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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Historical precedent | 141 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

Historical precedent

Authored by: hardmath on Wednesday, November 14 2012 @ 12:35 PM EST

The History Channel (cable in the US) recently produced and aired a series The Men who Built America that focused on the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the Industrial Revolution.

In the final episode there was mention of Henry Ford's battle with ALAM (Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers).

Patent attorney George Selden was what today we call a patent troll, in that he had no interest in manufacturing the invention (gasoline powered automobile) which he claimed. He sold this patent to the ALAM group, who threatened consumers with litigation should they buy "unlicensed" cars.

Ford countered with advertisements promising indemnification for such patent infringement claims to his customers.

Eventually (after eight years) a trial was decided in Selden's favor, but then overturned on appeal in Ford's favor. The ruling was that Selden's patent only covered a type of improved Brayton engine that was not used by Ford or any other manufacturer at the time.

---
Recursion is the opiate of the mathists.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Historical precedent - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, November 14 2012 @ 12:40 PM EST

create a better standard

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, November 14 2012 @ 01:54 PM EST

Yes this is possible, but given we're talking about small
newcomers to the field who can't afford the license costs,
they probably don't have the resources to force the entire
world to (for example) throw out all existing WiFi hardware
in favour of their new standard. Not to mention that it
would probably infringe anyway (as another example IIRC
technical exerts analysing WebM and h.264 expressed the
opinion that any implementation that worked would have to
use some patents from the h.264 pool hence WebM allegedly
infringes. The experts may have been wrong or biased, but
there are a metric ton of parents in any field and the
chance of infringement must be quite high when cloning
functionality to create a new standard when the old patent
pool have such a high interest in suing - to protect the
standard that have heavily invested in)

So standards should not be a cause for stagnation, and
should be replaced when outdated, but use of common
standards means interoperability and avoids reinventing the
wheel.

Arguably standards would be better with no encumbrance but
holders would have less incentive to donate technology to
them

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

IANAL - Authored by: Alan(UK) on Thursday, November 15 2012 @ 01:52 PM EST
- IANAL - Authored by: PJ on Thursday, November 15 2012 @ 09:07 PM EST

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