Formentry android5/8/2023 Pogo Corporation, which provides apps such as cinema information Īnd SWD Interactive, which helps people build iPhone apps. Widget Press provides a "FormEntry Touch Private Label" program to deliver custom forms to iOS users Kony Solutions, which generally writes mobile apps Lodsys and MacroSolve may, if successful, chase hundreds or even thousands of app developers in Apple's iTunes App Store and Google's Android Marketplace, as well as the rapidly-growing Windows Phone Market.Īpple, Google and Microsoft have not commented on the latest claims and lawsuits.Ĭanvas Solutions, which makes Smart Business Forms But that would involved developers in long drawn-out legal battles which they are ill-equipped to fight. The patents owned by MacroSolve might be challenged and nullified on the basis of being "obvious", given the time when they were filed, when the mobile web was already being used in a number of countries. The cases have highlighted a problem with the US Patent Office, which has already been criticised for awarding patents that are too broad, or even cover impossible inventions such as antigravity vehicles. If the patent cases are upheld, the app developers could be liable for damages and for royalty payments on the use of the patent.ĭevelopers could aim to have the patent invalidated, but that would be a long and expensive legal process. Software patents issued by the US Patent Office have the potential to strangle the burgeoning mobile app business, because they can tie up small developers in court cases that they cannot afford to defend – or where they may be unable, for geographical reasons, to organise a defence.Īpple's legal department is understood to be investigating the claims by Lodsys, but it is not known whether it has been alerted to the claims being made by MacroSolve against the 10 developers. The news will further discomfit app developers, who have already seen Lodsys – a company which bought a small portfolio of four patents from another patent licensing company, Intellectual Ventures – send demands for payment to a number of iPhone app developers. The company has chosen to sue app developers in the "rocket docket" jurisdiction of Texas Eastern District in Tyler – where patent-owning companies frequently file cases in the expectation that the courts will process them quickly, and in their favour. Jim McGill, chairman of MacroSolve, has said that the patent covers "thousands of existing apps" that collect data and send it to a central server. The patent was filed in August 2003 and awarded in October 2010, and the discussion specifically relates to "handheld computers" – a category that has now come to include smartphones.
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