Monster Media Taking Aerva To Court In Patent Dispute
March 10, 2015 by Dave Haynes
Monster Media has filed a claim against the Boston-based software firm Aerva, in the New York Southern District Court, alleging willful patent infringement.
Monster is asserting a patent for retrieving and then displaying social media content on screens. The patent was acquired by Monster when it acquired Locamoda.
My guess is this is not the last such claim Monster may make against other software companies, as MANY CMS platforms grab and display content based on hash tags.
This is wildly different from the patent troll business the industry has seen. Locamoda was doing social media display to screens before people started calling it social media, via things like wifitti.
Display social media on screens is quite common across networks, and I don’t know the intricacies of the patent and method to say whether the Monster/Locamoda patent is broad, or sufficiently well-defined that only some companies are infringing in some way.
The link to the patent is here, for those who like reading these types of things. I’m familiar with it.
https://www.google.com/patents/US8615565
I am not an IP lawyer, but based on the claims, you are infringing if you have a CMS that can automatically display any social media content based on keywords that you associate to the screen. Likewise, you are infringing if you produce and sell any dynamic content (HTML5, flash or otherwise) that does the same.
Curious to see how widely Monster tries to enforce this.