Ben was the first of a few folks who sent in the story that Pepsi has been told to pay $1.26 billion (with a b) for supposedly "stealing" the idea for filtered bottled water. Seriously. Two men claim they came up with the idea in 1981 to bottle water this way and approached Pepsi distributors with the idea. They say that Pepsi "stole" their trade secrets when it launched a bottled water line, Aquafina. Of course, Aquafina was launched in the mid-nineties, a decade and a half after this conversation supposedly took place. The $1.26 billion is something of a joke as well. It's a default judgment because a Pepsi secretary apparently forgot to pass on the letter alerting them to the lawsuit, so they didn't respond. Even so... there's so much wrong with this. First, $1.26 billion? For the "idea" of filtered bottled water? And for a lawsuit filed nearly thirty years after the alleged conversation? Nearly fifteen years after the product came to market? Yeah, that makes sense...
Michael Scott alerts us to the news that e-voting firm ES&S has sued two former employees, claiming copyright infringement over code they took with them from ES&S, along with additional trade secrets. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but all I can ask is "why?" As has been documented time and time again, ES&S's e-voting code has a ton of problems. Remember, these are the machines that have been found to have serious security vulnerabilities, with some serious bugs, such as adding votes to the wrong election, calibration problems that lead to people voting for the wrong candidate, and bugs that resulted in phantom votes. And ES&S is the company that knew about some of these bugs, and let them be used in elections anyway. So if you were going to go off and start your own e-voting company (and it's not clear these individuals did that), wouldn't you be better off starting from scratch?
It would appear that Wal-Mart's lawyers need to come up with excuses to keep billing Wal-Mart every year around this time. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart employees admit that sites posting "Black Friday Ads" help drive more business, Wal-Mart's hired guns keep threatening sites for posting the ads, falsely claiming a copyright on the content (hint: you can't copyright prices). This year, they've stepped it up a notch and are claiming that it's illegal to even link to a site that has such content.
Specifically, Wal-Mart's high-priced law firm has sent a takedown notice to the site SearchAllDeals.com, which is a search engine/aggregator of various deals sites. The site doesn't host any content itself, but that didn't stop Wal-Mart from sending a false DMCA takedown claim to the site (and, of course, a false DMCA takedown is illegal). So, we have Wal-Mart, whose employees think deal sites are helpful, getting its lawyers to send out bogus takedown notices over content that isn't copyrighted, and then sending them to search engines that don't even host the content in question.
It makes you wonder how much the lawyers are charging Wal-Mart... and if the fees are being paid out of the legal budget, or the marketing and promotions budget.
We see all sorts of ridiculous patent applications and patents, but my favorites tend to be the patents that have to do with patents themselves (such as the patent app on a method for filing a patent). However, the folks over at Patently-O have highlighted a fascinating patent application from an attorney at Halliburton, which appears to be an attempt to patent the process of patent trolling. The application covers, quite explicitly, having a company (we'll say Company A) that does not invent something, find a company (Company B) that did invent something, but chose to use trade secret protection, rather than patents. Then, the Company A files a patent covering Company B's technology, and then use the issued patent to get money out of Company B.
Now, one could hope that Halliburton's intention in patenting such a process was to use it to stop other companies from doing this, but it does make you wonder. Of course, especially after the Bilski ruling, this patent is most likely dead in the water, but these days, you never know.
Want to know how we know the holidays are coming? It's not the Christmas decorations already showing up in stores; it's the annual ritual of retailers threatening any website that posts the deals from their "Black Friday" (the day after Thanksgiving) sales circular prior to that day. Last year, Wal-Mart went beyond what others stores had done, in pre-threatening sites. In the past, companies like Target and Best Buy had simply threatened to sue sites after the ads went up. But Wal-Mart took it a step further and threatened to sue before the ads even went up, ignoring, of course that they don't own pricing data. The data on sales prices are not copyrightable and cannot be owned. Wal-Mart simply has no legal leg to stand on in demanding the data from the circular be taken down.
