Patent Troll attacks Gnome Foundation
https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/10/g...-patent-troll/
"A month ago, GNOME was hit by a patent troll for developing the Shotwell image management application. It’s the first time a free software project has been targeted in this way, but we worry it won’t be the last. Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC offered to let us settle for a high five figure amount, for which they would drop the case and give us a licence to carry on developing Shotwell. This would have been simple to do so; it would have caused less work, cost less money, and provided the Foundation a lot less stress. But it also would be wrong. Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects."
The patent in question, https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170302808A1/en , has a shady history. It seems it was first filed in 2008a, with several subsequent additions. Rothschild is identified as the "inventor", but his history is that of a Non-Practicing Entity, NPE ( one or more lawyers who don't invent anything but make their money using patent lawsuits. And, he has a ton of patents on about everything related to what the cellphone has been doing since it was invented.
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+Rothschild
He's already sued Magix.
With a simple search I easily found the following, a search which is apparently beyond the skill set of USPO patent examiners:
http://100photos.time.com/photos/phi...-phone-picture
The first public cellular phone call was made by Martin Cooper of Motorola. on April 3, 1973, using a $4000 Motorola device called "The Brick", but it wasn't marketed until 1983.
The first known example of a photo being sent wirelessly by phone occurred in the year 1997. Philippe Kahn home-brewed the device while waiting in for his child to be born in a Norther California maternity ward. "Kahn’s device captured his daughter’s first moments and transmitted them instantly to more than 2,000 people. Kahn soon refined his ad hoc prototype, and in 2000 Sharp used his technology to release the first commercially available integrated camera phone, in Japan. The phones were introduced to the U.S. market a few years later and soon became ubiquitous."
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.It was a cordless phone as distinct from a cellular mobile phone.
Wikipedia states:
"The DELTIS VC-1100 by Japanese company Olympus was the world's first digital camera with cellular phone transmission capability, revealed in the early 1990s and released in 1994.[25] In 1995, Apple experimented with the Apple Videophone/PDA.[26] There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997.[27] In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras."
...and ...
"A camera phone was patented by Kenneth Parulski and James Schueckler, two engineers at Kodak, in 1995. Their patent application was filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on April 24, 1995. The patent application specifically described the combination as either a separate digital camera connected to a cell phone or as an integrated system with both sub-systems combined together in a single unit. Their patent application design included all of the basic functions camera phones implemented for many years: the capture, storage, selection, and display of digital images and the means to transmit the images over the cellular telephone network to any number of receivers via stored numbers or keyboard input."
By 2008, the year that Rothschild patented his "invention" the transmission of images over wireless connections, half of planet's population had a cellphone subscription and three years later that figure rose to 6 billion people. In NONE of the patents on devices I researched did Rothschild's name appear as the inventor. And, they were sending pictures back and forth wirelessly from their phones.
I hope GNOME grinds that patent troll into dust.
"A month ago, GNOME was hit by a patent troll for developing the Shotwell image management application. It’s the first time a free software project has been targeted in this way, but we worry it won’t be the last. Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC offered to let us settle for a high five figure amount, for which they would drop the case and give us a licence to carry on developing Shotwell. This would have been simple to do so; it would have caused less work, cost less money, and provided the Foundation a lot less stress. But it also would be wrong. Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects."
The patent in question, https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170302808A1/en , has a shady history. It seems it was first filed in 2008a, with several subsequent additions. Rothschild is identified as the "inventor", but his history is that of a Non-Practicing Entity, NPE ( one or more lawyers who don't invent anything but make their money using patent lawsuits. And, he has a ton of patents on about everything related to what the cellphone has been doing since it was invented.
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+Rothschild
He's already sued Magix.
With a simple search I easily found the following, a search which is apparently beyond the skill set of USPO patent examiners:
http://100photos.time.com/photos/phi...-phone-picture
The first public cellular phone call was made by Martin Cooper of Motorola. on April 3, 1973, using a $4000 Motorola device called "The Brick", but it wasn't marketed until 1983.
The first known example of a photo being sent wirelessly by phone occurred in the year 1997. Philippe Kahn home-brewed the device while waiting in for his child to be born in a Norther California maternity ward. "Kahn’s device captured his daughter’s first moments and transmitted them instantly to more than 2,000 people. Kahn soon refined his ad hoc prototype, and in 2000 Sharp used his technology to release the first commercially available integrated camera phone, in Japan. The phones were introduced to the U.S. market a few years later and soon became ubiquitous."
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.It was a cordless phone as distinct from a cellular mobile phone.
Wikipedia states:
"The DELTIS VC-1100 by Japanese company Olympus was the world's first digital camera with cellular phone transmission capability, revealed in the early 1990s and released in 1994.[25] In 1995, Apple experimented with the Apple Videophone/PDA.[26] There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997.[27] In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras."
...and ...
"A camera phone was patented by Kenneth Parulski and James Schueckler, two engineers at Kodak, in 1995. Their patent application was filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on April 24, 1995. The patent application specifically described the combination as either a separate digital camera connected to a cell phone or as an integrated system with both sub-systems combined together in a single unit. Their patent application design included all of the basic functions camera phones implemented for many years: the capture, storage, selection, and display of digital images and the means to transmit the images over the cellular telephone network to any number of receivers via stored numbers or keyboard input."
By 2008, the year that Rothschild patented his "invention" the transmission of images over wireless connections, half of planet's population had a cellphone subscription and three years later that figure rose to 6 billion people. In NONE of the patents on devices I researched did Rothschild's name appear as the inventor. And, they were sending pictures back and forth wirelessly from their phones.
I hope GNOME grinds that patent troll into dust.
Comment