Submarine Submarine Patent Finding Software Hit By Submarine Patent Claim

Lawyers acting for the patent holding company Seaward Innovations, which has faced accusations of being a so-called “patent troll”, have filed suit in the Eastern Seaboard District of Texas, claiming that the recently announced product SubIntelligence, from startup Subtle Technologies, violates their patent 5,146,634.

SubIntelligence, which was announced with some fanfare at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015, is software targeted at businesses developing submarines and submarine-related technology, such as defence contractors and shipbuilders. It works by scanning the US patent database, as well as open-access research databases, the web, and unspecified legal data sources. Using machine-intelligence algorithms, it can purportedly determine the precise likelihood that submarine patents exist covering the submarine technology under development.

Seaward Innovations’ suit alleges that SubIntelligence’s method for discovering submarine submarine patents is itself patented under US Patent 5,146,634. The patent was filed in 2003 by Richard Williams of Maritech, then apparently acquired by Seaward Innovations in 2008 during an assets fire-sale following Martiech’s bankruptcy, but only surfaced after it was granted earlier this month. It describes a system for “automatic searching of electronic system(s) to find relevant submarine patents”. It appears Maritech gave up worldwide patent rights in order to keep the patent application undisclosed.

Subtle Technologies have issued a statement rejecting Seaward’s claim and describing their suit as “a shakedown”. They insist that the patent in question is too broad and nonspecific, and thus invalid, and have stated their intention to resolve the matter in court, if need be. However, patent law experts contacted by this publication stated that contesting the suit would be a risky strategy, since it would be fought under the poorly-understood Texan maritime law. They suggested that Subtle and Seaward would surely settle.

The IP Legal Herald spoke to Subtle Technologies’s CEO, Mark Subtleworth, and asked him why, if the company’s product worked as advertised, it had not been able to discover Seaward Innovations’ submarine patent before it surfaced.

“SubIntelligence is a submarine submarine patent finder,” Subtleworth told our reporter. “That is, it finds submarine patents covering submarine technology. It does not find submarine patents covering submarine submarine patent finder technology. Doing so would require some kind of submarine submarine submarine finder patent finder. We could, perhaps, have built a such a product, but who’s to say there aren’t submarine patents covering techniques to find submarine patents that cover submarine submarine patent finding techniques?”

“The problem repeats itself infinitely.”