to lobby government (have you any idea what financial scale we are talking about? in the UK, the pro-patent lobby just got our government to reduce corporation tax on patent-derived income from 37.5% to 10% ! that takes some serious lobby clout) ?
Definitely good to see the other side's response, but the post immediately prompts the question: what does Parsons stand to gain if he is shutting down RunwayFinder in order to "try this case in the court of public opinion" as FlightPrep claims (rather than simply to avoid getting sued over his hobby)?
From the patent, in the "Background of Invention" section:
However, as will become obvious later, additional applications of this invention may also include the field of cartography, route planning for motor vehicles, marine vehicles and similar utilization.
So does this mean they could potentially go after MapQuest or Google Maps for providing route planning for motor vehicles as well?
Standard rules for patent trolls: that'll happen later. They're going after little guys now so they can go into a case like that and claim that their patent must be good - just look at how many other companies paid up!
Is it possible for RunwayFinder to be hosted outside of the US? For example, if RunwayFinder is not premium (and not sold to the US), why can't the service be hosted in the UK or Europe where the patent is not valid?
I supposed it could be a big boost for FOSS if the remedy for IP infringement wasn't damages calculated on expected (lost) sales, but an account for profits; so you'd hand over the profit you made from infringing this patent (rather than - hand over what we can convince a judge we would have made if we didn't have to compete with a cheaper product)
It would probably hurt FOSS in the short term, because it would essentially legalize not-for-profit copying — unlicensed copies of any proprietary software would be legal, and so we'd have well-curated and reputable repositories of AutoCAD, Microsoft Windows, OrCAD, Cisco IOS, and so on, perhaps even with enhancements and ports to new platforms. I imagine this is already the case in China.
Is RunwayFinder the open-source flight planner? If so, it seems anyone can just run it by itself? Is the source out there? I bet they wouldn't send lawsuits to all their potential customers.
If it is open source, does the community provide any support to developers that find themselves in this situation? Perhaps the EFF or the legal team of an open source friendly company?
This is very sad. I would be glad if we can have site to expose those patent trolls. Browser plugin which automatically displays "Those are patent abusers, don't visit!" when you try to visit given url's would be even better. Maybe that would build some pressure to not use abusive claims.
knowing nothing about the company or history the line about lost revenue just made my blood boil. 22k unique visitors = 3.2 million in lost sales. 100% conversation.
There is so much fail going on here and that before you include the insanity of the 'patent'.
The line in question is a good example of law-fi literature:
"...that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue."
The thing is it is actually worse than that. It is 100% conversion with the assumption that every single visitor would instead use accusing site instead of going to any of the other alternatives.
RunwayFinder is a flight planning resource for U.S. pilots, showing current weather conditions for airports in an area at a glance displayed on seamless sectional and terminal charts. In addition, routes, range circles, and temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) can be plotted.
When a patent establishes a claim, and then says something like "Claim 19: The process of claim 18 further comprising overlaying a route line", does that mean the patent is narrowed to only things that include route lines, or does it still apply to systems with/without route lines? If it's not narrowed by the additional claims, what purpose do the additional claims serve?
Each of the claims is independent and additional. They are made so that it is possible for the patent examiner to approve the patent claim by claim with a more narrow scope, rather than rejecting it as a whole. From the applicant's point of view, the best case is that all claims are approved, but the usual goal is to write a series of increasingly narrower claims so that at least something gets approved. If nothing is rejected, you probably have not made it broad enough. Having a more narrow scope may also determine in a law suit whether something is infringing: if you have an explicit claim, it's more clearly infringing.
The benefit of multiple claims is separability. In your example, claim 18 might be found invalid, but claim 19, since it requires an additional element, might still be valid. On the other hand, claim 18 might not be invalidated, in which case the patent is broader (and therefore more valuable) than if it had included only claim 19.
There was an article on here recently about how in general the more agressive the lawyer is, the less case they have. Potentially the lawyer is bluffing. It a tragedy, that you have to shut down. This sort of thing makes me wonder if there is a market for a decentralized webserver. Sort of a bittorrent but for web pages that would allow you to get around some of the patent claims--in a way. The profit value of this would be that as traffic increased on site the added users would handle some of the load. Essentially auto scaling without the added hardware costs. Potential issues to get over is how to get the browsers to support such a thing. Could websockets or even existing JSONP work through it?
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|15 years ago|reply
On the other hand, there's lots of prior art for drawing flight information on maps. Here's a video game from the 1980's that I played: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC9i1drUg8c#t=2m15s
===========
It's easy to validate the claims that RunwayFinder forms prior art for the patent, assuming that RunwayFinder hasn't changed significantly since then:
First blog post:
http://blog.runwayfinder.com/2005/07/
Slow snapshot from archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051030165731/http://www.runwayf...
