Sunday, May 15, 2011

Apple iOS Developers Face Patent Lawsuit for In-App Upgrades




Lodsys, a patent licensing company has been threatening to pursue action against iOS developers that have allegedly infringed on the company's patents.

Lodsys is claiming the rights for a "upgrade" button which will be useful to jump from a lite or free version of an application to a paid version. Refer the  patent (7,222,078) "Methods and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity across a network ".

Many iOS developers have already received FedEx-delivered stacks of paper (up to 100 pages) from Lodsys threatening a lawsuit.

And, they allegedly have 21 days to work out some kind of licensing agreement with Lodsys before facing it in Court.

Anyway, the developers can not have any contract with Lodsys without Apple's explicit permission.
So, they have to forward the papers to Apple and let the Apple sort it out.

A number of the developers have referred the claims to Apple's legal department, on the basis that they have built their apps using Apple's developer toolkit.

Now the question is.why Lodsys is going after developers instead of Apple itself. If you know the answer, you can share the details thro' the comments.

Lodsys is  a Texas based patent licensing company for inventions developed by Dan Abelow  who sold five of his patents outright in 2004: Four of these patents went to Lodsys and one to a company called Webvention which may be owned by Lodsys itself.


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