ForeSee heads to court as clients face patent infringement claims

Best Buy, WE Energies and Adidas have all received letters from Lodsys claiming that their use of ForeSee’s website survey software, which recruits site visitors to answer customer satisfaction questionnaires, infringes Lodsys’s patents.

ForeSee itself has not received a letter from Lodsys but in court filings it says the company’s conduct puts it “under a reasonable and serious apprehension of imminent suit” alleging patent infringement.

Lodsys owns four patents that, according to its website, broadly cover “systems and methods for providers of products and/or services to interact with users of those products and services to gather information from those users and transmit that information to the provider”.

Documents sent to ForeSee clients by Lodsys claim the survey systems they use infringe some or all of these patents, but ForeSee has asked the court for declaratory judgement that its product does not infringe the patents and that the patents themselves are invalid.

Lodsys has been in the news recently for suing app developers working on Apple’s iOS platform, accusing them of patent infringement in their use of in-app purchasing technology.