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:
Lodsys is not afraid of suing deep-pocketed app developers. I'm not surprised, given that Lodsys has three other lawsuits going, all of them against big companies including the likes of HP, Brother, adidas, Best Buy, The New York Times Company, etc.
Lodsys continues to go after Android apps as well. In the original lawsuit against seven app developers, one of the games was available for iOS and Android (Labyrinth). That one is still part of the list, but now Angry Birds, a much more prominent cross-platform game, has joined it. Recently, Lodsys sent a number of assertion letters to Android developers, and Android community websites increasingly report on the problem (as I mentioned in this blog post on how app developers can cost-efficiently deal with the situation). Google's silence and inactivity about this issue makes it likely that Lodsys will sue more Android developers if they don't pay.
Lodsys is still not impressed by Apple's assertion that its own license to Lodsys's patents extends to its app developers. I also pointed out that Apple's "exhaustion" theory is not necessarily accurate. Also, Lodsys may be able to capitalize on contractual commitments that might preclude Apple and Google from challenging Lodsys's patents and the related infringement allegations.
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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Quizcover game app (by Quizista GmbH) [U.S. trademark application data on Justia.com]
