Comments on: Honeywell hits Nest with a law suit over smart thermostat

By: JLB

JLB — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:10:37 +0000

Gagh. Just about to order one of these when I learned it’s funded partly by Algore money. No thanks.

By: Shane Selman

Shane Selman — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:04:42 +0000

1. Read your Constitution. Intellectual property exists solely to encourage innovation. There is NO other reason. Allowing honeywell to patent an invention simply to prevent others from deploying not only does not encourage innovation, it actively prevents it.

2. Who am I to judge what “sitting on patents” means? I’m a consumer that wants products that function like the NEST products. Honeywell has admitted that they have no intention of producing them. As a business owner, I sympathize with honeywell – they don’t have enough money to do all they would like – but that doesn’t give them the right to prevent other companies from doing it.

3. Actual Innovation. Nest has a working product in the market place. Honeywell has never actually built any of these patented items, and never sold them – so Nest had nothing to copy. That’s called innovation.

4. Apple did sit on the sidelines. They did not, however sue phone companies that tried to make smartphones while they sat on the sidelines. Waiting for a market to mature to enter is not the same as trying to prevent that market from forming until you want it to.

By: Thomas Shannon

Thomas Shannon — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:25:20 +0000

That list of patents is total bull. How can you have a patent on “Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller” or “Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface” (Just two examples)? This is just another case of a bigger company trying to shutdown a smaller one using BS patents.

By: Reggie

Reggie — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:29:15 +0000

This is what you call “submarine patents.”

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:56:47 +0000

I think I am going to copy something – almost no comments to articles explaining the technology and its release – a flurry of interest when Honeywell file to protect their IP. Did Nest need some free PR?

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:42:19 +0000

Fuck Intellectual Property Honeywell can go to fucking hell. This is why the us is going to hell. There should be a rule that a company can not just sit on patents. They should only have a couple of years to develop a product with the patent or it goes into the public domain!

By: Michael W. Perry

Michael W. Perry — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:17:16 +0000

This is the all-too-predictable mess that has resulted from allowing software patents. Classic, mechanical patents only patented a particular way of doing something, say regulating the speed of a steam engine. That’s why you had to bring a working model to the patent office. And anyone who could achieve the same results with different hardware wasn’t violating the patent.

Software patents typically patent an obvious step-by-step process to achieve a result. They’re more like: 1. Measure engine speed. 2. Compare that speed to desired speed. 3. Adjust speed up or down as necessary. Stated that generally, they leave no other way open to achieve get results.

Software patents are really patents of what is done rather than how it is done. Those who create a software process should be limited to copyrighting their code rather than patenting the result of that code.

Patent law is in this mess because for all too long it’s been driven by the USPTO bureaucracy and by patent lawyers. Both have a vested interested in expanding what can be patented and creating endless contention over what is a patent.

By: Jeremy Nicoll

Jeremy Nicoll — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:47:10 +0000

If they researched and developed the methods themselves, they did plenty of innovating. Which leads to the problem of claiming vague ideas as property: if you’ve had an idea there probably are at least 20 people on the planet have also had the same idea. Ideas by themselves are worthless without implementation. We need to allow the do-ers to reap the rewards, and give deaf ear to the trolls who wish to sit back and do little and reap the profits of others.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:17:23 +0000

I daren’t proclaim one way or the other, but patents are usually awarded to new technology. You wouldn’t patent something that simply combines two old technologies, like an umbrella with a watch in the handle. All the items listed by Honeywell in this article already exist and are used widely by their larger competitors in many ways in many commercial devices. The only difference would appear to be the market – domestic.

My gut says this is quoshing.

By: Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:20:48 +0000

If you don’t produce a product and you have a patent, you are sitting on the patent. Period. There should be something in the patent law to prevent this, or at least to mandate licensing, otherwise the patent system runs against its own Constitutional intent.