Look at these frivolous BD related lawsuits and such

[Metalheadisme]

There isn't enough info here for me to pass judgement....

We have no clue what her patent encompasses and what she is claiming the companies are infringing upon.

There are very valid cases of patent infringement, and then there are ones based on frivilous patent filers getting patents on things that shouldn't be patented in hopes of stealing money from the people doing the real work.

Like in my case, I research optical biological and chemical sensors. You'd be surprised at the patents that are out there for "any system which uses a light source and detector to detect biological or chemical analytes." That type of nonsense would never hold up in the end- there's a grey limit as to how general a patent can be.

[scweb13]

...a patent she owns for light-emitting and laser diodes.

Sounds like it's not against just Blu-ray.
I wonder how much might be owed to her?

[TheRealBob]

Originally Posted by Metalheadisme

Like in my case, I research optical biological and chemical sensors. You'd be surprised at the patents that are out there for "any system which uses a light source and detector to detect biological or chemical analytes." That type of nonsense would never hold up in the end- there's a grey limit as to how general a patent can be.

IBM held the patent on the concept that if you're typing characters on a screen, and you get to the last character cell at the bottom right, then if you enter one more character the screen scrolls up one line.

I kid you not.

IBM was notorious for having a bunch of stupid patents like this that they'd enforce. They were very smart about it though, because they'd license it for a very modest payment, so it wasn't worth fighting them over it. The net result was that IBM made a fortune off all these small payments (every BIOS maker paid them to be allowed to use the technology I described above, for example).

Apple was just the opposite. They'd do stupid things like help create the IEEE 1394 interface standard, then they branded it FireWire, created good brand awareness of it, then wanted to charge everyone an arm and a leg to use the name FireWire. Most didn't pay, causing a lot of customer confusion, and, many think, causing much less success for IEEE 1394 than it would have had otherwise.