But why let that stop them? An anonymous reader alerts us to the fact that Wal-Mart is already sending the notices out to various sites, threatening legal ramifications if the sites were to post the prices prior to the date Wal-Mart makes them "official."
I recently became aware of yet another lawsuit where it looks as though a big companies with deep pockets appears to be bullying a small competitor through questionable use of intellectual property laws. The lawsuit was filed by uHaul against a small startup called HireAHelper, but also against HireAHelper's founder and his wife personally. You can see the full filing here:
The main gist of the story is that Michael Glanz had signed up with a uHaul subsidiary, named eMove, offering his services as a mover. Later, Glanz ended up starting his own startup called HireAHelper, in part claiming that his experiences with eMove made him believe he could do a better job helping people find a variety of helpers (beyond just moving help apparently). Of course, here in the US, there's a long history of people breaking off from a service or company they found inadequate and creating a better competitor. That's competition, and it drives innovation. But, to uHaul, apparently it's a threat that needs to be stamped out.
The lawsuit covers a variety of different charges, almost all of which seem questionable from what's presented. The most complete charge appears to be trademark violations, but the two trademarks in question seem highly questionable by themselves: "Moving Help" and "Moving Helper" which are both generic and descriptive -- which are two no-nos in getting a trademark. If we applied our ever popular moron in a hurry test, it seems unlikely that anyone (even folks who worked for uHaul) would be confused and believe that HireAHelper was somehow connected to eMove/uHaul.
After that, it appears that uHaul's lawyers just threw everything they could think of at Glanz and his company: including copyright infringement (of what? not clear), "business method material" (here in the real world, we call that competition and think it's a good thing), design logos (of what? not clear) and trade secrets. There may be more to the trade secrets claim, as the lawsuit provides almost no details other than to suggest that the trade secrets are from being a member of eMove -- something that many, many, many other people are, so it's difficult to see what the trade secrets are since most of the info is widely known.
Given how there are so many different claims without a clear explanation, I contacted uHaul by phone and email a week ago with a list of questions, hoping they might provide some more details and clear up some of the confusion over the lawsuit. To date, there has been no response (I can't even get a "no comment" apparently). From what we've seen, it certainly sounds like uHaul is simply lawyering up to get a much, much smaller competitor to shut down, in part because he was better at getting his site listed well in Google compared to eMove. Consider it the crime of being a better marketer.
Late Friday, the news broke that Motorola was suing a former sales executive who had left Motorola and joined Apple in April. Motorola is claiming that he was sharing Motorola's trade secrets with Apple. Of course, given the directions both companies seem to be heading in with their mobile phone devices, one might think that the only "secrets" he might have shared from Motorola were about what not to do. In fact, it seems like a lot of Apple's success with the iPhone has been in ignoring many of the old rules.
As Google's Gmail product has grown, it should come as absolutely no surprise that the company would offer up a tool to migrate users of Microsoft Outlook/Exchange over to Gmail. However, it appears to have come as a surprise to a small startup that offered similar tools in partnership with Google. That company has now sued Google claiming trade secrets were taken. From the details in the article, it appears that Google partnered with this small company that had developed such software as a rapid way of offering such functionality. Then, while all that was happening, it was developing its own such tools. This shouldn't be a surprise -- since migrating people over from Microsoft's email solutions is clearly a priority for Google, and it's no surprise that Google would want to have control over that technology.
Yet this startup seems to believe that a simple partnership with Google means that it was guaranteed to always remain Google's partner and that Google would never build similar functionality in-house. If anything, this seems like sour grapes from a company that perhaps didn't put together a very good contract with Google and didn't recognize the obvious path for Google's own development efforts. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this lawsuit is being prosecuted by the same lawyer who recently was on the losing end of a different lawsuit against Google (the infamous "American Blinds" case, accusing Google of trademark infringement because competitors could buy ads on American Blinds' trademarks).
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