Friday, July 22, 2011

Lodsys sues Rovio over Angry Birds for iPhone and Android

Today Lodsys has amended its complaint against mobile app developers and modified the list of defendants, leaving out one of the seven developers sued on May 31 (Vietnamese company Wulven Games) but adding five famous games companies:

  • Rovio is accused of infringing at least one of Lodsys's patents with Angry Birds for iOS and Angry Birds for Android -- here's the related paragraph (click to enlarge):

  • Electronic Arts: The Sims 3 for iPhone

  • Atari: Atari's Greatest Hits for iPhone and Atari's Greatest Hits for iPad

  • Square Enix: Big Hit Baseball for iPhone and Big Hit Baseball for iPad

  • Take-Two Interactive: 2K Sports NHL 2K11 for iPhone

The number of defendants in this lawsuit has now increased from 7 to 11 (7 original defendants, 1 left out, 5 new ones added). Here's the header of the amended complaint:

I have also uploaded the complaint to Scribd.

This amended complaint shows several things:

With today's amended complaint, Lodsys is currently suing a total of 37 defendants, and there may be more to come.

In this context I'd like to recommend an article written by a staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in light of the fact that there are app developers who have removed their products from the U.S. market due to the rampant patent troll problem (a fact that was reported on by The Guardian).

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