How is Lyft not infringing on Uber&#39;s patent?
<p>Uber owns <a href="https://www.quora.com/Does-Uber-have-any-patents" rel="nofollow noreferrer">several patents</a>, many of which are for systems that Lyft has as well. As such, how is Lyft not infringing on Uber's patents?</p>

<p>For instance, just to pick an example, "providing on-demand services through use of personal computing services."</p>

<p>"Providing on-demand services through use of personal computing services" is a preamble of a patent claim. In the case of one Uber patent, US9230292, claim 1 starts with </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>A method for providing information about an on-demand service on a
  computing device, . . .</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The preamble tells the reader what the claimed invention does; the rest of the claim (300+ words in this case) tell the reader the steps it takes in doing it. Two patented inventions can produce the same result and a method could produce the result promised in the Uber preamble but do it without performing all of the steps in the Uber claims, and therefore not infringe the patent.</p>

<p>"Providing on-demand services through use of personal computing services" would just be an abstract idea. You need more for a patent. You have to provide the actual method that you are using. So it would be "We are providing on-demand services through use of personal computing services by doing A, B and C". Lyft can then go and provide on-demand services through use of personal computing services by doing X, Y and Z, and that is not covered by the patent. </p>

<p>There's also in the USA for some years now the principle that if you combine A, B and C, and combining them does exactly what the average person would expect, then this isn't patent worthy. So "doing things by computer" cannot be patented if the only difference is what the average person would expect, like getting results quicker, handling big amounts of data and so on. </p>

patents