EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY!!! -- [What?] -- Login to add public annotations [How? >>YouTube].

He even got on slash-dot! Anyway, if you want to see a short six minute explanation of why we are being sued, here you go.

And to state the obvious, we are not discontinuing any of our products, we are not dropping Android as a platform, and we are in no way backing down because of the lawsuit. As you can tell from the video and Austin’s posts, Austin has some strong feelings about standing up to patent trolls.

X-Plane 10.50 update coming tomorrow.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

23 comments on “Austin Goes Viral”

  3. I do not understand as the first country in the world can fall into such blunders.
    He has my full support. Courage, the truth always comes out ahead.

  4. Ouch, people have got to help stop those crooks. More power to your elbow Austin. How stressful that must be. It’s so not fair. Why not start a crowd fund. Lots of us would chip in as getting rid of these corrupt Leeches would make the world a better place.

  5. X-Plane 10.50 update coming tomorrow.

    lol what a way to get myself excited

  6. Thank you Austin for fighting this, thank you Austin for making this film. Sharing, promoting and fighting it through social media the best that I can.

  8. I say we get Austin 110 Lawyers and arrive at court with an Army. That should scare the Cxxx out of them!

  10. Read the Slash.dot posts. There’s no financial advantage for Austin to pursue this in any way whatsoever. There’s tremendous ethical righteousness if he were to win, which is not guaranteed. And if he doesn’t win, not only does he lose the legal fees paid, he loses the settlement amount too, which can be substantial. I love the man’s spirit and agree with his position completely. And yielding to patent trolls would feel like the worst form of cowardice. But what’s the bottom line? If a guy is holding me up for the cash in my wallet, it’s his! My bank account is still safe.

    1. There’s a deterrence factor here and it’s why both sides (LR and Uniloc) are incentivized to keep going after each other. Even if a troll thinks they can’t win, they need to show that they’re going to make it really expensive for their target no matter what, so that the _next_ target will see the scorched earth results and settle.

      Similarly, we (LR) don’t want to be known as an easy target for trolling…since there is a virtually unlimited supply of silly software patents that can be read as ‘infringing’ with enough squinting, settling one case doesn’t make anything go away in the long term.

  11. Keep up the fight.

    Speaking of, why doesn’t Google provide legal assistance. I know Google isn’t being sued, but.. they still must have some interest in protecting their platform/store/users. I don’t get it.

  12. Hmm …

    I wonder if any of these patent trolls were careful enough to also patent the ideas behind their own behaviour? If not, then someone (let’s just call him Austin) might want to consider taking out a patent on the idea of patent trolling.

    Al.

  13. You’re welcome. I was the first person to post it to Reddit (flight sim subreddit). It has received tens of thousands if not a hundred thousand views from Reddit users.

  14. Being a developer too (suspect much of this blog prob is), the past few years I’ve become increasingly more disturbed by software Patents and Patent Litigation. Please correct me if I’m wrong but the way I understand, Patents were devised to allow a company to bring a product to market – perhaps like Henry Ford and the model T. In software the past few years… I’m seeing a big patent reform is needed. We have the Patent Trolls gaming the system, and *preventing* innovation. Instead of a device to foster innovation, we now have a weaponized money-wrench for the unscrupulous to use on people actually making things.

  15. very good video – I wish the US would do something against these patent trolls and nonsense

  17. Oh my goodness, the last frame of the video 😀

    www
    .
    ThePatentScam
    .
    com

    Hello there, creator of the X-Plane user interface, I recognise you! 😉

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