Georgia tech company drops Uber suit to fight patent invalidation
An Atlanta-based app developer has been forced to retreat from its lawsuit against Uber after a California federal court ruled that its ridesharing technology patent was invalid.
RideApp sued Uber in May this year, claiming that the popular ridesharing app infringed its patent for a “communications and computer-based urban transit system”.
Uber has emerged as the US market leader in providing peer-to-peer ridesharing, which underwent rapid growth at the start of the decade.
RideApp’s patent essentially claims the basic concept underpinning the sector as the Atlanta company’s own proprietary technology.
The patent lists Stephen Dickerson, RideApp founder and professor at Georgia Tech Engineering, as the inventor of a “novel communication and on-demand transportation system” incorporating cellular communication, GPS, automatic billing, and other features of ridesharing apps.
Dickerson incorporated RideApp, which describes itself as a “public benefit corporation” or ‘B-Corp’, to develop the technology.
When Uber launched in 2010, the suit recalled, it purported to answer the question: “How do you get a ride at the push of a button?”.
According to RideApp, that problem was already solved more than a decade earlier when Dickerson filed the ‘730 patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
In its complaint, filed in May at the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, RideApp said that “Uber literally cannot operate” without infringing the ‘730 patent.
The Georgia company was seeking enhanced damages for willful infringement as well as attorneys’ fees, but its efforts have come unstuck after a separate litigation led to the patent being declared invalid.
In 2018, RideApp sued San Francisco-based Lyft, the second-largest ridesharing company after Uber, at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Last month, the California court declared claims 2, 3, and 6 of the ‘730 patent to be “invalid for indefiniteness”.
According to an expert witness for Lyft, the ‘730 patent does not specify how the described transportation system would actually calculate the distance between a passenger and a prospective driver.
The court agreed with the expert’s assessment that the ‘730 patent effectively left a person of ordinary skill in the art to “fill in the gaps using his or her own ingenuity and skill”.
In the wake of the ruling, RideApp and Uber agreed a tolling and standstill agreement whereby the suit was dismissed without prejudice pending RideApp’s appeal of the court’s decision.
If its appeal is successful, the agreement would allow RideApp to refile its complaint against Uber without any effect on the amount of damages it can claim.
As a ‘B-Corp’, RideApp says it is focused on reducing the problem of traffic congestion in the state of Georgia. Its website states that although it is not currently operating, it anticipates it will function as a public utility in the state.
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