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Under Attack by PanIP's Patent Lawyers?
Matthew Catalano, of the Dickson Supply Company, asks: "I work for a small plumbing, heating, irrigation, and BBQ supply house. Over the past four we have built up quite a website that houses tons of information and offers many products for sale via an online store. Recently a company known as PanIP has decided to sue us on 2 counts of patent infringement. To the best of my understanding, as you can see from their website, they claim that they invented the use of text and images as a method of business on the Internet. They also claim that they invented the use of a form to enter customer information. Obviously this is ridiculous and most likely won't hold up in court! However, this is not the problem. PanIP has also sued 10 other small companies. PanIP chose small companies because they hope that none of them can afford the legal fees that would ultimately remove their patents. Most defendants, including us, want to opt to bail out for a smaller licensing fee of $30,000. PanIP will continue this vicious cycle on small companies of which many of you may become victim of. Eventually they will have so many cases under their belt that they will be able to attack larger companies." Yet again, the USPTO is used as a weapon in the free market. When will someone get a clue and put a stop to this type of digital extortion?
"I am hoping to release this story to the press so that the US Patent office finally wakes up, but the media is unpredictable and unreliable in terms of which stories they encapsulate. If there is anyone out there who has any ideas about stopping PanIP or can help us out in any way it would be appreciated. Otherwise, just pass this along to everyone you know and hopefully something will come of it.
There is also a page we have constructed that reveals some more details."
Get together with the other companies that they have sued and sue them back for restraint of trade or something like that. With the legal fees split 10-12 ways, it should be easier to defend yourselves.
From the looks of their web site, it appears as if the sole purpose of the company is to patent 'inventions' without actually accopmlishing anything. I would feel sorry for anyone losing a court battle to a company such as this.
Patenting a form of user input for a website, is about as stupid as patenting a a method to swing on playground equipment, but as we can see, they both held up at the patent office, the fact that such stupid patents as 'playground swinging methods' have been accepted by the patent office, obviously shows that the whole system needs to be overhauled
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Any company using a yahoo account as contact information for a corporation is going to have a tough time proving that they invented e-commerce!
And it is high time that the USPTO is made legally responsible for damages caused by patents that are succesfully revoked.
What do you suggest doing to the USPTO? If you throw the people who inspect patents in jail, or fine them, you'll end up with fewer people reviewing patents, making the problem worse, not better. Fining the office as a whole wouldn't help either - the USPTO would either end up with a reduced budget, hence leading once again to forementioned problem, or their budget would expand appropraitely, increasing the federal budget in turn and raising taxes and/or the public debt.
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For everyone suggesting that they band together, I believe they have taken the first few steps. The link from the question (labeled "more details") leads you to a site with a bunch of defendants. Namely, listed here.
Furthermore, I took a look at the patents (admittedly, only the abstracts), and while not as depicted as explained, still very vague and very obviously a stragety, not an actual protection of IP. First and second.
Looking at the abstract for the former of the above listed, I have a few qualms (besides with the whole thing entirely). The claim that they can have an infinite number of variations in the abstract (actually, on a quick search, they go into further details in the summary of the invention), it doesn't seem to me that what you're implementing can possibly be infinite. Note, I certainly ANAL (yet), but it just seems out of place.
Moving on to the second patent and it's respective abstract... it seems to me that such a patent had to be filed before September 11, 2001 (when the patent was made, hell throw that in your closing speech) as it seems the way it's described in both the abstract and summary of invention is very much alike to many implementations set forth by other companies, not just internet, but stores as well.
Good luck with that all. Open up a donation bin. I, for one, will throw in.
From the abstract of Patent No. 5,576,951:
Organizational hierarchies of data sources are arranged so that an infinite number of sales presentation configurations can be created.
This patent has nothing to do with your barbecue and plumbing site. Since your server has a finite life span, it is only capable of producing a finite number of sales presentations. Frankly, I think that a system capable of producing an infinite number of anything is quite impressive and worthy of patent protection.
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Dude,
Get yourself a decent lawyer. Per the complaint (and the specific patent information) you have posted on your website those guys don't stand a chance!
For example, in their Patent material they talk about customers dialing into the described system. Do all of your customers dial up to get to your website? Well, I looked at your website and I don't use a dialup system.
Also, all of the patent information is related to the travel industry. You are in the plumbing business. A good lawyer will find holes in their "argument(s)" big enough to drive an 18 wheeler through.
