Hello, we pre-ordered serveral smarthings packages. Searching on the net we found the following patent: http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/8271629.html
Could you guys @ smarthing please tell me if this will be any trouble? Recently a kickstarter 3d printer got sued over a patent infrigement.
thanks!
Looks like it refers to this. http://iobridge.com/
It also looks like their system is not aimed at the consumer but at OEMs and industry. So it may mean a different market.
The patent seems to broad anyway, why do they even issue that patent? What in there is what really was patented, novel? I can’t seem to understand, nothing there seems new.
Some patents are purposely drafted with vague language in hopes that someone will infringe on them. I’m sure the ST team did their patent research months ago to make sure that they’re in the clear.
Could you guys @ smarthing please tell me if this will be any trouble? Recently a kickstarter 3d printer got sued over a patent infrigement.There's no way anyone from SmartThings will reply to this, and rightly so. Any patent lawyer would have already told them never to read or discuss anyone else's patents. If they're ever found guilty of infringing someone else's patents, having read the patent means that infringement was "willful." Any damages awarded for infringement at that point would be tripled if the infringement was found to be willful. The easy way to avoid that? Don't read any patents ever, and it's not possible to willfully infringe.
Yet another bullet point on the “ways the US patent system is broken” list, but it’s unfortunately how things work.
Isn’t there a negligence penalty for not reading every possibly infringing patent out there? (i.e., however many billions of them…)