back to article British Gas wins pre-paid smart meter patent lawsuit

British Gas has won a patent infringement claim brought against it by Smart-Tech, the holder of a certain smart meter patent. Had BG lost, it would have had to pay out tens of millions of pounds in royalties. The case, heard in May in London's High Court, revolved around a Meter-Tech patent filed in the year 2000 titled “A …

  1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    The money will come from somewhere

    I would hazard a guess that Smart-Tech will now claim a tax loss.

  2. Stoneshop
    Devil

    the patent lacked an “inventive step”.

    And not even indirectly, as in "a method or system to make money by patenting something utterly trivial, obvious and unimaginative", because for that too there's now an overwhelming pile of prior art.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Have I got this right?

    A company writes some code which, presumably by a chain of purchases, finds its way into a product. It patents some of the technology* in the code, code for which I assume it was paid and then tries to sue the ultimate customer for breach of patent? Or did I miss something? I admit I've made a couple of assumptions but the case was about patent not copyright.

    * Ignoring the question of patentability which seems to have been an issue here.

    1. veti Silver badge

      As I read it - no, there's no indication that BG was using any code that had derived in any way from MeterTech.

      But the thing about patents is, it gives you ownership of the whole idea. If I patent "making payments using a meter number as an identifier", and you - quite independently and without being aware of my existence, much less my work - come up with the same idea, I can sue you for infringing my patent, precisely because you haven't paid me for it.

      That's what was going on here. And the judge, in a reassuring display of good sense, wasn't having it, because the idea itself is patently (sorry) obvious.

  4. styx-tdo

    .. use the customer ID to identify a smart meter is rubbish - way too much space for clerical errors.. swapping meters or having issues when someone moves.. that is stupid.

    serial number is (provided it is unique, like a mac - yes, i look at you, 3com) the natural choice.. how was that patent ever granted?!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      <Shudder>....3com and MAC in one sentence...kids, ask the old, wrinkly ones in the corner sat that muttering to themselves "I told you so".

    2. phuzz Silver badge

      I'm clearly to young to have heard this one, care to enlighten us kids about 3Com and MACs?

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
        Holmes

        I'm clearly to young to have heard this one, care to enlighten us kids about 3Com and MAC

        First network card to have the Mac reprogrammable via a normal API at runtime. 3C509. In those days everyone else had it burned into EPROM and thus you could rely on it.

        So some code to change the Mac could wreck massive havoc on networks which had heavy dependency on MACs, specifically Novell and clones.

        You can guess how old am I by remembering this one ;)

        1. BenDwire Silver badge
          Facepalm

          You can guess how old am I by remembering this one ;)

          And you can guess how old I am because I've still got one in use ....

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          "First network card to have the Mac reprogrammable via a normal API at runtime. 3C509."

          HP9000 servers could also do this. There was a product which enabled them to join DECNet. As far as I could make out DECNet used only recognised MACs which has their own manufacturer code in the high end bits. So the DECNet for HP product overwrote the HP ID to DEC's. There was, of course, a probability that the new MAC would clash with something on your network but it was vanishingly small.

          Of course when we fired it up for the first time the PC users connecting to the server lost their connections until their ARP caches were refreshed. Oops.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "(?) DECNet used only recognised MACs which has their own manufacturer code in the high end bits. (?)"

            Not exactly.

            DEC stuff came with MACs that used to start 08-00-2B (more were eventually needed). [1]

            DECnet used a facility to add (not replace) a MAC on a node-specific basis. The additional MAC was assigned on a system when DECnet was started (if I recall correctly), and was of the format AA-00-04-00 (and xx-xx). DECnet had a 16bit address space and DECnet addresses were allocated to boxes rather than to interfaces.. The bottom 16 bits of the 'additional' MAC address contain the 16 bits of the DECnet address. This made it possible for boxes to talk to each other without needing a (then expensive) router to map node numbers to MAC addresses (ARP and all that stuff would be the equivalent in the IP world).

            There were doubtless other reasons too.

            [1] I realised how serious MS were about privacy when, one day a very very long time ago, for some reason I was looking at a hex dump of a Word document and saw 08-00-2b in the stream of characters. For various reasons it was one of those patterns that caught my eye. The rest, as they say, is history.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The 3com issue was they shipped thousands of cards with the same MAC (HP I believe did the same to a lesser degree)

        We plugged in 20 machines to do a build and completely destroyed the LAN. It took days to find the issue.

    3. Tom Servo

      This is a world where Apple claim a patent on a paper bag as it's folded differently.

      I agree that he patent clerks need to be a little more diligent when approving applications to avoid patent trolls and lawyers profiting handsomely down the line in court.

  5. Anonymous Blowhard

    Prior Art

    Energy meters have to have a serial number, for identification purposes related to their certification.