Per what I saw their patent is very specific in nature. They goofed up by not making it as general as possible. All you gotta do is review the patent for the business steps (logic) they propose and find where your business differs.
IANAL, but my understanding of patents are that they relatively easily gotton around. I believe you merely need to show how you have created the same thing but in a different manner.
Otherwise, for example, how could say Ford and GM compete with essentially the same "gadgets" in their automobiles. They do it by merely doing the same thing in a different manner.
Do a little research on the web on patents (www.findlaw.com is a good place to start) to prime yourself. And then go out and spend a couple of thousand on a lawyer. Stop wasting time, you're probably gonna have to do it regardless. It will be well worth your time.
BTW, I'm no fan of lawyers, but when you need one then it's best to just buckle up and get one rather than wasting time. It can save you a lot of pain and agony in the end.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Come to think of it, that sounds like a good way to fight these frivolous patents: DDoS their servers...
... from the way they have build their website, they are preapared to fight lawsuits (or at least they threaten to do so). That's their strong position presumably.
Their weakness: public opinion and everyday reasoning and they don't seem to have any international patent.
If you cannot bring together enough money and support to fight them in court, consider as options
a) move
host your site outside the US and inform as many politicians as possible about the fact that you have to move your site away from the States because of unfair patent-laws and practices.
b) get support from IBM
spend 30,000 on an IBM E-commerce server. Make sure your contract with IBM says, that E-commerce is free from patents and royalties of third parties and that IBM will take care of any legal fights. Perhaps IBM will rent you an E-commerce system for 1 $ a year, if they are presented with this case? Even if you use the IBM machine only as portal or proxy to your existing site, to avoid extensive restructuring of your data and software...
c) enjoy
Laughter will kill them. Try funny, public responses. Like the response of the Marx Brothers when they were threatened by a big "--- Brothers" company. Imagine what some good writers and designers can do with this case for your image (and against theirs) with just some couple of bucks. It's a chance to play David against Goliath. And then don't forget to inform us slashdotters too, we are all in favour of a good laugh.
Depends how much of the material comes from the 1984 patent application. The applicants kept adding material, combining applications, etc, but appears to have gotten most of their raw material by 1993. The USPTO fought these people off for a long time -- 12 years.
The patent is probably not as broad as you were thinking. The term "means" is a very dangerous one for a patentee. See Chiuminatta Concrete Concepts, Inc. v. Cardinal Indus., Inc.
There is one SUREFIRE solution to frivolous and ridiculous lawsuits such as these.
It is simply to require the plaintiff to pay the defense's legal fees if the defense wins or the case is dismissed before it even makes it to court. The problem is that right now, if someone brings a lawsuit against another party, there is very little risk involved for the plaintiff. Law firms will take on crazy suits at no cost to the plaintiff on the off-chance that they will actually win and get a large enough settlement to make a profit overall or hope that the defendant will offer a settlement (even though they know they would win in court) less than their legal costs in order to "save" money. The latter is the scam that PanIP is trying to pull. This solution would stop them in their tracks.
If the losing plaintiffs were responsible for the incurred defensive legal fees, lawyers would not be so eager to take just any potential lawsuit. Claims would actually be researched and thought out before they were introduced into our legal system to waste our time, tax dollars, and business income.
If you think this is a good idea and are tired of wasting your money because of the lawsuit lottery, then write your congressman and encourage him to support an initiative such as this which would make plaintiffs responsible for the legal fees they incur.
I did some searchs on the filer of the patents included on PanIP's website and found this interesting federal court decision .
Basically Mr. Lockwood tried to sue American Airlines over their SABRE system using the '359 patent and the district court found that SABRE did not violate the patents due to prior art (like the fact that SABRE has been around since 1962). The linked decision is an appeal that Mr. Lockwood made to the federal appeals court that was rejected. Worth a good read to see how it would apply here.
Welcome to America, Dickson Supply Company. You are doing business, and now you are being sued. It goes with the territory. I'm sure this is not the first time you have been sued, so dust off the rolodex and call your local legal professional.
Your website looks pretty slick, did you build that yourself or was it outsourced? Maybe you should "pass on the savings" by suing your web designer for delivering as their own product a website rife with illegal, unlicensed IP. Seems like those "Powered by LivePerson" guys all over your website are the ones liable, not you.
Is your site being hosted locally, or is the whole thing outsourced? If the e-commerce portion of your site depends on some third-party vendor to process credit cards, then you should sue them for providing services that they were not licensed to provide. My guess is NaBanco has more lawyers than PayIP.
