Yup. Sorry, autocorrect hell.
It’s called “Patent Monitoring”. One famous example is noted below;
"Craven L. Wanlass was granted a US patent in 1977 for a certain type of electric motor. He offered a license for General Electric (GE), but GE refused claiming that the invention was not new. Wanlass tested GE products between 1977 and 1982 finding no infringement. In 1995, he sued GE for patent infringement based on testing of GE air conditioners conducted in 1992. For detecting an infringement, it was necessary to purchase the product that cost approximately 200 dollars, but the testing itself required no special equipment and was easy. The District Court of Utah concluded that Wanlass knew or should have known of the potential infringement by March 1989, which was six years prior filing the suit. " The Court of Appeals found it reasonable that patentees have the duty to search for in- fringements, since the patentees generally know better the scope of protection of their patents, and have therefore lower costs in investigating possible infringements than their competitors would have if they did comprehensive patent searches for avoiding in- fringements.
A noted above, the best thing we in the community can do is make sure Wyze is provided all of the prior art relevant to these patents. Commercial products and open-source products both. Wyze would also be well served to alert the EFF to the attempted patent trolling.
With clear prior art, it’s a relatively simple matter to get the patents re-examined and ultimately invalidated. Looking at the JC patents, I don’t see anything that is particularly novel there.
Johnson Controls is a slimeball company that can’t make any money of their proprietary - and notoriously insecure - building automation protocols. They’re heavily threatened by open-spec protocols like Zwave and Zigbee. So they’re resorting to this.
Any updates on this lawsuit?
You will be lucky to hear anything over the next few years. These lawsuits are the modern day equivalent of “put your watches, wallets, and jewelry in the bag and no one gets hurt”, they take forever to resolve and waste everyone’s time and money which we pay in higher prices and less R&D.
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wyze won
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According to this video, the decision has been appealed: We Got Sued For Millions of Dollars (UPDATE) - YouTube
I’m sad to hear Wyze has to put up with more legal proceedings, especially since it sounds like the judge chastised the plaintiff in the original suit’s judgment.
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