An intellectual-property management group has sued mobile phone makers Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Matsushita-owned Panasonic for infringing on a patent for wireless Bluetooth technology.
“Defendants have manufactured, used, imported into the United States, sold and offered for sale devices which, or the use of which, infringes at least the ‘963’ patent,” Washington Research Foundation said in a complaint filed at the U.S. Western District Court of Washington at Seattle. WRF helps manage investment in and licensing of technology developed by researchers in the state of Washington.
Engineer Jaap Haartsen, at Swedish mobile phone maker Ericsson, has been credited with the invention of Bluetooth during his research work in the second half of the 1990s.
Ericsson donated the technology, royalty-free, to create a large market for its applications. Since then, hundreds of millions of mobile phones, headsets and laptops have been equipped with Bluetooth chips every year.
From the article “…Engineer Jaap Haartsen, at Swedish mobile phone maker Ericsson, has been credited with the invention of Bluetooth during his research work in the second half of the 1990s.
Ericsson donated the technology, royalty-free, to create a large market for its applications…”
If thats the case then wtf is an IP group sueing for – Ericsson GAVE IT AWAY
I doubt this will have legs. While the patent was granted in 1999, the technology was “donated” as open source in 1998.
A better review is here
http://tinyurl.com/yjxghv
#1 Why? Because patent law is so messed up today. If now one has written in public journals that something is in the public domain, it can be patented. It’s your basic land grab. Currently with the right lawer you could patent gravity, then sue every one that has an object that is “stuck” to the surface of the earth.
I see the problem..
DID erickson HAVE the copyright. Or did they just give the tech away.
I love that there are company’s whose entire purpose is to sue other companies for patent violations. We created an industry out of nothing. It is based on nothing, creates nothing and only detracts value from the work of others. It does not and cannot add any value to anything except the shareholders net worth.
When history looks back on us, they will laugh about how we allowed this to happen.