Guy Claims His Patent Covers Everyone Making Computers, Cell Phones, Hard Drives, DVD Players, HDTV & MRIs (original) (raw)

from the you-probably-infringe-just-for-breathing dept

Joe Mullin has been digging into the saga of Gregory Bender — a guy no one seems to know anything about, but who just a few weeks ago started suing some big name companies, such as Broadcom, Freescale, AMD and National Semiconductor for patent infringement. A week later, he had also sued IBM, Agilent, Cirrus Logic, Siemens, Nokia, Sony, Motorola, and ST Microelectronics. Apparently that wasn’t enough, as a week later, he filed new lawsuits against AT&T, AT&T Mobility, Sony-Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital. At latest count, in the last month or so, he’s filed 22 lawsuits against 28 different companies.

The patent in question? It’s for a <a href=”http://www.google.com/patents?id=-YkgAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,103,188 target=”_new”>buffered transconductance amplifier, and Bender is claiming that basically all computers, mobile phones, hard drives, DVD players, HDTVs and MRI machines violate the patents. Bender may or may not have a valid claim… but the patent was granted in 1992, and it appears it will expire at the beginning of August, so it’s not entirely clear why Bender waited until now to sue — or what he’s been doing with his life in the interim. Mullin’s questions concerning that were answered with a: “He is a private person. He does not want publicity.” Then, perhaps he shouldn’t have sued pretty much every high tech company out there claiming they owe him money…

Filed Under: greg bender, patents