If Jawbone wins against Fitbit, that battle will only be the beginning.
Jawbone wristbands like the UP2 (pictured here) track users' steps.
Bradford Gregory / Jawbone / Via jawbone.com
Jawbone is suing Fitbit for infringing on its patented wearable technology. It's bad news for Fitbit, the biggest activity-tracker maker in the world — but if Jawbone wins, it will also mean trouble for Apple, Samsung, and basically any other wearable company that attempts to track movement and equate it to health.
Last week, Jawbone sued Fitbit for infringing on patented technologies that broadly use sensors to detect, collect, and interpret data about users' health and fitness biometrics. In Jawbone's reckoning, those functions sound uncannily similar to "virtually all of Fitbit's wearable technology line."
But here's the bigger issue: Jawbone's patents also have a lot in common with other body-monitoring trackers, like the Apple Watch, and the various Android Wear smartwatches from companies like Samsung and Motorola. If Jawbone's lawsuit and patents stand, these larger rivals would make for natural targets — especially given Jawbone's recent spate of financial difficulties.
For example, Jawbone cites in its lawsuit a patented technology that takes data from "one or more sensors disposed in a wearable computing device" and sets a "target score" that's "based on one or more health-related activities," such as a goal for steps or sleep.
That description will sound familiar to people who use their Apple Watches to set daily goals for exercising, calorie burning, and standing. Or to owners of Android Wear watches that show progress toward daily step goals. Or to customers that set targets for their steps, sleep, and calories with Garmin smartwatches and activity trackers.
"If I own those patents, I would litigate," said Chris Marlett, CEO of MDB Capital Group, an investment banking firm that specializes in intellectual property. "Fitbit's certainly doing it. So is anybody that's measuring steps or anybody that's inputting heart rate or doing anything to try and give feedback to the user to do more of it or do less of it. Anybody that wants to enter the space will infringe that patent."
The Apple Watch recognizes when users make progress on fitness goals.
Two other Jawbone-patented technologies also sound an awful lot like other devices. One involves using data from worn sensors to deduce a user's physiological status and context, such as location; the other involves continuously monitoring a user's consumed and burned calories. Jawbone paid more than $100 million to acquire these patents as part of BodyMedia, a wearable technology company, in April 2013.
Sid Leach, a partner at the law firm Snell & Wilmer, predicts that this lawsuit means trouble for others in the space. "It could even impact the Apple Watch," he said, citing the number of Jawbone's patents and the competitive nature of the wearables market.
If Jawbone's patents hold up, they would be ammunition against the Apple Watch — which, with Apple's clout and capital, threatens to swallow both Jawbone and Fitbit's market share.
"If I'm Jawbone," Marlett said, "I want to take down Fitbit first before I go and attack Apple."
If that happens, it wouldn't be the first time a company successfully went after a target and then took on a bigger rival. In 2001, NTP, a Virginia patent holding company, sued Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, for allegedly infringing on its wireless email patents. After NTP won a $612.5 million settlement, it went on from 2007 to 2010 to sue more than a dozen other tech giants, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, for infringing on those patents, too. (Those lawsuits were settled in 2012.)
Jawbone and Google declined to comment for this story, and Apple did not return a request for comment.
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