Circling Around: Yes, Yale Professor David Gelernter Is an Patent Troll--But an Ultimately Unsuccessful One
Think are intellectual property protections are insufficiently strong?
Five years ago I put a tickler in to see what would happen to this. Glad to see that sanity reigned after all:
On March 14, 2008, Mirror Worlds, LLC of Tyler, Texas (a subsidiary of Plainfield Specialty Holdings I, Inc.) filed suit against Apple, Inc. for patent infringement in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler, Texas. The infringement was alleged to occur in the Cover Flow, Time Machine, and Spotlight features found in Mac OS X and iOS software used for many of Apple's products.
On October 4, 2010 a jury awarded Mirror Worlds, LLC $625.5 million in damages, but Apple appealed the award citing various legal arguments and the judge stayed the ruling to allow both parties to submit post-trial arguments. The initial ruling was 'the second-biggest jury verdict in 2010, and the fourth-biggest patent verdict in U.S. history' according to Bloomberg News.
On April 4, 2011, 'U.S. District Judge Leonard E. Davis of Tyler ruled that Apple did not infringe on (the) patent', and overturned the jury verdict.
On June 24, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the appeal by Mirror Worlds, thereby letting stand the district court ruling that Apple didn't infringe on any patents.
October 7, 2010: Is Yale Professor David Gelernter a Forum-Shopping Patent Troll?
I certainly would never have thought that coverflow was patentable.
And if I had been on the jury, I would certainly have said that Irving Fisher's Rolodex is prior art...
