Zombie BT mobile patent emerges in hands of troll A Delaware company called Steelhead Licensing has filed a world+dog lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent it acquired from BT. The list of defendants here includes Apple, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, HTC, Kyocera, LG, NEC, Motorola, RIM, Sony and others. Carriers are included in the target list because their personal hotspot …
IANAL but...
Isn't the concept of calculating the best base station to use based on signal strength and error rate fairly obvious to anyone with even a little knowledge of data networking /electronics/radio broadcasting? Making a patent invalid due to obviousness.
Even if it's not is it not essential to the implementation of GSM and CDMA standards, meaning the patent would have to be licensed under FRAND making it of relatively low value?
In order to be subject to FRAND terms, you have to MAKE your patent part of the standard. If I write up a standard that Infringes your patent, but you are not involved in the creation of that standard,that doesn't mean your patent is automatically subject to FRAND terms. Only those contributing to the standard are subject to the terms.
If things worked your way, we would just start writing standards willy-nilly to make patents useless.
If its still listed as held by BT then that kinda suggests that it has been acquired by Steelhead Licensing fairly recently....... and in the current climate I just cant see BT selling off such a valuable patent. Something smells fishy here. My first thought was that BT was using Steelhead to front its patent litigation, but BT have denied that.....
On the face of it, this patent is ligit, and world + dog will indeed owe copious amounts of money to the rights holder
Because of realities of the way the Magical Universe is designed. Spend a couple of years of your life in the Magical Kindom of Stormhold and you will see why.
How to get there: drive all the way from Ipswitch to the village of Wall (it is called Martelsham these days), get past the guard on the wall and enter the magical kingdom. Beware of what you see and beware - if you have overstayed your welcome, getting back into the real world may end up being very difficult.
In the form of US patent #4692761. While it involves using power lines as a communication medium, but the rest of it works on finding adaptive paths using signal-to-noise ratio.
Why do I know this? I helped in the patent application (but not the patent, so my name isn't on it).
Hmm, I don't think BT come out of this squeaky clean. They sold a wide-ranging patent to a patent troll during its last year of validity for (one would assume) a lot of money. If you sell an assault rifle to a homicidal maniac then you can't distance yourself from his killing spree. Unless you use NRA logic.
This tech was a big deal towards the end of the 1980 decade when analog cordless phones talked to your landline base station at tens of MHz and Radio Shack still had electronics. First cordless phones had a sliding frequency switch on the handset and base. Next they had a frequency hopping button on the handset. Finally they hopped frequencies themselves. No multiplexors, no QAM, no side bands, and no codecs; just simple 1980s analog processing. Good luck with the trolling.
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