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Jury orders Google to pay $339M for patent-infringing Chromecast (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Seems like a patent troll…

All three of the Touchstream patents in question are titled "Play control of content on a display device" and detail "a system for presenting and controlling content on a display device" that uses "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."

Play control of content on a device. So…remotes violate this patent? Cmon.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Without reading the whole patent it did sound a bit too generic and obvious for the patent to be valid, but I'm not a patent lawyer. The comments from Touchstream were pretty great though.

I wouldn't blame a small company for not being able to bring a competing product to market against Google, but it seems like a long time to wait to sue someone making money off a stolen patent.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Big companies love to file bullshit software patents like this. I think I read a comment somewhere that said their coworkers used to have competition on who can got the most ridiculous patents approved by the patent office.

Instead of using patents for innovation, those big companies then use those patents as a weapon. They can basically sue anyone for anything thanks to their broad portfolio of bullshit patents. It's basically like a nuke for them, big companies won't sue each other because the other big companies also have nuke, so anyone who attack with nuke will also get nuked. We've seen it play out between Apple, Google and Qualcomm in the past (e.g. multitouch battle, modem battle, etc).

Patent trolls are different though, they are usually a non practicing entity. Suing them is useless because they don't do any business except hoarding patents, so they are not afraid of getting counter-sued for patent infringements. The worst that can happen is getting their stupid patents invalidated.

So yeah, I think software patents are basically useless and a drain to society.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

This sounds like an old X11 thin client would infringe this patent, which came out in the 80's. Chromecast and cloud gaming derive from that, being more of a refinement than an invention.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Looks like it's specifically the "casting" portion of Chromecast. The patent details having one device, in the example an iphone, request to play a video on a larger device, where it'll either play it from cache or pull it from the internet to display it. Seems a bit generic to actually patent something like that, but as usual parents serve to do nothing other than stifle innovation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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