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Software Patent
of the year 2006

September – Patent 2

EP1006502 – Terrestrial navigation aid system and terminal of such system

EU-Patent on software (algorithm)
Application to the European Patent Office on 1/12/1999 by SAGEM Communication (France)
Granted on 3/5/2006
Date of priority: 2/12/1998 (valid no more than until 2/12/2018)
Patent attorney: Bloch, Gérard
Patent specification provided by FFII/Gauss
Patent specification provided by EPO/espacenet

Advice on the reading of patent specifications:

The decisive element are the claims, as they specify which actions are forbidden within the framework of the patent.
Violating one single claim is sufficient to be considered a patent violation. Generally, claim number 1 is the decisive main claim which covers all other claims relating to special cases.
The description is intended to help the reader interpret the claim. At the same time, it is supposed to document and disclose the details of the invention. This disclosure is the original purpose of the entire patent system.
In practice, a patent specification contains no detailed information on how the patented procedure could be implemented (even if the patent owner allowed the implementation). In particular, a software patent contains no program code (reference implementation), but merely describes the idea of a software.

Patented idea: A mobile navigation system receives its geographical data from the network.

Main claim: The navigation terminal comes into contact through the communications network with a data bank, sends its location information to it and receives the geographical data about its surroundings in a form that can be directly displayed on the screen.

Further claims:

Several terminals have access to the same data bank through a radio network.
Special case: utilisation of a mobile radio network, the cell distribution of which is simultaneously used for determining the location.
GPS Terminal.
Data exchange per SMS.
The terminal requests the data from the data bank.
Call on the basis of a number of the service provider.
Selection of the route in accordance with the traffic conditions.
The terminal monitors the state of a vehicle.

Description: The patent specifications document the finding that a system is necessary in many cases for the automatic determination of its position and for the displaying of a plan of the surroundings (for ex. at the steering wheel of a vehicle) and is preferred to the manual search in the city map.

Everyday life parallel: A businessman has to finish something in several streets of a foreign city, but he forgot the city map on his desk. He calls his office from his mobile phone, specifies the street corner where he is, receives a description of the surroundings and draws a sketch on the basis of the description.

Examples for patent infringements: All the navigation systems which do not permanently save their geographical data in their memory, but download them from the network if required.

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