Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

OS News on lawsuit by Cygnus Systems against Apple, Microsoft, and Google

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

A post at OS News On the suit by Cygnus over US Patent 7346850 - "System and method for iconic software environment management" begins:

Large multinational software companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, rarely - if ever - initiate patent infringement lawsuits against other software companies, probably because they themselves infringe on lots of patents too.

The comment thread indicated that OS News is populated by commenters who understand little about the patent system. Or how to type:

What is getting ridiculous? The fact that all these "trolls" are appearing, or the fact that this does not look like a troll at all and still is (I think misleadingly) referred to as a troll?
Look e.g. at Patently-O writer, Dennis Crouch, who puts out a working definition of a patent troll. "The patent troll waits for others to independently develop the patented technology into useful products and to create a market for those products."
By "waits for others..." normally is meant that the troll is a "non-practising entity", i.e it does not use the inventions itself. Often the patent rtoll definition referes also to comanies that purchase patents cheap with the sole purpose of suing for big money.
I cannot see that Cygnus fits into this category at all?

The thread at OS News did not address the patents that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are getting, or the license deals they are getting from others.

***
Claim 1 of the '850 patent states:

A method of accessing one or more computer files via a graphical icon, comprising the steps of:

capturing automatically one or more graphical representations of one ormore portions of information content of one or more computer files while an application is manipulating the one or more computer files;

creating automatically an icon including selected portions of the captured one or more graphical representations of the information content of the one or more computer files wherein the icon graphically depicts at least a portion of the information content from the one or more computer files and wherein the icon is created while the application was manipulating the icon's corresponding one or more computer files and includes selected portions of the captured one or more graphical representations of the information content;

linking the icon to the application and to the one or more computer files based on theability of the application to manipulate the information content of the one or more computer files corresponding to the icon; storing the icon in a memory;

displaying the icon in a window on a display screen;

invoking the application for manipulating the information content of the one or more computer files upon selection of the icon by accessing the more or more computer files by reference to an underlying file system corresponding to the icon and opening the one or more computer files within the application.

boycottnovell has a post which mentions attorney Niro:

So, the father of a notorious methodology for abusing loopholes in the patent system could be a mastermind behind this mess.

Last time IPBiz heard the mention of a patent "loophole" was Eli Kintisch's stupidity published in Science.

Full post as published by IPBiz on December 28, 2008 (boomark / email).