BT sues Valve for "willful" patent infringement
Telecommunications company cites four patents in suit
British Telecom, the UK telecommunications giant, has taken the odd step of suing Valve for patent infringement.
Rock Paper Shotgun found the documents which were filed in July and concern four separate patents, the Gittins Patent (US Patent No 6,578,079), the Newton Patent (US Patent No 6,334,142) the Beddus Patent (US Patent No 6,694,375) and the Buckley Patent (US Patent No 7,167,142). If you know what any of those are without looking them up, you should win a prize.
The four patents relate to chat, subscriptions, broadcasting and call control protocols.
"On multiple occasions, BT has notified Valve of its infringement of the Patents In-Suit,which incorporate patented technologies that include, inter alia, digital rights management, broadcasting, voice and chat, and messaging, and requested that Valve enter into discussions with BT to address it, e.g., through a licensing arrangement," BT alleges in its suit.
"Valve has derived and will continue to derive substantial value from these products and services which incorporate the patented technologies. Nonetheless, Valve has failed to respond to BT's correspondence, at all, and chosen instead to continue to infringe the Patents-in-Suit willfully and wantonly."
The full filing can be found here. We'll update this story if and when BT or Valve comment on it, or the case moves forward.
General enough that it could apply to any digital retailer with their own DRM and database of users and licenses. Maybe BT think Valve are small-time, since it could equally apply to Amazon and their Kindle, Adobe and their PDF DRM, Sony, Microsoft... Yet Valve are the ones being sued.
Bunch of chancers.
This is really similar to the case concerning the patent on hyperlink. BT seems to have taken a lot of textbook information on how networks are supposed to function and filed them as patents in the 90ies. I am sure that if you dig hard enough, you can find the same patents granted to IBM, Cisco or Intel 20 years earlier.
As for Valve's lack of international presence, I believe that Australian court put that one to bed. Not that it matters whether you have a presence, what counts is doing business. Nobody really expects you to have a presence in country X to do business in country X anymore. You can have VAT numbers of plenty countries without ever having an address there. You want to know who is doing business where? Follow the VAT trail.
This to me is incredibly dumb.
The fact that some grown adult earning £100k+/yr work up early every morning for a week - probably skipping breakfast in the process - took the underground at rush hour reading hir daily feed of news in sardine-can conditions to sit at a desk putting together such a ridiculous case (all while managing to keep a straight face and not laughing their ass off) AND get paid and encouraged to do this tells me there is something awfully wrong about our society.
Oh and they invented hyperlinks too? That one really makes me feel bad because I've been using hyperlinks for around 20 years now and I didn't know I needed to compensate someone at BT.
If Morville's post is true they've also patented a basic customer database. I've been profiting from those for years...
Who at BT do I send the money to? And for how much?