The patent in the complaint doesn't even have anything to do with what we do as a company! It describes a system that calls 911 when it detects a crash (like onstar). Ignore the (very generic) title and read on in the actual patent. https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/10454707
But for the purposes of attempting to extract a settlement, it doesn't matter. It will only matter after a long and expensive trial.
(I would like to invalidate the patent entirely, which several of their patents already have been. But even if it is valid, it also has to apply to us)
The disclosures in the patent aren't what they are suing you over. Read the claims. Patents like this often have a lot of stuff shoved into the disclosure so that they can keep the patent application alive to write more patents based on the original disclosure. The claims appear to be written to read on devices like yours: My knowledge of your system is a bit dated, but I thought you had a device that you plugged into a port in the car instead of a manufacturer-installed thing. This is why this patent has a 2007 priority date, but a 2018 application date: they essentially wrote a ridiculously broad disclosure, and kept filing patents based on it.
Dataspeed did appear to have tried to invalidate this patent in 2019 (see the IPR documents linked there), and succeeded on all but claim 20. If your device does not have a relay which shuts off its electrical connection within the car, you're probably safe. You could try to invalidate it, but you should read the docs from the IPR to see what Dataspeed did and what you might need to do.
My gut-check guess is that claim 20 is probably not going to get invalidated unless you can find some weird after-market car part from before 2007 which does a safety shut-off of a car component.
A lead would need to teach significantly more to even be considered.
Does the vehicle have (1) an after-market device installed that (2) detects that a first component stopped sending commands to a second component and (3) uses relay switch to disconnect the failed first component from the second component and (4) starts sending commands to the second component on its own that are indistinguishable from those sent by the first component?
Technically, the above requirements are needed against claim 20 of '707. Claim 6 requires fewer features.
That doesn't help us because:
(1) claim 20 is asserted in the complaint [0], and
(2) claim 20 was upheld in a previous challenge to its validity (an "IPR"), so it's got some staying power.
This is a good start but not fully there. Ideally you would like a bigger published technical description of that electronic stop device, so you can map the device onto the claims to show that a claimed device existed before the patent was filed.
You are describing one scenario where this invention could be used ("a system that calls 911 when it detects a crash").
The legal protection provided by this patent is _not_ limited to any specific context or scenario.
Let's take '707 claim 6. _Any_ commercial product with each and every one of the following bullet points ("limitations" in lawyer-speak) infringes and must purchase a license to this patent.
[1] A vehicle, comprising:
[2] a factory-installed first apparatus configured to generate an electrical signal;
[3] a factory-installed second apparatus configured to receive the electrical signal; and
[4] a retrofit apparatus electrically connected to the factory-installed second apparatus,
[5] wherein the retrofit apparatus generates a mimicked electrical signal independently of the electrical signal generated by the factory-installed first apparatus, and
[6] wherein the factory-installed second apparatus receives the mimicked electrical signal.
Once you’re done crushing this patent troll, go after the USPTO for granting bogus patents in the first place - you shouldn’t have to bear the costs of fixing their fuckups.
We write open source ADAS software, and it doesn't have any functionality like that: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
But for the purposes of attempting to extract a settlement, it doesn't matter. It will only matter after a long and expensive trial.
(I would like to invalidate the patent entirely, which several of their patents already have been. But even if it is valid, it also has to apply to us)