If you thought Lodsys was a bad patent troll, it seems MacroSolve is worst, from the way they attack and the patent itself. I like to see how the community respond to this. Microsolve seem to sue first and ask questions later with their broad patent. Every patent I see, makes me wonder what type of morons man stations at USPTO. I hope enough people will work together to get this patent invalidated, electronic forms and data exchange over the internet is as old as the WWW itself. I see every web page as a electronic form; you type an address into your browser and you are provided with data and response.
According to the FOSS Patents of Florian Mueller (and he has a better write up as well);
In terms of lending itself to incredibly broad interpretations and infringement allegations, MacroSolve's patent-in-suit is similarly dangerous as Lodsys's in-app upgrade patent. MacroSolve is suing companies over U.S. Patent No. 7,822,816 on a "system and method for data management", "including the steps of: creating a questionnaire; transmitting the questionnaire to a remote computer; executing the questionnaire in the remote computer to prompt a user for responses to questions of the questionnaire; transmitting the responses to a sever via a network; making the responses available on the Web." In other words, anyone who distributes electronic forms via the Internet or to mobile devices and then collects and evaluates the answers could be accused of infringing the patent.
I really hope people will come together and fight this unbelievable patent. I agree with Florian, hoping that Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM get together and thwart this nonsense.
FOSS Patents
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