The Road Forward
December 17, 2010 in News by Dave | No comments
I?m starting a new post that is dedicated to the dismantling of the FlightPrep patent and their lawsuit against RunwayFinder. I spent some time last evening reading over their patent and some of the documents in their patent application. I think there is a clear path toward fighting the lawsuit against RunwayFinder, and potentially a way to invalidate their patent. I am going to represent RunwayFinder myself at least initially in the lawsuit. The help from everybody so far is much appreciated.
I?ve had some good interest in putting the website code into open source. Regardless of how the lawsuit works out, I?ll work on that once the current situation is under control.
I?ve had several requests for the summons and complaint that was filed in Oregon District Court. I?ve posted it here. I didn?t scan Exhibit 1 as it?s an exact copy of the FlightPrep patent 7,640,098.
First off, a little background on patents. If you know all of this, feel free to skip this paragraph. The most important part of a patent in an infringement suit is the claims section. Ironically, the claims sections starts on nearly the last page of the patent. FlightPrep has 23 claims in their patent. You?ll notice that many of these are linked together. Claims 2-10 are all linked to claim 1. Claims 12-20 are all linked to claim 11. And 22-23 are linked to 21. The linked claims are called dependent claims. In order to be infringing on a patent, a person or entity must be infringing on every one of the claims that are linked together. Thus, an infringement would need to be on all of claims 1-10, or all of claims 11-20, or all of claims 21-23 for this patent.
I?ve also posted what?s called the ?file wrapper? for the patent. This includes all of the original application plus any amendments and the correspondence with the patent examiner. A couple of interesting things I?ve noticed after reading through it more carefully. First, their application for a patent was not rejected just once. It was rejected 7 times, including one ?final rejection.?
Additionally, as I mentioned in an earlier post this patent is a divisional patent. In other words, the original patent application was split into two applications. I?ve also posted the file wrapper for the original FlightPrep patent application. It was eventually abandoned. It?s interesting to compare the claims in the original patent application to what they ended up with in the final patent. I?ll be reading through those differences more carefully, but they substantially modified and added to their claims over the course of 8 years adding a housekeeping frame and navigation waypoints. Most of the modifications were done in the 2006-2009 timeframe, well after websites like Google Maps, RunwayFinder, and SkyVector had been online for years. Even going back to their original 2001 patent application, it can be argued that their ?invention? was basically taking what MapQuest did back in 1996 with online maps and making an obvious extension by applying it to aeronautical charts. From what I understand, the best way to get the patent invalidated is to write directly to the patent examiner with prior art that he did not consider in his original review of the application.
As for the lawsuit, reading through their patent more carefully I can make a very clear and convincing case that RunwayFinder does not infringe. Every one of their independent claims starts with the concept of ?compositing? a navigation chart. This is basically how Google Maps creates their road maps. They start with a blank slate, add roads, add cities, add text, etc. However, RunwayFinder is only displaying a digital representation of paper VFR and IFR charts. Even in the patent they say, ?In this invention, the charts are not the traditional paper charts, but are charts generated electronically using a computer software system, this will become apparent further in this description. [sic]? RunwayFinder does not generate the charts. There are many other angles I can take as well, but this seems to be the most convincing as it is the basis for their entire patent.
I must respond to their summons by December 28th. Convenient that this lands right on Christmas week. I?ll be working on my ?answer? over the weekend, and will post a draft on this blog.
