Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"They're the everyday fixtures of the Internet experience: pop-up stock quotes on a website, suggestions for related reading near a news article, videos along the side of your screen. Now, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen says he owns the technology behind all these ideas, and he's demanding that some of the world's top Web companies pay up to use them."

Above: He's the dude with the beard.

I've come down hard on patent trolls before, and though I have respect for Allen as the co-founder of Microsoft, the patents he's suing eBay, Google, Facebook, and others for seem like they have the whiff of troll on them. Check them out:

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,263,507:Allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social-networking sites. (Accused violators: AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, YouTube)

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,034,652, U.S. PATENT NO. 6,788,314:Enables ads, stock quotes, news updates or video images to flash on a computer screen, peripherally to a user's main activity. (AOL, Apple, Google, Yahoo)

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,757,682:Allows readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject, among other things. (AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, YouTube)

Do those seem like true innovations to you? Or more like obvious evolutions of previously established technologies? Should software even be patentable at all?

"A recently published Canon patent application (see USPTO Appl. No. 12/630,594) reveals a method for altering exposure values at the pixel level, which would allow Canon to produce a camera that captures a much wider dynamic range with a single image."

This is pretty neat for those of you who are looking to actually get real dynamic range out of your images, as opposed to that overdone fad of making your images surrealistic (and not in a good way either). While it is hard to tell if this will ever materialise (or stay; remember Canon's ill-fated Eye Control experiment), at least it's good to see some work done in areas other than just finding out how to squeeze more megapixels into the marketing brochure.

"A company called Tsera has sued 23 electronics companies in federal court in eastern Texas for violating a patent on touchscreens. The suit, filed on July 15, cites Apple's iPod Classic and Nano products, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Zune digital media player, and several other popular devices as violating a patent, "Methods and Apparatus for Controlling a Portable Electronic Device Using a Touchpad," which was granted in 2003."

Well, here we go again. Is it even remotely surprising anymore when an unknown company with no products that I am aware of digs up a years old patent and sues, well, everyone? No, I didn't think so either. Its hard to say what will become of this suit. Tsera seems to be going especially hard after Apple's iPod and they do indeed hold the patents they are suing over.

According to the Information Week article, there could be some hope in the future. There is apparently legislation in Congress right now to make it more difficult to find courts that will be friendly to this type of litigation. Hopefully that will help but I really think we need to see some sort of reform for the patent process. The patent office can't be expected to identify a potential problem in a patent when its issued but it seems that before these lawsuits are allowed that the patent itself should be given a much closer look.

Someone might want to send the judge a memo that the touchscreen has been around since quite a while before 2003.