I first heard about this yesterday while listening to TWiT 207 and Greg Friese was also nice enough to point it out. A Texas based company called TechRadium™ is suing Twitter over the “process for simultaneously notifying large numbers of people about emergencies through multiple communication gateways, such as cell phones, pagers and e-mail.[1]” TechRadium™ is the creator of a proprietary system called IRIS© that they sell to organizations, public safety agencies, and of course governments.

The Issue According To TechRadium™, Is Us

The supposed issue at hand are TechRadium™’s patent numbers 7,130,389 filed in April 2005, 7,496,183 filed in December of 2007, and 7,519,165 filed April 2009 [2]. These patents outline a process to send a message to group participants via text and voicemail across numerous different devices.

While I am no patent law attorney I can tell you that the idea of one to many communication via text and voice is neither a new idea nor a new technology. E-mail allows you to send one text message to many recipients, cell companies themselves have enabled SMS messaging on their devices to allow e-mail’s to be received on phones (not including BlackBerry’s obvious e-mail feature), paging systems are still used across the country to send out call information, mobile data terminals over both radio frequencies and cellular frequencies do the same, as do two way radios that are now not only analog but digital as well. This is certainly not a new concept and not a technology that TechRadium™ can claim. In fact, their lawsuit doesn’t even really address the actual normal everyday use of Twitter at all as the issue.

The issue, according to TechRadium™, is us.

TechRadium™ has a problem with public safety agencies such as LA Fire (California), The American Red Cross (National Non-profit), Unruh Fire Department (Kansas), The Food and Drug Administration (Federal), South Orange Rescue (New Jersey), and The Center for Disease and Control (Federal). In their opinion these agencies using Twitter to better serve the people in their communities instead of the IRIS© product that they charge for is therefore costing them money and an infringement on their product.

Let me be very clear when I tell you that the TechRadium™ lawsuit, in my opinion, is both treacherous as well as frivolous.

I find it treacherous against the American Public for this company to try and handicap Public Safety Agencies who are already facing budget cuts that are forcing rolling service brown outs or just flat out closures cutting service to their communities. Why can’t Public Safety Agencies be afforded the same opportunities as individuals, small companies, and large corporations? Well it’s because obviously your tax dollars aren’t lining TechRadium™’s pocket.

Of course something they have obviously overlooked is that RSS Feeds have been syndicating messages across platforms since 1999, which is 6 years before their patent was filed. I don’t see them trying to sue AT&T for SMS Messaging, Microsoft for e-mail, or Motorola for pagers even though there are Public Safety Agencies certainly using those services. I also don’t see them suing the FCC for empowering television and radio stations to provide the public access to Emergency Broadcast System… so why is Twitter any different? Oh right, because it’s free, easy to use, popular, and in their minds probably not as powerful (and therefore an easier target for a litigious shakedown) as Facebook.

One of the supposed key components of IRIS© is the ability to take one message and translate it across multiple mediums. Therefore a text message would be translated into voice and a voice message into text. Does Twitter do that? No… but Kindle can! So the possibly only innovative idea that TechRadium™ came up with isn’t even being accomplished by the defendant, which is why I think it’s a frivolous lawsuit by a company who has a history of doing this.

The bottom line is treacherous corporate mongers suck.

Source 1: Law.com: Twitter Sued Over Emergency Tweets

Source 2: TechCrunch: Here Come The Twitter Patent Lawsuits

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