Twitter has been the subject of controversy as of late, primarily regarding the content of “tweets,” Twitter’s user-sent messages. Some of this controversy has turned into legal action. While the highest-profile controversies involve celebrities, such as the one involving the recently-settled lawsuit regarding a Twitter impostor of Major League Baseball manager Tony LaRussa, even non-celebrities have filed Twitter-related lawsuits, such as in the Chicago, Illinois lawsuit involving a corporate landlord taking offense to a tenant’s allegedly libelous “tweets” regarding her “moldy” apartment.
Thus, it may not have been much of a surprise that the wildly popular micro-blogging service itself was hit with a patent lawsuit.
On August 4, 2009, a Texas technology company filed a lawsuit against Twitter for patent infringement. In its complaint, plaintiff TechRadium alleges that Twitter infringes on TechRadium’s patented IRIS mass notification system technology. While attorney George Borkowski commented in Wired “Twitter is likely to claim that the [TechRadium] patents should be voided because what has been patented is too generic,” we will be waiting to see what consequences the lawsuit will have on the digital media world.