Patent owners want to strip a little girl
On Slashdot laid out the sad story of the girl Maya , who may literally lose the opportunity to speak because of the fights in the field of patent law.
The fact is that the girl is having difficulty speaking, after a long search, her mother found the program Speak for Your for iPad. With its help, the child can learn the language by selecting the desired icons on the tablet screen. This application area is Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The only problem is that the AAC market is clearly divided between large corporations that produce specialized devices for these purposes and have thick packages of patents.
Now the corporations Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich filed a lawsuit against two doctors who developed the program Speak for Yourself, accusing those of patent infringement.
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Speak for Yourself is a fairly expensive application, on iTunes it sells for $ 299.99, but even if you add the price of an iPad, it’s still less expensive for parents than specialized AAC devices from Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich, which have similar functionality and cost up to $ 9,000.
The girl's mom is concerned that if the claim is satisfied, the program will be removed from iTunes, and she does not have nine thousand dollars. She sent letters to the aforementioned companies, but those do not yet have plans to release applications for the iPad, because this undermines the business of selling hardware devices, and profits then drop significantly.
“For my daughter, the point is not at all what happens in court, but in what happens to her program. An iPad with a special case and the Speak for Yourself program has become a means of communication for it. She does not care who earns money, what is the patent law or the history of large corporations against small startups ... it is important to just be able to tell mom that she wants milk instead of water or wants to go to the zoo, or with whom she played in the garden. She just wants to be able to talk, ”writes the girl’s mother.
Girl Maya proudly holds her talker
The fact is that the girl is having difficulty speaking, after a long search, her mother found the program Speak for Your for iPad. With its help, the child can learn the language by selecting the desired icons on the tablet screen. This application area is Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The only problem is that the AAC market is clearly divided between large corporations that produce specialized devices for these purposes and have thick packages of patents.
Now the corporations Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich filed a lawsuit against two doctors who developed the program Speak for Yourself, accusing those of patent infringement.
')
Speak for Yourself is a fairly expensive application, on iTunes it sells for $ 299.99, but even if you add the price of an iPad, it’s still less expensive for parents than specialized AAC devices from Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich, which have similar functionality and cost up to $ 9,000.
The girl's mom is concerned that if the claim is satisfied, the program will be removed from iTunes, and she does not have nine thousand dollars. She sent letters to the aforementioned companies, but those do not yet have plans to release applications for the iPad, because this undermines the business of selling hardware devices, and profits then drop significantly.
“For my daughter, the point is not at all what happens in court, but in what happens to her program. An iPad with a special case and the Speak for Yourself program has become a means of communication for it. She does not care who earns money, what is the patent law or the history of large corporations against small startups ... it is important to just be able to tell mom that she wants milk instead of water or wants to go to the zoo, or with whom she played in the garden. She just wants to be able to talk, ”writes the girl’s mother.
Girl Maya proudly holds her talker
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/140875/
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