Thursday, September 24, 2009
OC Firm On Patent Offensive
An Orange County firm, SpeedTrack, has targeted Amazon.com, Best Buy, Dell, Costco, The Home Depot, and a slew of other firms over a patent the firm said is being infringed upon by the companies. According to SpeedTrack, the patent--U.S. Patent No. 5,544,360--covers how those retailers return searches for products on their web sites, so that users don't see "cannot be found" in the results. SpeedTrack said the patent protects a method it calls "Guided Information Access", which was created by co-founder Jerzy Lewak for its software, which the firm said is used by police departments to sort through criminal records data. The company is seeking damages for the patent infringement. SpeedTrack is being represented by Hennigan, Bennett & Dorman LLP in the patent lawsuit. Hennigan, Bennett & Dorman is the same law firm being used by Joltid, the firm owned by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, in a lawsuit against eBay over use of peer-to-peer technology in Skype.