Copyright trolls; they’re all over the place. We hate them, because instead of allowing technology to flourish (and become cheaper and more accessible to everyone) they’re trying to earn a quick million bucks by harassing people who make our favorite gadgets. The Amazon Kindle Fire, due out next month, is already under fire (lol puns!) by Acacia Reasearch, a firm that doesn’t make anything, but instead games the system by buying up intellectual properties and licensing them out.
They’ve already taken aim at Apple, who refused to settle, but Amazon is new to the hardware game. One of the patents that are allegedly infringed is “According to the method, a graphical feature having a surface area is displayed on a touch-sensitive screen. ..To control software executing on the processor, a user-supplied writing on the surface area is received and the software is controlled responsive to the writing.” Or as I like to call it, “using a touch interface.”
The second patent is titled “System And Method For Displaying And Manipulating Multiple Calendars On A Personal Digital Assistant,” which probably deals with syncing multiple calendars and displaying them in different colors, much like Outlook will do, except this is on a PDA. I hope that the US Government realizes this is the perfect opportunity to create jobs by forming a patent court, and hiring experts to research these infringements as well as establishing guidelines as to what is “too general” to be patented, like using a touch screen to navigate software.
Source: BGR
You must be logged in to post a comment.