Patent filing date:
09/28/2005, via http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7640098.html
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
Chilling Effects has a patent section (http://www.chillingeffects.org/patent/) - but it also doesn't seem to have much of a database-type thing. And the same goes for PUBPAT (http://www.pubpat.org/).
Is there anything else out there I'm missing?
[+] [-] cduan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|15 years ago|reply
Doesn't matter. Patents are awarded by first to invent not first to file.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|15 years ago|reply
FlightPrep tried to go after the deep pockets in the industry, too, Jeppesen. Jepp's apparently blown them off: http://www.aopa.org/flightplanning/articles/2010/101214AOPA_...
[+] [-] shrikant|15 years ago|reply
They won’t talk to me. Instead I’m stuck dealing with their lawyers who twice said that if RunwayFinder pays a license fee (would you like 10% or 20% of zero?) or removes the website that they will drop the lawsuit. Unfortunately, they are now reneging on that and posturing for more. They are claiming damages of $3.2M per month.
FlightPrep responds: http://blog.flightprep.com/2010/12/regarding-runwayfinder-sh...
FlightPrep stands by its offer to grant a free-license to RunwayFinder to operate its website during this negotiation phase of our legal dispute. We are not asking RunwayFinder to shut down and in-fact are offering them a temporary free-pass at our technology in hopes that this gesture of goodwill will better enable both RunwayFinder and FlightPrep to constructively work toward a mutually beneficial long-term solution.
Doesn't absolve them of hefting lawsuits around, but there seems to be some sort of communication gap here...
[+] [-] gjm11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|15 years ago|reply
This makes me so angry... I just don't know how that thought can be honestly held in a sane mind.
[+] [-] cvos|15 years ago|reply
http://hustlebear.com/2010/12/14/how-to-handle-lawyers-threa...
[+] [-] megamark16|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] regularfry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
(Personally, that amount would be more than I could ever pay off in a lifetime, so I wouldn't worry about it. I would just join some teach-kids-to-read-in-Africa chairty, leave the world of material wealth behind forever, and never pay a dime of the settlement. Just to spite them.)
[+] [-] mkramlich|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madars|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clavalle|15 years ago|reply
Is there anything similar out there for smaller businesses, particularly for those in the software industry?
Wouldn't it be nice to have an Open Invention Network type entity that can build up an arsenal to defend against these types of existential threats?
I could see paying a monthly 'licensing and services' premium that would go toward maintaining a patent portfolio, retaining defensive legal services and maintaining a database of prior art and other useful information that can be brought to bear in these kinds of situations.
I know there is regular patent insurance (I have never used it) but it seems more offensive rather than defensive in nature and is expensive.
[+] [-] Empedocles99|15 years ago|reply
b) Some of us would be willing to pay an insurance premium against patent trolls
Proposal: Form an organization (or convince an existing one like the EFF) funded (donations, I'd presume) by all of us to:
a) Lobby for changes to to the patent process and law.
b) Aggressively challenge obvious software patents as being obvious, or using prior art.
c) Serve as a communal defense fund/legal help for small businesses against patent trolls.
d) Maintain a community database of bad patents and potential prior art (to be used in defensive or offensive legal actions)
[+] [-] flipbrad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raymondh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blantonl|15 years ago|reply
http://blog.flightprep.com/2010/12/regarding-runwayfinder-sh...
[+] [-] jessriedel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] findm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patd|15 years ago|reply
Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale
[+] [-] jeffmould|15 years ago|reply
However, as will become obvious later, additional applications of this invention may also include the field of cartography, route planning for motor vehicles, marine vehicles and similar utilization.
So does this mean they could potentially go after MapQuest or Google Maps for providing route planning for motor vehicles as well?
[+] [-] acdha|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Splines|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwg66|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanONeill1970|15 years ago|reply
I still reckon they'll come after me though, they love to waste time and think because they 'had an idea' that they own the rights.
[+] [-] flipbrad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutorm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soitgoes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iheartcsharp|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nick24862486|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moge|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cuchoperl|15 years ago|reply
"...that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue."
[+] [-] og1|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccarpenterg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japaget|15 years ago|reply
RunwayFinder is a flight planning resource for U.S. pilots, showing current weather conditions for airports in an area at a glance displayed on seamless sectional and terminal charts. In addition, routes, range circles, and temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) can be plotted.
[+] [-] kj12345|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkurz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aces|15 years ago|reply