Life360 fights back against patent troll by sharing resources with other victims

When patent holder AGIS unleashed a patent lawsuit against Life360, chief executive Chris Hulls replied with a … very “candid” letter, to say the least.

Now, the company is taking another step in its quest to squash AGIS’s patent lawsuits, which it believes are unwarranted: It is publicly releasing prior art and invalidity contentions worth more than $100,000 in legal costs.

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Life360 is a mobile-based social network aimed at families, that heavily uses location-sharing to help family members stay connected to each other.

At the time of Hulls’ reply to AGIS, the company had just raised $55 million in a third round of funding. The patent in question, U.S. patent 7031728, covers “a cellular PDA communication system for allowing a plurality of cellular phone users to monitor each others’ location and status,” through markers superimposed on a map. The patent also covers the ability to call others by tapping their markers on the map.

“We’re getting sued for having markers on a map showing where people are and allowing communication between them. I could show them a Star Trek episode from the 1960s” that had a similar concept, Hulls told VentureBeat at the time. In short, he believes the patent is incredibly vague, and AGIS is only suing Life360 to get money, not because there’s a real patent infringement.

The resources Life360 is making publicly available online are a body of what is known as “prior art.” US Legal defines prior art as “a term used in patent law to broadly describe the entire body of knowledge from the beginning of time to the present. Prior art is everything publicly known before the invention, as shown in earlier patents and other published material. It is a barrier to obtaining a patent.”

While Life360 has settled such disputes in the past, this time around, Hulls decided to fight the lawsuit and has spent “easily over $100,000” in assembling the research and resources the company is releasing. The idea is that by making all this expensive legal work available, Life360 can help small startups that don’t have the money or legal resources also fight AGIS lawsuits against them instead of settling. The patent is also so vague and broad that Hulls believes many other companies could be targeted by AGIS, according to his note on the prior art’s website.

Back in May, Hulls told us that he was thinking of possibly setting up an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to assemble funds for this legal research, although it looks like he decided to have Life360 swallow the costs itself.

Hulls is also inviting any startups, companies, and organizations to join him and Life360 in fighting AGIS and other patent trolls suing tech companies.