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Wow, one would have hoped that TechRadium would have tried to upsell their clients on the security of their services over Twitter. This reminds me of the compa

by seasoup 17y ago

Wow, one would have hoped that TechRadium would have tried to upsell their clients on the security of their services over Twitter. This reminds me of the company suing Google because they are offering maps for free. Twitter is a start up and this will eat up some of their much needed capital... TechRadium is trying to bully them into shutting down instead of trying to have a better product. Another example of our patent system gone awry.

olefoo 17y ago
I'm fairly sure that the owners and employees of TechRadium would disagree and say that they are merely trying to protect their invention and defend the business they've built on it. This is not a case of a patent troll sitting on an idea and attempting to charge a toll from anyone who uses it without themselves developing it. This is a company that actually went out and built a business and spent a fair amount of effort making sure that they could defend it. And now they are.
- ramy_d 17y ago
  and yet don't you think the patents are still vague?
  - spc476 17y ago
    I'm not a patent attorney, but to me, they seem to be completely different than what Twitter does: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html It seems their technology is more push, that is, one person submits a message and their software will then broadcast it via email, SMS, phone, etc, and will even translate the message to a target language. Twitter is pull; it doesn't push. Other third parties might do the pushing, but Twitter, nope. Also, the last two patents seem to be more business related, applying the first patent to schools and government organizations, which to me, is a painfully obvious use of the first patent (and in my world, the other two would not have been issued, but we're not on my world).
    - halo 17y ago
      I agree, although I'm not a patent lawyer either. The first claims of each of those patents states that there must be "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device" and that there should be "a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group". Twitter doesn't do that, and all the other claims rely on the first.
  - olefoo 17y ago
    It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the judge thinks. And having been a part of a couple of patent processes, you are encouraged to make your claims as broad as possible.
- skermes 17y ago
  The thing that feels... unwholesome about this isn't that TechRadium is trying to crush a superior product through a misapplication of patent law; I don't think they're trying to do that at all. It seems more like they invented a hammer that's custom-designed to pound nails with a square head. No one has a better hammer for that. And then Twitter made a hammer that can pound nails with any kind of head, and does it good enough most of the time. Twitter just happened to solve a more general problem than TechRadium did. It feels unwholesome because Twitter isn't really a system for sending mass emergency alerts to people. That just happens to be one application of being able to send short messages to a host of devices. And, really, Twitter wouldn't even be in competition with ISIS if it hadn't become absurdly popular for reasons that have nothing to do with emergency alerts. The feeling here of suing someone for getting so popular that an infrastructure has grown around them that lets them do what you do is, again, unwholesome.
- DavidHogan 17y ago
  The 'inventions' look pretty obvious to me. I don't see why this business should be protected from having to compete.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

by seasoup 17y ago

olefoo 17y ago

I'm fairly sure that the owners and employees of TechRadium would disagree and say that they are merely trying to protect their invention and defend the business they've built on it. This is not a case of a patent troll sitting on an idea and attempting to charge a toll from anyone who uses it without themselves developing it. This is a company that actually went out and built a business and spent a fair amount of effort making sure that they could defend it. And now they are.

ramy_d 17y ago
and yet don't you think the patents are still vague?
- spc476 17y ago
  I'm not a patent attorney, but to me, they seem to be completely different than what Twitter does: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html It seems their technology is more push, that is, one person submits a message and their software will then broadcast it via email, SMS, phone, etc, and will even translate the message to a target language. Twitter is pull; it doesn't push. Other third parties might do the pushing, but Twitter, nope. Also, the last two patents seem to be more business related, applying the first patent to schools and government organizations, which to me, is a painfully obvious use of the first patent (and in my world, the other two would not have been issued, but we're not on my world).
  - halo 17y ago
    I agree, although I'm not a patent lawyer either. The first claims of each of those patents states that there must be "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device" and that there should be "a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group". Twitter doesn't do that, and all the other claims rely on the first.
- olefoo 17y ago
  It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the judge thinks. And having been a part of a couple of patent processes, you are encouraged to make your claims as broad as possible.
skermes 17y ago
The thing that feels... unwholesome about this isn't that TechRadium is trying to crush a superior product through a misapplication of patent law; I don't think they're trying to do that at all. It seems more like they invented a hammer that's custom-designed to pound nails with a square head. No one has a better hammer for that. And then Twitter made a hammer that can pound nails with any kind of head, and does it good enough most of the time. Twitter just happened to solve a more general problem than TechRadium did. It feels unwholesome because Twitter isn't really a system for sending mass emergency alerts to people. That just happens to be one application of being able to send short messages to a host of devices. And, really, Twitter wouldn't even be in competition with ISIS if it hadn't become absurdly popular for reasons that have nothing to do with emergency alerts. The feeling here of suing someone for getting so popular that an infrastructure has grown around them that lets them do what you do is, again, unwholesome.
DavidHogan 17y ago
The 'inventions' look pretty obvious to me. I don't see why this business should be protected from having to compete.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]