Scott Witte wrote:
Apologies for not chiming in sooner. I've had a lot going on.
I must preface this by saying that I am not a lawyer and nobody should depend on anything I say below. What I say is only my opinion or represents my understanding of the facts, which is several years old.
First, I couldn't blame anyone getting a letter like this for simply ignoring it as an obvious scam. I'm not sure when you would need to take it seriously. Certainly, if you receive an official complaint, a legal filing with the court, with actual papers delivered to you, you would have to. Filing such a complaint costs roughly $400, so I don't know how worthwhile it is to them when dealing with a really small entity like an individual photographer.
Nonetheless, if they take it that far you could be faced with working something out with them or fighting them in court, which would likely cost hundred's of thousands of dollars. If you ignore the complaint there will be an automatic judgment against you. Even if you can successfully defend against it, the complainant can simply walk away with no consequences while you are still out all that money (in America). They obviously expect you to cut your losses and make a deal. Some people have called this legal extortion.
Some Background... and this is super-simplified: IVRPA sponsored a reexamination of the '400 patent. We could only afford to do this as an "ex-parte" reexamination, which meant we made our argument, once, "on paper" but had no right to argue in person. That would have cost at least 10 times as much, a minimum of $150,000 at the time. We were amazingly successful. Every single claim of the patent was struck down. But the patent owner has the right to argue their case in person, which they did. All claims remained struck down. Then the patent owner had the right to rewrite the claims to make them patentable, as long as the rewrite was based on the patent description. They did that and it was still struck down. So they did it again and again. Each time the claims became less clear and where drawn in ways that weren't allowed, IMO. (Again, I am NOT a lawyer so take that for what it is worth.) And there seemed to be no end to how many times they could attempt to rewrite the claims.
In my opinion, based on reading the transcripts, I suspect the examiner essentially threw up his hands and essentially said, "Fine. I will grant the patent on some very limited grounds. Now go away. We have lots of other projects we need to get to." They may have been thinking, "Let the courts sort this out. We are done with it."
The limited patentability came from the use of "frames per second" although that seemed to get translated into images per second, and on the use of "vectors." To me, neither are patentable for so many reasons that I won't go into here. I personally feel certain that if litigated to the end, instead of settling beforehand, the patent would be struck down, either at the patent office or in court. But that would take a good $300,000 or more.
In the email, TTS states,"...virtual tour using a geometric projection which keeps straight lines straight during up-and-down and left and right changes in the direction of virtual view. This technology is covered by United States Patent Number 6,754,400..." By my understanding, this is not an enforceable part of the patent, but it sounds good and technical. (The method that "keeps lines straight" is simple geometry and TTS is using the exact same method covered by the Quicktime patent, which was part of the original reexamination. Further, it is just math, and math cannot be patented, by my understanding.)
So what to do? I suppose you could make it enough of a hassle for them that they move on to the next mark. That is something of a dice roll. What confuses me is that Handel, the lawyer representing TTS, who I suspect has a majority financial interest in the patent, is a high-end IP lawyer, who has won patent infringement cases with millions of dollars in settlement. So why is he slumming around trying to shake down a bunch of individual photographers??
Post Link:
https://ivrpa.org/forums/topic/being-su ... post-23295