Macrosolve has been busy lately filing lots of lawsuits. While Macrosolve seems to be a Troll like Lodsys, there are substantial differences that will affect application developers for their legal strategies and risk analysis.
A huge difference from the Lodsys analysis is that the claims in the Macrosolve patent (7,822,816) (from a quick review) do not necessarily require another party (such as the operating system or hardware) to be infringed, whereas I believe the Lodsys '078 patent does. That is, in plain english, a software company or application developer could possibly infringe the claims of the Macrosolve patent due to just their products.
What this means from a practical effect is that there may be no hardware company or OS company (such as Apple or Google) coming to the rescue to defend the application developers or offer indemnification.
At this time, I have no opinion as to whether any applications do or do not infringe the Macrosolve '816 patent or whether there are any non-infringement or invalidity arguments with respect to the Macrosolve '816 patent. From an initial reading of the patent, much detail will need to be analyzed to determine the scope of the claims and how they could apply to each application, which analysis may be different for each application. Thus, a customized legal analysis for each application developer sued by Macrosolve might be needed.
(I have to run this will likely be updated later)
-USPA
Re Macrosolve, look for SystemSoft (the company) SystemWizard (the product). If not that, try Motive Communications and their late 90's products that definitely did the interactive querying. Also, any survey interaction run by AOL or Prodigy using their early/mid 90's software would probably also be prior art.
ReplyDelete