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Google owes $338.7 mln in Chromecast patent case, US jury says
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Quite literally the opposite of patent trolling. The company invented something. Acquired a patent. Tried to sell a license to google. Google left the negotiating table. And then not long after introduced a product that fulfilled all of the requirements to be protected by the patent licensing they hadn't paid for.
I hate patent trolls. These are not patent trolls. These are people the patent system is meant to protect. These are people who developed a product and wanted compensation for all the time and money they spent developing it. And they got it 10 years later, and probably didn't get as much total as they could have if Google hadn't fucked them over
Depends on what exactly was covered in the patent. The article only says
Which is vague and an obvious bogus patent. Prior art exists in both the digital and analogue space
The full patent goes into detail (pdf): https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/8356251
It details a process of synchronising videos between multiple devices and a content server, as well as a few different variations of the idea - it doesn't just cover what Chromecast does.
The telling point here is that Google didn't even try to argue that they didn't use this method. Instead, they tried to argue that the patent was invalid. Apparently, they did not manage to invalidate the patent.
After looking at the patent it's clear it's way too vague, generic and obvious. It should never have been granted. (I Am Not A patent Lawyer). For one the XMBC web interface from 2009ish is prior art.
Technically the Kodi remote control app would be in violation of the patent, except it doesn't use any "back end server system".
If you replace the words "display" and "video" with "speaker" and "audio" then the Spotify app would be in violation as well, as it allows changing the playback device to any of your logged in devices.
Come to think of it, if you use Firefox on mobile to access YouTube, then "send tab to other device", and send it to a desktop computer connected to a big screen, it could be interpreted as violating the patent as it's using Mozilla's "back end server" to relay the message
XMBC web interface just streams to a different client. Here, we have a client requesting to stream to another client, and synchronised by the server. The key part is the synchronisation between multiple clients.
The patent also deals with a few other types of concurrent streams for other applications, beyond what Chromecast does.
That may well also violate the patent. It would likely depend on whether the devices are synchronised, or if the desktop is just getting a link and streaming separately.
Just because lots of people use it without paying doesn't make a patent invalid. You only have to look at what happened with the patent for WiFi.