Lodsys, a well known patent troll (A patent troll is a company or person that acquires patents with the sole purpose of suing other companies. Patent trolls do not create their own intellectual property or provide a product or service), filed a complaint on July 22nd that added Angry Birds developer, Rovio, to a list of iOS developers being pursued by Lodsys for patent infringement.
Lodsys has been in the news quite a bit recently as they added more and more app developers to their list.
Lodsys is the owner of US Patent No. 7,222,078, which claims various aspects related to in-app purchases popular on Android and Apple App Stores. If you have never seen what a patent looks like or are just interested in seeing Lodsys’ patent, you can check it out here
Apple who has licensed the ’078 patent claims that their license covers the activities of all of their app developers. Lodsys obviously disagrees and has begun steps to take legal actions from app developers who have not licensed the ’078 patent.
Lodsys is demanding slightly over 0.5% of all US revenue generated from the sale of apps sold by developers who are allegedly infringing the Lodsys patent through the expiration of their patent in 2023. While this doesn’t sound like much, those pennies definitively add up.
So what does this mean for gamers? Not much for the time being. Litigation is time consuming and it is highly unlikely that Lodsys will be able to stop Rovio or any other app developer from selling their apps, but they may have to change how in-app sales are processed.
Stay tuned as we update you on news related to this case.
Filed under: Angry Birds News
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