Another lawsuit filed against Uber by Hailo Technologies

While Uber is already battling a case filed by Google's Waymo for stealing 14k documents, here comes another lawsuit from a company named Hailo Technologies which has sued Uber over alleged infringement of U.S. Patent 5,973,619, that covers an “automated vehicle dispatch and payment honouring system.”

The lawsuit was submitted by the Southern California law firm Cotman IP in U.S. District Court for California’s Central District on behalf of Hailo Technologies LLC, which shares a similar name with the cab service Hailo. However, it's an entirely separate entity, sharing no relation with Hailo. Hailo left the American market in 2014 and more recently merged with Daimler’s MyTaxi.

Correcting VentureBeat report, a representative for Daimler’s MyTaxi wrote on social media saying the report is incorrect.

@jordannovet HI Jordan, your article about Hailo suing Uber/Lyft is incorrect. It must be a different Hailo company that filed the lawsuit.

— Stefan Keuchel (@frischkopp) April 22, 2017

Filed by Alexis Paredes in 1997 and granted in 1999, the patent, describes a software system that allows a user to pick a means of transportation from a menu, enter in a destination along with the number of passengers, shows you the estimated cost of the ride and then accepts payment via scanned cards.

Both the companies are yet to comment anything on the matter.

Uber, which is also going through steady executive departures, recently launched its own patent purchase program, called UP3.  Though the new program is an aggressive push towards increasing its IP holdings through acquisition and its own engineering efforts,  apparently its also aimed at protecting the company from legal hassles in the future, like this one.