14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to patent lawsuits, the general idea is that they’re quite a hassle and have an unpredictable outcome. One of these particular lawsuits seems to target an Android developer who took to Google Play Store to post his apps and then got sued for patent infringement.
Developer Austin Meyer wrote a flight simulator app called X-Plane. A few years ago he uploaded the app to the Google Play Store so that anyone can get access to it. After some time, the developer was sued by a company called Uniloc, which claimed to own the patent for the Google Play store.
Uniloc didn’t just sue Meyers, but a lot more companies that posted apps in the Store, including game developers. The logical thing to do would have been for Uniloc to sue Google, but of course, that wouldn’t have ended well.
Meyers posted a video on YouTube, stating that Uniloc had nothing to do with the creation of X-Plane or the Google Play Store. Meyers mentioned that the lawsuit had been dragging on for four years and claims that almost all patent trolling lawsuits in Texas are part of a greater scheme that involves lawyers and judges.
Patent trolls could potentially sue anyone who uses the Play Store or App Store
Meyers also stated that such a lawsuit wouldn’t be limited to just Google’s Play Store, as people could be sued for using the Apple App Store or even Steam, because the patents are very vague and cover many things that they leave grounds for a lawsuit.
Whatever the case, such lawsuits on patent infringements can be an inconvenience even for big companies like Samsung or Apple. The two companies battled in a lawsuit last year on patent infringement regarding the design of smartphones, specifically round-edges and multi-touch gestures that Apple claimed that the company from South Korean copied and implemented on its smartphones.
