DeviceAtlas

Yesterday the European Patent Office (EPO) opposition division narrowed Afilias Technologies Plc's device detection patent EP2245836B1 in Europe, as a result of an opposition brought by 51Degrees in 2017 and explained in this blog. The EPO concluded that the patent as initially granted was not valid.

DeviceAtlas made a public copy of an open source GitHub repository created and licensed by competitor 51Degrees. 51Degrees is an innovative competitor of DeviceAtlas. DeviceAtlas is a product owned and operated by Afilias Technologies.

When 51Degrees arrived in 2011 we changed device detection with our innovative open source business model. The software, source code and intellectual property is freely licensed. A flexible subscription model is used to provide data updates. We only do Device Detection, and we do it better than anyone else. We’ve driven all the innovation in the Device Detection space.

In July 2017, after eight long years of deliberation, the European Patent Office (EPO) finally granted Afilias Technologies Ltd patent EP2245836B1 "Determining a property of a communication device". 51Degrees, the company I founded and still run, opposed this patent not because we think it affects any of our current products but because it attempts to monopolise the earlier WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) solution now run by ScientiaMobile along with other well-known computing techniques.