Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
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:
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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.