Is there pocket change stuck in this Lint?
We’re used to seeing patent lawsuits filed by small holding firms against tech giants go through Texas’s federal courts. Whether they end up being rightful claims to royalties or a fruitless attempt at trolling, we don’t often recognize the names of the plaintiffs. Not so with this new case against Google coming out of Purdue University.
The Purdue Research Foundation is suing the web search giant (via Reuters) for infringing on a published patent describing how to detect power-sapping errors called “power bugs” or, in Google’s terms, “wake locks” — outdated or inaccurate requests from apps asking to prevent a sleep state. Specifically, these violations can be found in “Lint,” a popular code-scanning tool included with the Android Studio integrated development environment.
Purdue’s story goes that Google engineers caught wind of its research in early June 2012 and sought to obtain and implement those findings to improve Lint. A script for wake lock detection for Lint was submitted for approval in the Android Open Source Project gerrit in July and eventually got merged into the base repository in December. The Purdue Research Foundation would file its patent application in late June of 2013.
Some of the questions that might be floating around are what damages the foundation is entitled to since the Lint tool is free for Android app makers to use and whether Google can claim the prior use defense in this case if it’s determined that Purdue’s claims were in use at least a year before the foundation filed for the patent.
The Purdue Research Foundation is seeking a jury trial in the Western District of Texas, a court known for attracting patent cases.
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