As we know, VueStar Technologies being empowered by the patent holder, Ron Langford has sent letters of demand, (along with an invoice and a user license agreement) to an unknown number of Singapore companies. This news has even hit Techcrunch, Slashdot, The Inquirer (UK), Ars Technica, and ZDNet Asia, in addition to The Electric New Paper, Straits Times and Cnet Asia.
Many of these editors have been calling VueStar Tech a Patent Troll. In effect, Singapore has just met with it’s first [Patent Troll?] who is preying on practically the Singapore man/firm in the street – the small fry. In fact, a pyschological trick to bring fear seemed to be executed by claiming that it will be going after the big boys such as Internet giants like the Vole and Google.
Reading through the 29 pages of patent details, page 24-29 listed 39 claims. The independent claims are claim 1, 19, 25, 26 and 31. The rest are dependent claims. Based on the possible prior art in 1998 from suevuestar.biz, (from the paper “Web page caricatures: multimedia summaries for www“, published in proceedings of IEEE International Conference), we can see that the patented claims are not novel.
Quoting the paper (possible prior art), “This paper addresses the problem of rapid browsing of a large set of World Wide Web documents, such as the results of a search engine query or a bookmark list. Traditional presentations of such lists are in the form of text, and require careful attention and often laborious efforts in order to discover relevant documents. We propose a visual representation of documents, called a caricature, which emphasizes the key points of a document in a way which quickly conveys these points to the user, and thus facilitates document selection.”
Moreover, based on the figure that is extracted from the paper, Figure 6 shows the overview picture of a search result for an Alta Vista query “snowboarding”. That implies that a user does a search using the word “snowboarding”, and the search engine searches it’s database, and provide an output in he form of visual representation of the documents (caricature) to the user. The result contains visual content, hyperlink to the search result and contact information for the organization in the form of email-link icon. As such, Claim 1 has been described by a prior art.
Taking a close look at the caricatures in Figure 5 and 6, the visual content is an image, as such claim 3 is refuted. Looking at Figure 5, we have the Siemens logo, while in Figure 6, we have the product logo avalanche. As such, claim 4 is refuted. Referring to Figure 5 and 6, there is a mailbox image that is an email-link for those entry’s in which the organization’s email is available. As such Claim 10 and 11 are refuted.
Thus, based on my layman analysis, that so many claims are refutable, with a proper lawyer, and class action if the affected companies are willing to cooperate, the patent can be over-turned. The main trouble however, will be the legal fees that it will cost. Sigh.
Disclaimer: The author is not a lawyer and as such the companies should always seek professional advice.
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