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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'."
For the 99% of you who didn't read the references:
Overture isn't suing about Google's page rank results, nor do they claim that the ad results are part of the main search. They're saying that the adwords results in and of themselves constitute a pay-for-play search that infringes the patent.
Personally, I think it sounds like a desperation play of a dying company.
Yet another prime example of why patents shouldn't apply to software.
The entire software industry should kneel down and kiss the feet of IBM, Xerox, and other early software pioneers for not patenting every software related concept... the linked list, the hash table, binary sorts, bubble sorts, grouping data, grouping data and methods, batch processing... because if they had done so, computers would still be in large room in the basements of our universities & large corporations, with little application in our lives.
Just try and think of something that hasn't been affected by computers.
It is sickening to look at many software companies today... always looking for the path of least resistance, and never willing to claim responsibility for thier actions.
Did you even read the rest of it? The "influencing" they describe is by clients paying for their pages to rank higher in the regular search results, an automated system to bribe for better results, which Google explicitly does not do. Google's ads, which are kept seperate from regular search results, sorta work like this, but this patent really seems to be more relevant to messing with messing with links mixed in with actual search results.
DEC brought up Alta Vista in 1995 and went public by at least 1996.
They started selling keywords fairly early on as well, which is a mechanism to affect the rank of the results. The only major difference between Alta-Vista's scheme and Google is that Google does it publicly.
The patent was filled in 1999 so prior art from 1998 invalidates it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
(* How is "give us money and we'll rank you higher" an original contribution to art and science? *)
Soooooooo stupid.
I would love to see a written justification by the granter of the patent. What the living f_____ was going thru his/her stoned little head?
If you patent delivering pizza by ion rocket, they will probably grant it because ion rockets sound like gee-wiz stuff. You are neither inventing pizzas, delivery, *nor* ion rockets. But the combo somehow delights the patent office jerk.
A PHB-like buzzword trigger-bot working over there?
Table-ized A.I.
Every patent is the grant of a privilege of exacting tolls from the public. The Framers plainly did not want those monopolies freely granted. The invention, to justify a patent, had to serve the ends of science - to push back the frontiers of chemistry, physics, and the like; to make a distinctive contribution to scientific knowledge. That is why through the years the opinions of the Court commonly have taken "inventive genius" as the test. * It [340 U.S. 147, 155] is not enough that an article is new and useful. The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end - the advancement of science. An invention need not be as startling as an atomic bomb to be patentable. But it has to be of such quality and distinction that masters of the scientific field in which it falls will recognize it as an advance.
One is left to sadly wonder why things have fallen so low.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
I firmly believe that the ranking system in place on google makes it a far better search engine. If I am looking about in their directory, I will more often than not hit the top 10 whether out of lazyness or whatnot. It helps measure the popularity of the site and the usefulness. Weeds out the crap links IMHO.
tinfoilmedia
When you're not looking for someone to sell you something there's absolutely no reason to use Overture. Even Teoma will give you better results. :-)
The Patent Office isn't charged with ensuring that the patents are valid. Anyone who wants to contest them gets to do that. If you want the PO to ensure validity, you're going to need to give them a lot more funding than they get, since you need top-of-the-field experts in almost every domain to be hanging around.
May we never see th
I'm thinking in terms of Class action law suits.
USPTO has explained their position which is to issue the patents and let the courts sort the mess out.
I was wondering whether it is possible to file a class action law suit to bring them to their senses.
Would this work?
I'm wondering b'se I have several (valid)patentable ideas but with people patenting general & obvious ideas like this I would have to go to court to get patents which raises the bar for lone inventors like me.
The system sucks & something has to be done!
So is it worthwhile, even possible to sue USPTO to stop the stupidity?
If you purchase keywords on overture and are one of the top 3 bidders, you appear on all the sites they listed including Netscape. I can confirm this as I have a couple of listings online w/overture. They do appear on the netscape page in the section "Partner Search Results". (I also buy space on google.)
I believe the results below are the google results. The Google results do not have any advertisement content in them.
So, when overture says "when you buy space here, you get on x and x and x and x, but if you buy space at google you only get on google", they are exactly correct.
Try looking at the url on the "partner search results" on netscape.