Lodsys has gotten a lot of attention for their patent threats against app developers lately, and yesterday came news of Macrosolve doing something similar. Florian Mueller wrote some great stuff about it here, as he usually does.
Basically, Macrosolve is a publicly traded app maker who has done terribly at their core business, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last few years. But they were recently awarded a patent for a “system and method for data management” relating to mobile computers, and now they are going crazy suing small developers.
Unlike Lodsys, Macrosolve isn’t beginning by asking for licenses, and the developers they are targeting run the gamut of mobile operating systems. This is probably a bad idea for multiple reasons: For one, some of the defendants are just going to fight the suit, costing Macrosolve a lot more money than Lodsys, who won’t have to defend their patent. Also, by suing developers on a range of platforms, Macrosolve is more likely to entice Apple, Google, and Blackberry to split the legal costs and fight the patent head on. Apple doesn’t have that option with Lodsys, because Lodsys hasn’t actually sued anybody, and they’ve only asked for licenses from Apple developers.
Still isn’t good for the mobile app ecosystem though, and all of this is demonstrating that the patent system really needs to adjust in some fashion to fix software patents, or risk stifling development in “mobile computers”, a rather broad category that covers every new consumer technology likely to come out in the next ten years. It just doesn’t make sense to reward a company likely Macrosolve, a total loser when it came to making real apps, with the right to IP ownership over such a simple concept. Even if the concept wasn’t simple when Macrosolve “invented” it, clearly others reinvented it quite quickly – nobody was copying Macrosolve, whose most successful app was related to barbeque recipes… and it wasn’t even successful. The patent system allows this logic to prevail when a court looks at whether a patent was “obvious”, but that’s pretty late in the game in terms of litigation, and everybody has spent a pile of money by then. Software patents are a pretty broken system, and hopefully the system will adjust sooner rather than later, before the small app developers are forced out of the market.
danielmarkmiller.net 