Online Greeting Cards Patented

Trailer Trash writes "According to this story at bizreport.com, Hallmark has given in and licensed Tumbleweed Communication Corp's patent for delivery of online documents with e-mail notification. Will the idiots at the patent office never stop? Jeff Smith of Tumbleweed claims to have been granted three patents last year."

Comments

Just the facts ma'am...

[Thalia]

Let's try the intro to patent law again. The abstract is NOT the claim. The summary is also not the claim. In fact, there is a section, labelled "Claims" that are... well, the claims. The scope of the patent is defined solely by the language of the claims, as interpretted in light of any comments made during prosecution.

So, let's look at the broadest claim of the newest patent:

1. A document delivery system for delivering one or more documents between a sender and at least one recipient, said system comprising:

a server that temporarily stores said documents, wherein said server generates a URL for each intended recipient of said documents, the URL unique to each recipient, and sends each of the URLs to each respective intended recipient; and

a database which is associated with said server and which records log data describing which recipients accessed said documents;

wherein said server sends the log data to the sender of said documents.

What are the simple limitations in this claim that make it narrow enough to be uninteresting. Well, let's see:

1. The server must store "each of the documents" temporarily. So, dynamic URLs are pretty much out.

2. Log data must be "sent to the sender." This means that if you require the sender to log back on to your side (the traditional way of doing this) instead of sending them the log, you do not infringe this claim.

What do you want to bet that none of the prior art (from BlueMountain to standard email) meet all of these criteria? And this doesn't even take into consideration the fact that likely those limitations were discussed during the prosecution of the patent. If you really want to analyze the scope of the claims -- if for example you want to invalidate the patent -- order a copy of the file wrapper from the patent office, which includes every scrap of communication between the PTO and the company. Once you've reviewed that, we can get a real discussion going.

If you actually look at the patents, and in particular 6,192,407, you will find that they cited a huge number of references, including most of the references that you have discussed. This strongly implies that the patent office actually took a look at this patent, before allowing it. Now, whether patents should be permitted at all or not is a different discussion. But assuming that no prior art technology, articles, or patents were referenced is rather silly, when the patent is available for review.

I will agree that this claim is too broad in my (not-a-legal) opinion. However, it is not nearly as broad as /. seems to imply.

So... for future reference, read the bloody patent claims (not just the abstract) before starting to bitch.

Thank you,

Thalia

Please go to BountyQuest

[KjetilK]

Great stuff!

I think I have been infringing on this patent myself since 1995 :-), as I started telling my friends at that time: "don't send me heavy documents in the e-mail, dump it on the web with my name on, and send me the URL". This patent quite simply covers things that the web was specifically made for. But that isn't publicly available information so...

Make sure you to go to BountyQuest every now and than to check if a bounty is posted, so that these patents can be killed once and for all.

Hm, come to think of it, there should be a similar site that organizes prior art claims and challenge patents on the basis of it... Anybody know about anything like that?