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https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/08/patent-troll-uses-ridiculous-people-finder-patent-to-sue-small-dating-companies%ef%bf%bc/>
"Finding people near you with shared interests, and talking to them, has a very
long history in human culture. We’re social animals. We need to find other
people close to us to work together with, play games with, and build
relationships and families with. Modern online social networks are built on top
of those basic human needs.
The technologies we humans use to do these things are ever-changing, but the
basic concepts aren’t. Software that promotes new types of social networking is
a terrible fit for the patent system, which hands out hundreds of thousands of
20-year monopolies each year on inventions that are supposedly new, but often
aren’t. No one should be able to patent an “invention” that simply describes a
method of finding like-minded people.
Unfortunately, that seems to be just what happened with a patent we looked at
recently. A patent troll called Wireless Discovery LLC sued eight different
social and dating apps for patent infringement, claiming that they infringe
U.S. Patent No. 9,264,875, which claims “location-based discovery” based on
people’s “personal attributes.” Wireless Discovery, which was created just
before its patent was granted in 2016, sued eight different online dating apps
in April—most of them small apps."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
