jonathan
Photo via Beige Alert Paice, a company that develops hybrid electric power train technology, has filed a patent infrigement case against Toyota (yet again), saying that the company is using Paice’s technology in the Prius and two other hybrid vehicles. Should Paice win, it could spell the death of certain vehicle imports, possibly including the green icon Prius. … Read the full story on TreeHugger
Original post:
Toyota Prius Faces Ban Due to US Patent Suit
Comments
2 comments
September 6, 2009
I’m not sure what’s worse. The fact that the patent lawsuit was decided by a jury, or that Toyota’s lawyers were not capable of pointing out to a jury all the prior art and/or inapplicability of the Paice LLC patent.
Paice’s web site lists six patents. Looking those up on the USPTO web site, I see that most of these six are substantially the same (in fact, they have identical abstracts). As near as I can tell, the patents cover fairly obvious things such as using a computer to take various inputs related to the performance of the vehicle and use those inputs to manage outputs related to the performance of the vehicle.
Duh. Hybrid technology has been around for nearly a century in one form or another (the first diesel-electric locomotive was produced in 1917), and computer-controlled motor systems (hybrid or not) have been around for decades (essentially since computers were small enough to fit in cars; arguably, even early analog electronic control systems are prior art). Just because a company made some specific refinements to those existing technologies, that makes their design a “non-obvious invention”, defendable as a valid patent in a US court of law?
Toyota’s planetary continuously-variable transmission, now that’s “non-obvious”. But using a computer to modulate the performance of a vehicle?
This is a prime example of how broken our patent system is.
September 6, 2009
Why not just have them pay a royalty for every Prius sold? Baning them just seems stupid…and even bad for the company suing.