In either case your lawyers should be able to convince a judge that you are not the culpable party.
I've been trying to find a bright side to settling. Lets say you do decide to license their invention for $30,000. Just make sure that your license agreement is perpetual, and that the licensor (PayIP) will assume all liability for any future claims should PayIP's patents be found to infringe on someone else's patent. Only problem is, that won't be worth much once they go out of business. Maybe you should get their patent put into escrow as a shield against them going out of business. Again, it's a worthless patent so why bother.
You have to fight this one. With lawyers. It's really not that uncommon to be the victim of a frivolous lawsuit, but you should still stand up. $30,000 gets you enough lawyer time for this case to be dropped.
Unless, of course, you are selling airline tickets at video-disc terminals, then you might want to pay their licensing fees.
I wonder if the PayIP has approached Orbitz or Travelocity or PriceLine.com with these patents...could be a gold mine!
1) Patent examiners get paid some (low) base rate for examining a patent.
2) Patent examiners get paid a bonus for each case of prior art they find which invalidates the patent
3) Patent examiners get paid a bonus if they reject a clearly frivolous/and or obvious patent.
4) Patent applicants are fined for filing clearly fraudulent patents.
5) Repeat offenders of 4) are sentenced to prison terms.
Then why not throw out the patent system outright? Either there's enough political power to do so or there isn't (and there isn't). No need trying to take the expensive, less effective, wayward route; that's one of the reasons our government is as screwed up as it is.
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I sent the following letter to an address on their page:
Dear Sir
I'm extremely offended to see the types of things your company is doing, as described on Slashdot.org, here:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/13/191
Your strongarm tactics against small businesses are a disgrace. Why don't you come play ball against corporations that can afford to defend themselves against your ridiculous patent claims?
I suggest you respond to the story on Slashdot.org and present your side of it.
Your actions are a true insult to the spirit of mutually beneficial commerce and free enterprise.
Disgusted,
John E. Francis
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." --Henry David Thoreau
Go make your annual contribution to the EFF. Don't wait.
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
Leaving off the www gives "The site panip.com is running Web Servinator v0.3 (v.terbo) on FreeBSD." Their netblock is "E.D.G.E. Inc", in San Diego.
Note that I REALLY recommend that people NOT hack/DoS/otherwise mess with their site; that's only going to make things harder for the people they're suing. ("Your Honor, not only are these people violating our patent, but they're also deliberately causing massive DDoS attacks against our servers." Sure, that's a load of crap, but so's the lawsuit; the last thing they need is to try to defend themselves against two frivilous lawsuits, and the DoS thing would almost have some merit.
So my point is twofold:
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This is why the US desperately needs a "loser pays" system similar to that used in English courts. If you choose to sue someone and lose, you end up having to pay *their* legal fees as well as your own. Thus if you are a small business getting sued by an asinine large business with a suit that doesn't stand a chance in court, you don't have to cave in just because the court costs are large. If the evil know-nothings suing you lose, they have the responsibility of paying for wasting your time and the court's time. That would kill the evil business strategy of "patent something everyone already knows how to do and then scare people into paying you license fees to do what they already knew how to do on their own."
Of course, the system has to have some careful safeguards in place, such as a small maximum reasonable amount of court fees to be responsible for (so that, for example, Joe Schmo doesn't have to take on the risk of paying for Microsoft's expensive lawyers if they sue him - he only takes on the risk of possibly paying for more reasonably priced run-of-the-mill lawyers no more expensive than his own.)
Personally, the safeguard I would like to see is that you end up only being financially responsible for the opponents' lawywers up to the amount you paid for your OWN lawyers. So if your laywer cost $3,000, and your opponent's lawyer cost $500,000, you at most could end up paying $6,000 if you lose ($3,000 for your own, and $3,000 worth of the opponent's lawyer's fee) If you think the case is so incredibly frivolous that you can defend yourself, you don't incur any risk of paying for the opponent's lawyers at all.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
First off, we need people in the USPTO office to actually read the patent submissions and maybe pay them enough to keep technically minded people working there. The turnover has got to be rediculous.