    An account number is associated with a particular meter (by serial number) and if there are problems the meter can be replaced and the new serial number associated with the account.

    So British Gas were just continuing the method they already use for non-prepay meters.

    1. Mark Honman

      Re: Prior Art

      Not just that, but in the STS specification for prepayment credit transfer the meter serial number is the unique ID of the meter. STS has been around since the mid-1990s.

      As a side-note, one of the cute things about STS is that the serial number is part of the credit encryption scheme; therefore in a wireless system it is feasible to broadcast the credit tokens...

    2. veti Silver badge

      Re: Prior Art

      Not quite. The case is about associating payments directly with the meter number.

      British Gas doesn't do that for regular meters: your payment is associated with your account number. After all, you may have half a dozen separate meters, each with their own number. Or you may have moved out of the house three months ago and be paying off old debt. Whatever, there are gazillions of scenarios where it would be problematic, as well as silly, to try to associate a payment with a specific meter.

      But for prepay meters, those considerations don't apply, and associating the payment directly with the meter is the obvious and correct thing to do. With prepay, it doesn't even matter who the customer is. I can, if I choose, load a hundred quid of credit onto my meter the day before I move out, and leave that as a gift to the next resident - that's a completely valid thing to do and I'd be highly indignant if my supplier interfered with it.

      1. Mark Honman

        Re: Prior Art

        > The case is about associating payments directly with the meter number.

        Yes, that is how STS works. IMO it is about the only sane way to handle credit transfer to prepayment meters.

        STS was originally intended for developing-world markets, where many customers are illiterate. Typically the customer is given a magstripe card with the meter number on it. This is all that is needed at POS for the customer to make their purchase.

  6. LewisCowles1

    Common sense

    The use of a meter would have caused problems for whatever storage system ties the meter to a customer.

    It's basic relational database design to use an identifier that is not the current most recent object for parent-child relationships, and basic storage design not to store or use potentially ephemeral values for indexing or addressing root objects.

    Considering "meter tech" bought a tech company it's amazing they made such stupid, frankly laughable comments.

    The broader point is (or should be) that nobody should be able to patent anything that is for the public good as slapping items behind a paywall forces all our bills up. It really does make no sense whatsoever.

    Apologies to British Gas I clearly misread at first and thought you were litigating competition over such features (also not on)

  7. Natalie Gritpants

    Patent values

    Interesting how the value of the patent varied so much, just goes to show that value is speculative until the item is sold (or scrapped for zero as this was). There must have been some Dr Evil moments in the board room as they came up with this.

  8. Dwarf

    Nice to see some common sense here

    Good to see that a common sense judgement was reached.

    A unique identifier for the meter (such as its serial number) make perfect sense as there are many cases where its not 1:1, for example

    • Customer may have multiple meters on a site, for example a large property (Hotel, industrial site, etc) with different feeds
    • A customer can have different sites that are managed from one account.
    • Larger houses sometimes have different feeds - garage/summer house etc as they have different underground pipework and can be isolated separately
    • Someone paying for their parents feed etc.
    • Meters go faulty and need replacement,
    • People move and get different meter serial numbers, but are still the same customer

    Hope they invalidate the patent - since the use of a serial number is a common thing in many different applications, so why did they even get the patent in the first place ??.

    Also hope that the completely broken patent system is overhauled to put some common sense back into it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice to see some common sense here

      All true. I am one who has designed such a database for prepayment meter management.

  9. GrapeBunch

    bonus pretii ?

    Surely state-employed hackers are assembling arsenals (one arsenal per state) of "smart meter" exploits to deploy should things ever get "hot". You might imagine that these exploits would be "up to" cutting off your service, but where electricity and natural gas are concerned, exploits can be far more deleterious than that. I'm glad to see that payment is integrated into the function of some smart meters. Perhaps this will attract the attention of private or commercial hackers for present-day exploits. This will have two benefits: it will allow Utilities a practice-ground to see how to defend against everyday threats (the threats from states are likely to be more powerful because a: they have more resources; and b: their arsenals will include exploits where they aren't afraid of getting caught); and the rest of us may begin to ask why our utility conduits are labelled "Blow Me (Up)".

  10. Hans 1
    WTF?

    >Meter-Tech countered that BG should have used the customer's account number as the main reference point, claiming that its patent covered the use of the smart meter serial number in that context and that BG was therefore infringing its patent.

    So, Meter-Tech claim a patent on using a "serial number" as a uid ?

    They should be sued into oblivion by the crown court for wasting their time ...

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Indeed, not only are they wasting the court time, they are helping to create an overhead that will be passed on the rest of us, the legal costs. And they were hoping to get British Gas to pay a royalty, which effectively will be the British Gas customer paying them. For some nebulous idea. I've no idea how it was patented in the first place.

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