Reading through the online version of ComputerWorld, an article delving into the lawsuits filed by a company, heretofore unknown to me, Convolve, located in the ‘little’ town of Armonk, New York. My first thought, was that this company must be an offshoot, or subsidiary of, that really famous company that occupies much of the discussion whenever Armonk comes up. I could find no evidence of that.

Convolve appears to be a working company, that does real work, not one of those entities evolved for the sole purpose of patent litigation, known as ‘patent trolls’. Their business, according to their website, is

an engineering company that specializes in generating optimized trajectories to improve the performance of motion control systems. Trajectories generated by Convolve software can reduce the move and settle time for systems with oscillatory responses without the added expense of feedback transducers and complex feedback control algorithms. The following plots illustrate the benefit that can be achieved using Input Shaping®:

Well. That certainly sounds like something that improves the lives of some people. It is, however, one of those things that, one wonders could be accidentally ‘discovered’ by using common sense techniques, and doing little calculation – yet achieving the goal of damped motion.

This is the sort of question that will be asked in court, in Marshall, Texas, where the suits against Dell, Western Digital, and Hitachi were filed. (If the idea that it is odd I speak of where the case got filed, you would need to know that lots of patent law cases are filed there – it appears to be the patent litigation known center of the universe.)

In reading the article, it is clear that not all models of drives by Western Digital, only a couple of models by Hitachi, and an undetermined number of items from Dell, are involved in the infringing examples cited.

Why is this interesting? To me, if a company came into possession of an amount of information that would substantially improve the characteristics of its offerings, would they not use it across the entire range of offerings? This is one of the questions that this suit brings up.

Yet, Convolve states that the companies named in the suit only used their patented technology in a few examples. Strange. Could it be completely coincidental? Possibly.

Is patent law tortuous? Yes. Does it need to exist? Definitely. Should it be revamped? Undeniably.

If 2 of the 3 largest drive manufacturers in the world get slapped with a fine concerning intellectual property, you can bet that the consumer will be paying that fine, however indirectly. But it all could be a simple coincidence of manufacture, and a common method of achieving a result, without cross pollenation of ideas, similar to the way that Newton, and Gottfired Leibnitz, independently developed calculus. Yet most who know anything about mathematics would credit Newton alone.

The case will be interesting as it unfolds, as Convolve claims that it has proof that all 3 cited companies hold papers with their methodology.

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Technorati Tags: patent litigation - intellectual property - Convolve - Dell - Hitachi - Western Digital