:(
And secondly, if we did the above, PanIP would not have been granted the patent. Nor would the guy who patented a method of swinging. Or many other stupid patents. Patents were designed to allow ingenious people protect their inventions and ideas. The method for inputting customer information on a computer is extremely obvious, and thusly doesn't qualify for a patent under current legislation. Or their 'invention' of the process of doing business by using the combination of images and text. Again, very obvious. I agree that 'processes', even in software, can and should be patented. I DO NOT agree that the end results should be able to be patented.
Some people disagree with Amazons '1 Click Purchase' patent. I don't. The text of their patent describes how it works, not just that a single click can purchase something. PS:Great business idea. There's no easier way to sell than with INSTANT GRATIFICATION.
I even agree with our legislation.
A software patent should something not obvious, and should explicitly and exactly outline a process. If we had Patent examiners who gave two shits about their job, things like these wouldn't happen. But, we'd probably have to pay them better. Mr. Bush probably gave all of their money to the army
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
1. Send cease and disist letters on behalf of PanIP to Microsoft, Sun, Adobe, Ebay, etc. drawing their legal department's attention to the PanIp web page. 2. Contact your congressman, state senator etc. Give them something to champion. 3. Send info to the big networks and cable news services. (You might also want to include them in step 1) 4. Contact the small business lobby groups and if your not already a member join and then have them sue both PanIP and the Patent Office. PanIP for conspiracy to commit fraud and the Patent Office for gross negligence. (There is plenty of documentation in the public domain about who invented the web, SGML, HTML, HTML forms, etc. to prove that the patent office didn't exercise proper due diligance when granting the patent or that PanIP knowingly witheld information showing that PanIP did in fact not invent what they claimed to have invented.) 5. Find out who the principals of PanIP are and send out inflamtory demands on their behalf to the hacking community. 6. Find out where PanIP's offices are and then you and your friends can "injure" yourself on their premises. There are a lot of injury lawyers who will take your case for a cut of the insurance money. Then use the insurance claim to fund your countersuit. 7. Contact the FBI etc. because as far as you and your collegues have discovered, they are a front for the Al Quaida terrorism network. (Well, dont you feel terrorized!) Bottom line is not to be intimidated. I have been on both sides of lawsuits and the onus is still on the plaintiff. Make them prove they invented the technology and that their patent was not obtained fraudulently "to the strictest proof thereof"! Don't worry about cost. Get creative and start up a legal fund. I'm sure there will be enough industry interest to drum up support. ALWAYS COUNTERSUE!
Apparently, the "authors" of this "invention" were not very forward-thinking as the usage of an LCD screen (instead of a CRT) will put a user outside the scope of this patent. Snipped directly from the Patent: "The satellite facilities are sales and information terminals, each equipped with a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) for receiving and displaying requested customer information from the computer's data sources at the data processing center. Customers interactively display the audio-visual presentations by selecting various choices and entering the choices on a telephone keypad which directs the computer to select from its data sources the requested information and transmit it to the customer's CRT in their home" Hmm...
Speak to your state's attorney general's office, I bet they'd be willing to go after the company for fraud and extortion, along with a whole slew of other things. If it's criminal, the AG foots the bill as they're the ones pressing charges. Once the criminal case is won, you're almost garanteed the ability to sue the f'ing sh*t out of them.
Okay, you guys need to start using the internet's many spectacularly powerful databases and stop going to google for the solutions to all of life's problems. I've done some quick searches in Lexis/Nexis, and have found a few things: (1) There are no mentions of "PanIP" in any business publications indexed in Lexis/Nexis. (2) However, that should not lead us to believe that this is a troll or a scam, as Mr. Lawrence B. Lockwood certainly exists, and has been very involved in intellectual property litigation in the last decade. One case in which he was involved (In re Lockwood) eventually went to the United States Supreme Court. (3) The "CHI" Research group, mentioned on the PanIP website as a firm's technology consultant, has produced at least one article telling intellectual property lawyers to use "citations" of their patent as evidence of its validity -- which explains that whole weird thing on the PanIP website where they boast at how often their patents have been cited. (4) Intellectual Property lawyers have been using In re Lockwood as a hallmark case where an appellant demanded a jury trial.
I'll post clips of some of the relevant articles here, and in follow-up posts, since some of them are long and /.'s gonna truncate this message:
Here Lockwood loses his Federal Court of Appeals Case.
Here's the introduction to the longer law review article by CHI Research, which includes names and corporate addresses for that consulting firm.
And here are citations for two law review articles discussing the importance of In re Lockwood I'll snip out the relevant portions.
And one more:
It's over now. That, or it's go time. One of the two. acts of gord