Jew World Order

Oracle has filed a legal complaint against Lodsys — the company that’s taken aim at app makers on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and other technology platforms for infringing on its patents — with the hope of invalidating them.

The enterprise software giant filed a suit against the Texas-based patent holder in a US District Court in Wisconsin last week (reported by GigaOm), saying that the firm has “repeatedly threatened numerous Oracle customers”, and that the company isn’t actually using any of the technology for anything besides getting revenue from other companies.

“Lodsys did not invent the technology claimed in the patents in suit,” Oracle claims. “Instead, Lodsys claims to have acquired the patents in suit from a non-practicing entity, Webvention, LLC, and now seeks to extract royalties by demanding that Oracle’s customers or Oracle take a licence under the patents in suit.”

The 16-page document makes the case that Oracle, its customers and end users are not infringing on any of Lodsys’ four patents, and that those patents should be invalidated based on prior art.

According to the suit, Lodsys has sent letters to Oracle’s customers “since early 2011”, claiming that they were infringing on one or more of the firm’s four patents. Those customers include Epicor, Walgreen and Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which were all sued by Lodsys last month after not agreeing to pay for a licence.

Lodsys has been contacted for comment.

Lodsys is what’s known as a non-practicing entity (NPE) — a company that licenses patents but doesn’t actually have any other business. Informally, such companies are known as patent trolls.

Lodsys began its aggressive efforts last February, with a patent-infringement lawsuit targeting printing technology made by Samsung, Brother, Canon, Lenovo and others. Two months later, the company began a campaign against mobile application developers, sending out letters to a number of developers saying that they were infringing on Lodsys-held patents, and offering up a licensing deal to those that did not want to duke it out in court.

Last June, Apple was granted intervention in a separate Lodsys lawsuit against a handful of iOS developers. The difference is that Apple already had a licensing agreement with Lodsys for patents that covered in-app purchase, with Lodsys arguing that said licence did not cover developers on its platform. Similar arguments and infringements were sent to developers on Google’s Android platform, with Google filing a request with the US Patent and Trademark Office to get the Lodsys patents invalidated.

Here’s a full copy of the complaint from Friday:

Oracle v. Lodsys

Via CNET