Julie Samuels, a Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said Apple should join forces with its developers to dispute patent infringement complaints Lodsys, LLC sent to several independent iOS app-makers last week.



From TUAW:

On May 13, a number of iOS developers reported being told their apps, by using the in-app purchase mechanism built into Apple's development kit, infringed on intellectual property owned by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas. According to Lodsys, their patent specifically covers technology that allows end users to upgrade "light" editions of software to fully functional apps. Lodsys claims that Apple, Google, and Microsoft already pay to license the technology for themselves (possibly through investments in the patent portfolio of Intellectual Ventures), but licensing agreements with these tech giants do not extend to third party developers.

  EFF takes on Lodsys patent controversy