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Overture Sues Google Over Pay-for-Placement Patent
Ana anonymous submitter wrote: "C|Net News is reporting that Overture is suing Google over its AdWords advertising method since it may be infringing upon Patent 6,269,361 'System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine'."
Writing a spec and writing a patent have little in common. In addition, patents are usually drafted by lawyers. The patent is intentionally vague and broad. Breadth is where a patent gets its strength. It's not in the drafter's interest to have a precisely-defined patent as that would impair the patent's coverage.
A lawyer would get fired for using the word "composed of" in an application. In patent-speak, "composed of" means "composed exactly of". That is, all I would have to do is add Froot Loops to my search term and poof, no infringement. "Comprising" means the thing has at least those components, and possibly more. In the "comprising" case, Froot Loops would infringe.
The patent does have to define a "complete" system, and that's why they have the bit about the client entering "the search term and the listing". If you've got something materializing out of nowhere, the app gets bounced for incompleteness.
That said, the patent is a monster: 7 independent claims and 60 dependent claims. If you really want to go nuts, read those.
This may be a residual effect of people protesting the Xenu.net flap of a month ago.
Basically, Don Marti proposed that people run this shell script:
Google essentially took this to be a DoS attack against their search (which, to a large extent, it is, imho). They started banning IP's which were running this script. When lots of users from Comcast netblocks began running the script, they may have decided to block those netblocks.
Does Comcast happen to use PPPoE? If so, then I would say that Google's actions are warranted, imho.