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Honeywell Sues Nest Labs for Patent Infringement on Thermostats
Honeywell has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nest Labs, alleging that the start-up company has infringed on seven Honeywell patents related to thermostat technology.
Filed today in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, the company also links Best Buy to the lawsuit. Specifically, Honeywell says Nest is infringing on the following patents:
U.S. Patent No. 7,634,504 – “Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller”
U.S. Patent No. 7,142,948 – “Controller Interface with Dynamic Schedule Display”
U.S. Patent No. 7,584,899 – “HVAC Controller”
U.S. Patent No. 7,159,789 – “Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface”
U.S. Patent No. 7,159,790 – “Thermostat with Offset Drive”
U.S. Patent No. 7,476,988 – “Power Stealing Control Devices”
U.S. Patent No. 6,975,958 – “Profile Based Method for Deriving a Temperature Setpoint Using a ‘Delta’ Based On Cross-Indexing a Received Price-Point Level Signal.”
“Competition is good and we welcome it, but we will not stand by while competitors, large or small, offer products that infringe on our intellectual property,” says Beth Wozniak, president, Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls. “From our iconic ‘round thermostat’ to the first programmable and simple-to-use touch screen thermostats, Honeywell is known for setting the standard in home comfort and energy efficiency.”
Over the years, Honeywell says it has invested “substantial” resources into the research and development of thermostats. Besides the company’s lengthy product line, Honeywell holds as hundreds of patents in the thermostat space alone.
Honeywell is seeking to recover damages caused by the infringement.
Honeywell recently filed a separate suit against Venstar Inc. and ICM Controls for infringing patents related to thermostat and combustion controls patents.
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News · Product News · Home Automation and Control · Energy Management · Legal · Honeywell · Nest ·4 Comments (displayed in order by date/time)
Honeywell sucks…they can’t create anything remotely as cool as the NEST thermostat so they opt to try and kill it…
U.S. Patent No. 7,584,899 – “HVAC Controller”
U.S. Patent No. 7,159,789 – “Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface”
“Competition is good and we welcome it”
That is pretty funny statement if these two patents are as broad as they appear in name as it basically says ‘compete, just not with hvac controllers’. Either they went for licensing payments and got rebuffed and are just adding pressure or they really do view Nest as a threat and are trying to kill them off before they can get going.
You can’t stop progress. Most of honeywells products look like they are from Radio Shack in 1996. I completely agree with Kyle, it looks like a snipey desperation move by a company that can’t keep up. If NEST ripped off Honeywells products directly, they wouldn’t sell. They would be unattractive, unoriginal and probably unprofitable. We don’t need another Honeywell, we need NEST. A company who is taking an otherwise boring product (at the average consumer level) and making it rad again.
Talk about court actions that stifle innovation in the CE market. Should probably be paying as much attention to this as we are the DVD CCA case.