Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week’s software patent is held by Telephia, a provider of “performance measurement information to the mobile industry.” They have sued a competitor, M:Metrics, for violating multiple patents, including patent #6,754,470, “System and method for measuring wireless device and network usage and performance metrics.”
The patent is rather vague, but Telephia seems to effectively be claiming the very concept of collecting information from mobile devices. Here’s the first claim:
A mobile wireless device comprising: electronic memory encoded with, data gathering software which gathers information pertaining to device usage from actual use of the mobile wireless device by a user, the gathered information including event data and association of respective events with respective location information indicative of device location during the occurrences of such respective events; and data transfer software which provides the gathered information for transmission.
That describes almost any conceivable onboard system for monitoring mobile device usage. Somehow, I don’t think Telephia was the first to think of digitally collecting information about mobile device usage. And I don’t think that filing this patent ought to give Telephia a monopoly in such data-gathering activities.
I’ll conclude by quoting Mike Masnick’s write-up of the patent from last month.
Both firms are fairly well known in the wireless space for providing data on mobile data usage. However, the idea that one of them should own patents on the idea of measuring such things seems ridiculous. Measuring data usage on computing devices is quite common–and the idea that just because something moves to a mobile device it’s unique enough to deserve patent protection is silly and has little to do with promoting innovation. It’s not as if collecting mobile data usage metrics wouldn’t have happened without patents. It’s an obvious step for the market that has always thrived on data usage metrics. However, even more importantly, these are two research firms. Shouldn’t they be competing on the quality of their data–not who has a patent on the research method?
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