Emergency Twitter Is IP Theft?

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes at ReadWriteWeb:

Law.com reports today on a lawsuit from a Texas-based emergency broadcast technology company alleging that by designing its system in a way that allows Twitter to be used for emergency broadcasts, Twitter has violated the litigant’s patent.

Sorry RedCross, sorry Center for Disease Control, sorry protesters in Iran – by alerting people to life and death situations over Twitter, you’re party to piracy of intellectual property. You ought to be ashamed, and sign up for the services of TechRadium Inc. right away!

The Suit: TechRadium, according to Tresa Baldas on Law.com, “argues that it has patents covering the process for simultaneously notifying large numbers of people about emergencies through multiple communication gateways, such as cell phones, pagers and e-mail. The company develops and sells the technology to schools, businesses, governments and the U.S. military but not Twitter.”