Florida Patent Attorneys & IP Lawyers : Florida Intellectual Property Law Blog

Patenting Internet business methods have become almost imperative with cases of infringement steadily increasing.  In one of the recent encounters in this arena, Marshall, Texas-based Polaris IP LLC alleged Yahoo Inc., AOL LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Borders Group Inc., Google Inc. and IAC/Interactive Corp for violating the patent on its automatic message interpretation and routing system. The patent produced by Polaris, is essentially a system that can analyze incoming emails of users and decide whether it can be managed automatically or need to be send to a customer service representative. Polaris has filed a lawsuit against the alleged offenders in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, as reported in an article in www.computerworld.com, asking for a jury trial, attorneys’ fees da

A long-standing patent infringement matter between Microsoft and opponents Eolas and the University of California was settled on August 31, 2007. Eolas launched a claim against Microsoft’s Internet browser Internet Explorer which is said to have violated a patent it held. The dispute revolved around embedding of items within a web page. Microsoft has modified the element in its browser and agreed to make an undisclosed payment to Eolas as cited in an article in www.theregister.co.uk The patent involved is partly held by University of California, which is expected to receive a part of Microsoft’s payout. Eolas has mentioned its shareholders that it anticipates a payout worth $60 to $72 per share for them. However, in a letter to its shareholders Mark Swords, Chief Operating Of

I As a Florida patent attorney, I find myself regularly following news relating to IBM.  Not only is IBM consistently one of the top 10 patent filers in the U.S., but the birthplace of the P.C. was right here in Boca Raton, Florida.  In fact, IBM’s main complex was just northwest of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton until they relocated to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Internet patents are asserted by IBM claiming patent infringement by Amazon.com.  IBM has charged the e-commerce giant, Amazon with two lawsuits, seeking unspecified damages as reported by www.pcadvisor.co.uk IBM further added that it had tried to resolve the issue outside of court regarding the Internet patents for four years before deciding to sue Amazon. According to the article, Amazon.com d

Software patents have been granted to HNTB by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for parts of its TrueViz(R) Transport software system, adding to the list of software patents. According to www.prnewswire.com HNTB has received exclusive rights to technology for the first time and this has been developed for facilitating its engineering and architecture clients’ projects. TrueViz(R) Transport is an interconnected system of procedures and software which increases the interactive visualization for public involvement and design analysis. The code of the software is credited to transform linear point-based data in design output to a chain of mathematically defined surfaces and curves. This simplifies the conversion of design files to 3-D and also brings in more accuracy and needs less time. Consequently, HNTB can

Internet Patents in the news again.According to a recent press release from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in their official website www.eff.org, they are set to challenge an allegedly improper Internet patent that is threatening small businesses. Ideaflood is a self-declared ‘intellectual property holding company’ that makes use of Internet subdomain patenting against payment from the website hosting companies, which provide personalized and virtual subdomains, such as ‘action.eff.org’ for ‘eff.org’, the parent domain. A reexamination request had been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), the result of which revealed by EFF and Rick McLeod of Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, proves that the method Ideaflood boasts of inventing was known prior to the issue of the patent

A number of my Florida patenting clients have business patents for innovative marketing methods and other business innovations.  In recent years, business method patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are forced to meet the raised bars of patentability.  NextMark received a patent from USPTO for its series of new techniques the list technology company has invented for choosing mailing lists, as has been reported in an article at www.dmnews.com. In essence, the patent defines a method for generating a highly targeted mailing list of prospective customers for a listed purchaser. It is partly based on productive prospect lists that was earlier used by the list purchaser, current customers of the list purchaser, prospect lists that the related list purchasers used or it might be any combination

A ‘head’s up’ to those interested in patenting in the music industry. Woodstock Systems, LLC has reached patent pending status with breakthrough music sharing software Woodstock PDS. According to an article on www.send2press.com, the New York based software development company has created the first software that combines a full-feature media player together with secure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file lending.   The software enables its users to play digital music easily, listen to thousands of the popular Internet radio stations, and transform their CD’s into MP3’s. At the same time, they can legally share their digital media files.