The invention pings both an IP address of a first server, and a URL of a different server;
The patent examiner found an earlier disclosure of very basic pinging (the document is referred to as "Sinha"); no mention of IP+URL pinging (at least according to Theranos), or switching network providers as a result.
You may read this and think how obvious it is to ping both a domain and an IP address, and switch providers based on that;
but unless you can find it in an earlier reference with this (before Sept 2011), or convince a court it's an abstract idea ("101" in patent parlance), this is what's patent-worthy according to present laws..
If you spend 200-800k, this patent can be invalidated easily. These patents get granted because examiners have less than a day to evaluate them, and the PTO survives off the maintenance fees (it receives zero tax dollars), and the cost of invalidating them later.
The invention pings both an IP address of a first server, and a URL of a different server; The patent examiner found an earlier disclosure of very basic pinging (the document is referred to as "Sinha"); no mention of IP+URL pinging (at least according to Theranos), or switching network providers as a result.
You may read this and think how obvious it is to ping both a domain and an IP address, and switch providers based on that; but unless you can find it in an earlier reference with this (before Sept 2011), or convince a court it's an abstract idea ("101" in patent parlance), this is what's patent-worthy according to present laws..
If you spend 200-800k, this patent can be invalidated easily. These patents get granted because examiners have less than a day to evaluate them, and the PTO survives off the maintenance fees (it receives zero tax dollars), and the cost of invalidating them later.