Encyclopaedia Britannica Fails In Attempt To Revive Infamous Multimedia Patent

from the the-sum-of-all-human-knowledge dept

Last year, we pointed out how rather ironic it seemed that a company like Encyclopaedia Britannica, who is supposed to be in the business of spreading knowledge, would sue GPS makers for patent infringement. However, at the time, we were unaware of the history of the patents in question. Joe Mullin, over at The Prior Art, has the full story, including the fact that the case relied on a rather infamous patent, that gave many folks a preview of future patent battles to come.

The patent in question was about doing searches on CD-ROMs and was granted in 1993. The original patent holder, Compton's, claimed that: "Everything that is now multimedia and computer-based utilizes this invention," and noted, of course, that basically everyone in the industry now owed it money. The outcry over this was so great that the commissioner of the patent office initiated a re-exam by himself, eventually getting all of the claims of the patent rejected. However, with some back and forth, eventually greatly narrowed claims were approved in 2001. In 2005, EB, who had taken control over the patent (it had been an investor in Compton's) decided that the patent applied to GPS systems, even though it's pretty clear that the patent had nothing to do with GPS systems.

After a few more years of battling, the good news is that a court has, once again, found the patent to be invalid, more or less (hopefully) closing the book on this patent, but demonstrating how the patent system has been misused yet again. The original patent was clearly way too broad, and it took years to get that worked out. And, then, even the eventually-allowed patent was asserted against totally different systems, only to finally be brought down years later. While some patent system defenders may suggest that the system works, since the eventual outcome was okay, there was an awful lot of time, money and effort wasted on all of this that could have gone towards actual innovation.

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