Update 2: Michigan Assoc. of Realtors to Pay for Member Use of Civix Mapping Patent
Multiple listing services and Realtor associations now have blanket protection from legal claims by a company that holds several patents on location-based Internet search techniques, after the National Association of Realtors raised $7.5 million in licensing fees by Tuesday's deadline [8/16/11].
--- update 7/19/11 ---
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) Is on track to pay its licensing fees to CIVIX for use of its location based search patent. It promised $5 million by July 17 and has delivered.
--- original post 5/31/11 ---
The Michigan Association of Realtors will pay a settlement on behalf of 43 groups in the state to deal with potential lawsuits against member users who have a mapping app that might infringe a mapping patent. Michigan's $250,000 is part of a $7.5 million settlement deal for the National Association of Realtors. Alexandria, Va.-based Civix-DDI LLC holds the patent and already has settlements with the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo. In recent years the company has gone after smaller players with what many believe are reasonable licensing fees. (This will sound familiar to the REAL Inc case APB covered in depth over the years.) So far the company has 22 licensees most related to actual or threatened legal action.
What patented technology? It's titled "System and methods for remotely accessing a selected group of items of interest from a database," US patent 6,385,622 from May 2002. Abstract:
A user can access a common database from a remote communications port, at any qualified location, to generate a map or other positional information which locates selected items of interest, e.g., businesses, stores, architectural sites, and the like. The database contains information representing the items of interest, including, for each of the items of interest, positional coordinates, a geographic vicinity, and a selected category. The positional coordinates discretely locate the vicinity, while the vicinity specifies the exact locations of the items of interest in the selected category. For example, a user in New York can select the display of sporting shops in the area surrounding Chicago O'Hara International Airport selectively. A user can also access a port and display locations of items of interest within the same vicinity as the user and relative to the user's position. The database can be modified from qualified remote locations to change, or add to, the information therein. An advertisement can be tagged to the display or print out as an association with the selected items of interest.
While it seems there is some prior art, so far most organizations are paying up. The patent runs out in 2015, so it seems there's a bit of gold rush going on now.
