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Online Greeting Cards Patented

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-is-the-wheel-next dept.

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."

3 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Wait A second...... by rveno1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't Blue Mountain who started the greeting card email craze?

  2. READ THE DAMN PATENT FOOLS by elmegil · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The key part here is that Tumbleweed is in the business of providing SECURE "content management systems", not bloody greeting cards. Hallmark wants their greeting cards (unlike those of Blue Mountain et. al.) to be SECURE. So they licensed a particular technology which claims to do that, and which happens to have a patent.

    Now that you've thrown your reflexive anti-patent knee out of joint, try getting upset about something important for a change.

    --
    7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
  3. Re:WTF? by mpe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sooner or later, people are going to start ignoring patent protection on software simply because the patents become so broad and ridiculous that no one respects USPTO decisions anymore

    You also have plenty of similar problems with "biotechnology" patents. When the concept of patenting was invented the issue of patent applicability to self replicating "invention" wouldn't have come up.

    Fix the unworkable or unenforceable portions of IP law to become realistically applicable in a digital world, or watch the whole regime collapse in flames.

    Remember that, at least in the US, patents are intended as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves.

    That is the choice facing intellectual property-based corporations and organizations

    Similar choices face governments. At least their legislative and judicial arms.
    The irony is that most of the problems appear to stem from attemption to extend IP laws in areas they probably shouldn't have been extended into in the first place. e.g. patents into genetics, software and business methods, copyright into "useright", etc, etc.