The Troll that wouldn’t die

Lodsys: “We stand firm and restate our previous position that it is the 3rd party Developers that are responsible for the infringement of Lodsysâ€ patents and they are responsible for securing the rights for their applications. Developers relying on Appleâ€ s letter do so to their own detriment and are strongly urged to review Appleâ€ s own developer agreements to determine the true extent of Appleâ€ s responsibilities to them.”

Special place in Hell for lawyers. Yep.

Who was sued? Glad you asked.

Combay

Iconfactory

Illusion Labs

Machael G. Karr

Quickoffice

Richard Shinderman

Wulven Games

Something to note, Iconfactory’s Twitterrific for Mac was called out, as well as Illusion Labs Labyrinth for Android. So this extends beyond iOS. Who’s next? Is Windows Update covered by this? What about all the apps that do automagic update?

FOSS Patents: “Unfortunately, I was right. Today — on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 — Lodsys filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (the place in which I predicted that it would do so) against seven little iOS app developers. Lodsys asserts two of its four patents: U.S. Patent No. 7,620,565 (“the ‘565 patent”) on a “customer-based design module” and U.S. Patent No. 7,222,078 (“the ‘078 patent”) on “Methods and Systems for Gathering Information from Units of a Commodity Across a Network.” Note that Lodsys so far emphasized the ‘078 patent, although Lodsys always mentioned its other patents as well.”