Patent Troll's Claim Over Screen Rotation Gets Nullified

Apparently somebody owns, or claims to own, that auto rotate feature you may have grown to love and hate on your smartphone. And surprisingly, it is neither Apple nor Samsung but a patent troll. Fortunately for the mobile world, the USPTO has just declared Patent No. 6,326,978 or "Display method for selectively rotating windows on a computer display" as invalid, in no small part thanks to the efforts of open cloud computing company Rackspace.

Patent trolls don't instigate patent litigation because of principles but because of the money they can get, not from winning, but from settlements. As such, they cast a wide net in the hopes that one of the smaller fishes would decide to settle for a smaller amount rather than accumulate legal fees, whether or not they win. In 2012, Patent Assertion Entity (PAE, a.k.a. patent troll) Rotatable Technologies cast that net, which included Apple, Netflix, and EA, among others. In 2013, it included Rackspace in that scheme. Unfortunately for Rotatable, Rackspace has a vendetta against patent trolls and called their bluff.

Rackspace's account of the events that led up to this victory is amusing in itself and shows the modus operandi of patent trolls. First they target as many defendants as the can, sending frightening legal letters. Second, they end those letters always with a settle demand that the troll will claim to be far lower than what they would incur in legal fees. When Rackspace made a routine legal inquiry, Rotatable revealed that "their client" was willing to settle for $75,000 and even that amount was negotiable. Many companies would have probably taken the bait, Rackspace decided to fight for the cause.

That companies like Rackspace, Netflix, and EA would be sued regarding this patent is already quite amusing, considering they themselves don't develop technology or software directly related to it. Rackspace, for its part, is a cloud computing company and its use of screen rotation is mostly limited to its mobile apps. And even then, it simply uses libraries provided by Android and iOS. If Rotatable were truly earnest in protecting its patent, which it most likely have bought off some poor fellow or company, it would have trained its guns on Apple and Google or Samsung. But then that would be patent troll suicide.

Under the America Invents Act, Rackspace filed last year an Inter Partes Review of Patent No. 6,326,978, which could be used to prove that the patent should have never been granted in the first place. Fortunately for the mobile world, the US patent office declared it unpatentable, leaving platform makers and app developers free to enjoy all that auto rotating goodness. That is, of course, until one of these bigger ones starts claiming they own the patent too.

SOURCE: Rackspace