Twitter wins patent suite

Internet), paidContent.org says.

The jury in federal court ruled against Dinesh Agarwal, a patent attorney who invented his own interactive Web program to track famous people or people with similar interests. He sought millions from Twitter, saying it used his patent without permission, HamptonRoads.com reports.

Agarwal said after the verdict that he was "100% disappointed" at the outcome.

According to Intellectual Property Brief, Twitter argued that VS' “virtual community” patent failed the “machine” prong of the test because it was not “tied” to a particular machine or apparatus, in this case, the Internet, because the patent described the process as publishing profiles over any “machine-readable media”.

Twitter also asserted that even if the patented process was “tied” to the Internet (ie. required publication via the Internet), the Internet is not “a particular machine” for purposes of satisfying the machine prong. To support this proposition, Twitter cited CyberSource vs Retail Decisions, in which the Federal Circuit stated that practising the patented method “over the Internet” did not tie the process to a particular machine because the Internet is an “abstraction” comprising a network of many individual machines.