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But the technology wasn’t quite ready for Robert E. Lee’s air cavalry It’s the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and Union forces on Cemetery Ridge await the final Confederate assault. But instead of witnessing serried ranks of rebels marching across a mile of open ground into the maws of Yankee cannons, the bluecoat regiments are shocked to hear the thud of rotor blades. It is the the sound of Confederate general George Pickett’s 13,000-strong division landing behind Union lines. Is this a neo-Confederate dream? The Red Badge of Courage meets Apocalypse Now? No, it turns...

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling that patents owned by licensing company Smartflash, LLC are invalid. The finding kills Smartflash’s hope of restarting lawsuits against Apple, Google, and Samsung. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a set of rulings by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board which said that key claims in seven Smartflash patents relating to data storage technology were invalid because they described an abstract idea, not a patentable invention.

Soverain Software, a non-practicing entity that gained media attention for suing Newegg and other online retailers over "shopping cart" patents, on Thursday filed a complaint against Apple for alleged infringement of IP relating to internet-based services. Screenshot of Soverain's webpage. Public access to the site was removed sometime last year. In its lawsuit, filed with the patent holder friendly Eastern District Court of Texas, Soverain leverages four patents developed by e-commerce startup OpenMarket, including the now-bankrupt firm's Transact product. Transact, along with other technologies describing basic digital shopping carts, were at the heart of Soverain's attack on major online companies...

Apple Faces Patent Lawsuit Over iPhone's Battery Technologies Tuesday July 12, 2016 12:04 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol Somaltus, LLC has filed a complaint against Apple today in an Eastern Texas district court, accusing the iPhone maker of infringing upon its 2010 patent related to complex battery technologies. The small Frisco, Texas-based firm also filed lawsuits against Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba over the same patent. The lawsuit claims that the iPhone 6s and any similar devices sold by Apple infringe upon U.S. Patent No. 7,657,386, titled "Integrated Battery Service System," and seeks unspecified monetary damages or, alternatively, a...

NEW YORK, July 8, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Network-1 Technologies, Inc. (NYSE MKT: NTIP) announced today that Mirror World Technologies, Inc. ("MWT"), its wholly-owned subsidiary, agreed to settle its patent litigation against Apple Inc. ("Apple") pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,006,227 (the " '227 Patent "). Under the terms of the agreement, Apple will receive a fully paid up non-exclusive license to the '227 Patent for its full term, which expired in 2016, along with certain rights to other patents in Network-1's portfolio. Network-1 will...

Florida resident Thomas S. Ross has filed a lawsuit against Apple this week, claiming that the iPhone, iPad, and iPod infringe upon his 1992 invention of a hand-drawn "Electronic Reading Device" (ERD). The court filing claims the plaintiff was "first to file a device so designed and aggregated," nearly 15 years before the first iPhone. ​ Between May 23, 1992 and September 10, 1992, Ross designed three hand-drawn technical drawings of the device, primarily consisting of flat rectangular panels with rounded corners that "embodied a fusion of design and function in a way that never existed prior to 1992." Quote...

A Saudi man who claims he invented the concept of e-commerce during the early days of the internet says that he is talks with big firms who wish to avoid litigation for stealing his world-changing idea. “There are now undergoing negotiations with big companies inside [the kingdom] and abroad to find a solution without opting to head to international judiciary,” Faisal bin Fahd al-Osaimi told the local Saudi daily Okaz. Osaimi said he presented the concept of e-commerce to the late King Fahd in 1991, the same year the internet was born. The late king reportedly referred him to the...

Infamous patent troll VirnetX has formally asked a Texas court this week to order Apple to stop providing its FaceTime and iMessage features to customers. The request follows VirnetX’s victory in court earlier this year to the tune of $625 million, which the firm wants to see increased by $190 million or more, Law360 reports: At a post-trial hearing Wednesday, Texas technology company VirnetX argued that although an injunction blocking Apple’s popular video chatting and messaging features, along with a virtual private network on demand feature, may seem like a harsh remedy, it is necessary because of the irreparable harm Apple’s...

A dinosaur hobbyist who made his name as a Microsoft multimillionaire published a scientific paper on Monday alleging “serious errors and irregularities” in dinosaur research involving some of the world’s top paleontologists. The research, some of it dating to the 1990s, analyzed skeletons of different ages to estimate how quickly dinosaurs grew. For example, a 2001 paper, published in the journal Nature, estimates that the giant dinosaur Apatosaurus had a growth spurt of 12,000 pounds in a year. The papers, particularly a 2004 paper in Nature on the growth of Tyrannosaurus Rex, were influential in offering an explanation for why...

Veteran Judge Posner says "animals" like Apple are just exploiting the weapons an ineffectual gov't has created "It's a constant struggle for survival.  As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem," states Judge Richard A. Posner in a recent interview with Reuters.   As a sitting judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals who occasionally moonlights as a judge in Chicago's U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Judge Posner has watched the devolution of America's intellectual property system over the past several decades. I. Google v. Apple -- A...

Apple partners with patent troll Digitude Innovations — and wow, what a deal December 10, 2011 | Matt Marshall Apple has partnered with a patent troll company called Digitude Innovations, VentureBeat has confirmed, allowing that company to attack the world’s largest phone manufacturers of smartphones. In a clever deal that effectively gives Apple immunity from attack by the troll, Apple agreed to some cross-licensing deals that gave Digitude the ammunition for a heavy attack against Apple’s rivals. Digitude recently filed suit against RIM, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Amazon, and Nokia. It did so at the International Trade Commission, a...

BetaNet on Monday filed a lawsuit against 18 companies, including Apple, Adobe and Microsoft. Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, the lawsuit claims the companies violate the ‘134 patent, entitled “Secure System for Activating Personal Computer Software at Remote Locations.” The patent was issued on June 22, 1993, according to the lawsuit. BetaNet specifically mentions Apple’s iTunes, Aperture, QuickTime and MobileMe as infringing on its patent. The lawsuit describes Apple’s violation like this: “The program file contains a first executive control program, representing a limited version of the program file. License transaction information is entered in the...

The big three in technology – Google, Apple, and Microsoft – have been sued by a Michigan-centered networking company. On Wednesday, this company alleged that the three aforementioned companies were in violation of a patent. This patent is owned by the Michigan company is focused on the use of document preview thumbnails, commonly referred to as icons, used in operating systems. This Michigan company, Cygnus Systems focuses their lawsuit on specific programs made by Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The programs in question are Google’s Chrome, Apple’s iPhone, Mac OS X, and Safari, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (8) and Vista programs....