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Minerva Awarded Exclusive Right to Cellphones with Wireless Internet and Other Generic Features; Sues RIM, Apple, and Motorola

By Troll Tracker

At 12:01 this morning, Minerva Industries (a Los Angeles patent holding corporation for Los Angeles inventor Ki Il Kim, represented by Los Angeles lawyers at Russ, August & Kabat, and who I featured previously), filed 3 lawsuits on recently issued U.S. Patent 7,321,783. The first lawsuit named Research In Motion and Cricket Communications as defendants. I saw this lawsuit appear on January 21, and had a post up about it, briefly. But Minerva caught its mistake, killed that lawsuit, and filed the new one. The now-dead lawsuit will appear on ECF, but clicking through will just generate a message that nothing's there. So problem solved, apparently (RIM still could have seen the mistake and filed a DJ on the East Coast to win the race to the courthouse -- a race that will almost completely be eliminated by patent reform. It would have been useless, though, given the earlier filed lawsuit by Minerva against 40+ defendants in Marshall, including RIM).

The second lawsuit was against Apple and AtlanticRT over the iPhone. From the Apple complaint, it appears that the Minerva patent was about to issue in August, Apple waited until a week before issuance, and then sent prior art to Minerva. Minerva pulled the patent from issuance, sent the art to the PTO, interviewed the examiner, and got the issuance over that prior art. Kudos to Connolly Bove Los Angeles for smart prosecution moves.

The third lawsuit names 29 defendants: Motorola, Nokia, Alltel, AT&T Mobility, Dobson Cellular, Helio, HP, MetroPCS Wireless, Sprint Spectrum, Nextel of Texas, Nextel South Corp., Nextel of New York, Nextel of the Mid-Atlantic, Nextel of California, Nextel West, T-Mobile USA, Tracfone Wireless, Cellco Partnership, Virgin Mobile USA, High Tech Computer Corp., HTC America, Kyocera Wireless, LG, Palm, Pantech Wireless, Sanyo, Utstarcom, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung.

That's a total of 33 defendants sued just minutes after this patent issued. And what a patent it is! The '783 patent has 125 claims. The broadest claim appears directed to a cellphone with a wireless internet connection, a memory card, a microprocessor, a display panel for displaying internet data. So far, so broad. Also required are 1 of the following: voice dialing, wireless earphone, or wired earphone with microphone. OK, then also required are that the phone is capable from downloading one of the following from the internet: videos, music, or videos and music combined. The patent has a little over 4 columns in the specification, but has almost 32 columns of claims! Don't believe me? See for yourself.

Priority date: either March 2000 or, if CIP entitled to earlier priority date, then April 1997. I know of prior art predating the 2000 date, but what about April 1997? Does the original specification really support the claims? Is it enabling? I'll leave that to the experts.

Full post as published by Patent Troll Tracker on January 22, 2008 (boomark / email).