Snapchat owner caught up in IP suits
Snap, formerly known as Snapchat, has been caught up in a patent infringement claim on the same day that it filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US.
Investel Capital filed the patent infringement claim on Thursday, February 2, at the US District Court for the Central District of California.
The Canada-based investment fund claimed that it invented and owns the rights to location-based filters that Snap calls “Geofilters”.
US patent number 9,407,816, called “Apparatus and method for supplying content aware photo filters”, is at the centre of this dispute.
In August last year, Investel filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Snap, the owner of the Snapchat app, in the Federal Court of Canada.
According to a statement from Investel, the Canadian court ruled that the claim could proceed on the grounds of sufficiency.
Although Snap’s IPO filing doesn’t mention Investel’s lawsuit, it does state that Snap agreed to pay $157.5 million to a man who asserted that Snap was “using certain intellectual property that the individual jointly owned with our founders”.
Lawry Trevor-Deutsch, Investel’s managing partner, said: “The revelation that it settled an IP suit with Reggie Brown, an ‘ousted founder’ of Snapchat, shows that the company has a pattern of grabbing IP that it does not own or have the right to use.”
Trevor-Deutsch added: “Snap clearly does not respect IP rights. It is unconscionable that they did not even mention Investel’s patent litigation in its filing.”
But this is not the only IP litigation that Snap is facing—on the same day, Eyebobs, a developer of reading glasses, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against the company.
Filed at the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, Eyebobs’ suit requested that the court enjoin Snap from further using its ‘Spectacles’ product.
In December 2016, Eyebobs filed a trademark infringement complaint against Snap, which had begun selling its ‘Spectacles’-branded sunglasses under an eyeball design mark—an eyeball against a yellow background.
According to Eyebobs, the design infringes its logo, which has represented the brand since 2001 and is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The glasses company said it had tried to handle the situation “amicably” but that Snap had “refused to recognise the problem and has proceeded with the use of the infringing mark”.
Michael Magerman, CEO of Eyebobs, said: “Ultimately, the new ‘Spectacles’ logo is nearly identical to the one our customers have become familiar with over the past 15 years. Allowing another business—particular one selling glasses—to use that mark would be very damaging to our business’s growth and expansion in the years ahead.”
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