Apple, AT&T, Samsung, Verizon and others sued over Shazam app

Earlier this week, a company called Tune Hunter accused music-finding service Shazam as well as a host of consumer electronics makers, wireless service operators, and digital music retailers of infringing on its patent on a music identification system.

Shazam is named along with Samsung, Apple, Amazon.com, Napster, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, AT&T Mobility and Pantech Wireless in a suit filed Tuesday over U.S. Patent No. 6,941,275, which was issued to Remi Swierczek/Tune Hunter in September 2005. The suit accuses Shazam's music discovery and identification service of violating the patent and the other companies of benefiting directly from Shazam's alleged infringement. Tune Hunter is asking for unspecified damages and an injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Texas that would prevent "further infringement" on Tune Hunter's patent.

Tune Hunter's patent covers "a music identification/purchasing system, specifically to a method for marking the time and the name of the radio station in portable device such as a key holder, watch, cellular phone, beeper or the like which will allow the user to learn via internet or regular telephone the name of the song, artist and/or music company by matching the stored data with broadcast archive."

Shazam is available on several different mobile devices. It is a popular iPhone application sold through Apple's App Store, which "listens" to songs and identifies them. Samsung is a partner with London-based Shazam on a mobile music store. Amazon.com, Napster, and Gracenote are retail partners of Shazam.

Shazam was founded in 2002 in London and says by the end of the year its service will be available on 250 million devices.

Shazam, AT&T, Apple, and Gracenote each said they had no comment on the suit, and Samsung and Verizon had not yet heard about it.

Shazam is also available on many platforms not named in the lawsuit, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Facebook, and Android-based phones like T-Mobile's G1.

Isn’t ampu a a jerk with his “this is why they have courts” rap?

Well, it is. Courts find facts. This "inventor," such as he is, spent his money and effort to get a patent. But that isn't money, it's only a piece of paper until he takes it into a court and asks the judge to vindicate the rights the patent says he has. But if the patent describes a wheel, and if I can show that people were already using wheels before the "inventor" filed for his patent, then no matter what the "patent" says, the holder of the patent has no claim against me for using a wheel.
So there will be a court case, the prior art of the Sony device will cause the court to throw the patent out, and Apple et al will owe nothing. That is as cut and dried as it gets. Unless of course the inventor is a black lesbian and President Obama has managed to stack SCOTUS with a majority who rule on the basis of empathy and without regard to law.
Of course Apple et al can also, according to Swordmaker, counter that the patent does not describe what Shazam actually does, since Shazam doesn't rely on any knowledge of what radio station was playing what version of which song at a given time. And therefore the patent, even if valid, is irrelevant to Shazam.
I would think that if your suit is invalid both due to prior art and irrelevancy of the patent to the actual operations of the plaintiff you would be getting pretty close to "frivolous lawsuit" territory.

No, with patents the courts are merely cudgels used to beat down the poor who happen to invent.

The problem here is earlier than the courts. It is SAME as what happened to banks. And similar but not the same as what happened in education. Lack of professional accountability. In the banks it is the failure of the bank examiners to uphold the highest standards of accountability. No bank examiner should have allowed any complex derivative to be considered as a valid banking asset or contract. In education is a more general failure of standards.

Here the problem is intolerably low standards of patent examination, and that is exacerbated -- just like in banking -- by slimey sharp con-men getting legislative "relief" from the most venal and corrupt of congressmen and regulators.

And just as in banking many seen the problem as it happens, but the on-rushing tides of easy money and cultural tossing-off of accountability in anything for the sake of PCism, "toleration" and going-along-ism make them powerless to stop it.

Here, in evidence is a paragraph from one letter, and this is only one bit of it:

In many patent offices, the pressures on examiners to produce and methods of allocating work have reduced the capacity of examiners to provide the quality of examination the peoples of the world deserve [and that] the combined pressures of higher productivity demands, increasingly complex patent applications and an ever-expanding body of relevant patent and non-patent literature have reached such a level that, unless serious measures are taken, meaningful protection of intellectual property throughout the world may, itself, become history

Source: http://www.popa.org/pdf/misc/epocipo2007.pdf (found via wikipedia)

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