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DoubleClick Banner Ad Patent Busted
RWoody writes "Noticed today that BountyQuest paid
$10 Grand to a porn king for info on the DoubleClick banner ad patent. As always, the porn guys were way ahead of the curve: he had an ad affiliate program long before DoubleClick. Also noticed that they started going after copyrights as well as patents. Not much help for Napster, but I bet there are plenty of companies being pushed around by bogus copyrights, just like with bogus patents."
A key part of DoubleClick's patent is not present in the porn mogul's business plan: DoubleClick's use of cookies to identify a user across all of DoubleClick's affiliate web sites. The use of cookies allows DoubleClick to ensure that adds are not repeated, and helps them target their adds more effectively. It is much more interesting to advertisers to know that a person has visited www.macnn.com, www.news.com www.macintoch.com, and www.slashdot.com, then to simply know that the user is viewing an add from www.slashdot.com.
While some might say DoubleClick's use of cookies is the most insidious part of their patent, I believe it is a significant enough improvement over the porn king's business plan to make it's patent still stand up. At any rate is is far to soon to proclaim that DoubleClick's patent is "busted".
Sig goes here
Simple Logic: Why doesnt the Patent Office fire up a Slashcode based website and give the community-at-large an opportunity to diffuse patents *before* they are issued?
If disclosure is a problem - just issue ALL (*everything* not just technology) patents with a 2-3-4mos. 'community review period. Simple. No more bad patents.
That was a pretty weak attempt to apply the mis-granting of patents to copyrights. The whole point of the patent problem is that patents are granted, often by people who have no clue what's going on. Copyrights, on the other hand, are never granted, they're only enforced. Any time you create something original you have the copyright to it, you don't need to apply for anything.
I doubt there's going to be any porn king who comes along and says that he actually wrote "Fields of Gold" and "Enter Sandman," although that definitely would help out napster users.
I understand that the p0rn industry also has prior art on lots of innovative ways to make babies, including methods that aren't obvious to every skilled worker in the field.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
(from http://www.abanet.org/journal/mar01/fstate.html)?
Similarly, Serena and Venus Williams could clobber Kevin and George Repper in a doubles match on a tennis court. The Reppers, though, could force a rematch in federal court if the swinging sisters dared to appropriate their patented tennis stroke. As described in the abstract of patent No. 5,993,336 (Nov. 30, 1999), this technique consists of wearing kneepads and swatting the ball "either while the covered knee is on the tennis court surface or just prior to the knee contacting the tennis court surface." This innovation "enables a player to successfully return balls that otherwise are out of effective stroking reach," the patent claim concludes.
Someone prove prior art by posting a picture of yourself wearing kneepads
I am not a lawyer but my sister is, so don't mess with me
:)
A web pr0n pioneer gets $10,000? What was I doing? I've been viewing web pr0n since my first dialup account in college (remember Slipknot?). I should have remembered this...
Dancin Santa
Wow! Is there anything pr0n can't do?
Funny enough, the pr0n industry seems to be way ahead of the curve because there's so much profit to be made with relatively few expenses...
Small start up costs mean lots of businesses will spring up quickly. Perhaps, Napster should consider distributing music through steganographically-encoded XXX pictures? I'm sure they would have a lot of financial backing...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
pr0n saves us from Corperate America. how much better can it get?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Well? What do you mean by "bogus copyrights"? Are you saying that Metallica or any creator of content (visual, audible, written, digital or otherwise) somehow doesn't deserve copyright protection?
Proof that on the internet, smut drives technology. I derive some humor in the fighters of one of the internet's biggest nuisances, patents, are aided by the industry responsible for another one of its nuisances, the javascript popup.
You know, seriously, part of me wonders just how much innovation over the internet has come as a direct result of the demands of the porn industry. I mean, where else is personal security being violated more of an embarassment? Where else are video demands as high? I remember when our government office was looking at having some of their meetings broadcast live over the internet, and were wondering if it was possible, and I wanted to say, "Sure! Heh heh, just check out this site over here..."
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Get your headline right. BountyQuest has identified what it thinks is prior art. As the article states, the patent stands until either a court or the USPTO invalidates it. It appears that geeks know of the law what lawyers know of code.
At this point what kind of an impact will people expect. Not to be sound so "anti" anything, what I will say is, he should have done something long ago instead of waiting 6+ years while DoubleClick built a niche in the market for this service
Can someone explain to me how people are patenting free words and actions of a computer language. I don't wanna hear about "Its a nice idea" the underlying factor is, it isn't really an invention, no one physically owns code, why doesn't someone rant and sue for using their code, say Larry Wall sue DoubleClick for using Perl without his prior consent. Sure Larry Released it free, and I can theorize if he knew it would be used by "for profit" companies he would have probably released a professional copy.
Why cant this be simple such as a "move your feet lose your seat" solution. Taxpayers spend millions on this bs. Who says this is going to hinder anything, a patent is a patent. I had an idea for a lot of things people have ended up creating and patenting, would that give me the right to sue someone for it, because I was too lazy to capitalize on patenting and copyrights?
Patent Pending
360 degrees of Karma