Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> Patent Troll Tracker

Patent Law

: Patent Troll Tracker

Acacia Sues Apple over iTunes ... In East St. Louis, Again

By Troll Tracker

New Acacia subsidiary Restricted Spending Solutions, LLC sued Apple last Wednesday in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the Southern District of Illinois. Acacia sued Apple last November in the Southern District of Illinois over the iChat feature, as I reported here. Then Acacia sued 19 defendants in the medical field in East St. Louis in December. This caused me to puzzle why East St. Louis? So this is the third lawsuit filed by Acacia in the Southern District of Illinois in the last four months.

The latest Apple lawsuit asks the court to order Apple to contact each of its customers of iTunes, and destroy all existing copies of iTunes that uses the "iTunes Allowance component" featured on iTunes. The complaint alleges that:

The iTunes Allowance feature is a component of iTunes which allows family members and friends to create an account for automatically transferring chosen dollar amounts via a credit card to a recipient's iTunes Store account for use by recipient in the iTunes Store.

In this case, Acacia alleges it owns the patent-in-suit, 7,143,064, titled "Controlled Entertainment Spending Account," as opposed to other cases where it is an exclusive licensee. Here's claim 1 of what I consider to be a business-method patent:

A computer-based method for allocating parental funds in preestablished accounts for use by children, comprising;

providing a bank or credit account containing parental funds for allocation to at least one child;

creating a secondary account file with an internet music file supplier accessible by a child for spending on internet music purchases; and

periodically transferring directly and automatically to said secondary account file from said bank or credit account an allowance payment for use by said child to purchase and transfer music files over the internet using a personal computer;

wherein said steps of creating a secondary account file and periodically transferring funds from said bank or credit account to said secondary account are performed using information supplied by said parent over the internet using a personal computer.

The priority date of the '064 patent is possibly April 16, 1996 (it is a continuation-in-part of a division of a continuation-in-part of an abandoned application). Pretty early if it is entitled to the earliest application, but either way definitely a headache for Apple on one of its top-selling services.

Full post as published by Patent Troll Tracker on February 11, 2008 (boomark / email).