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Pop-Under Ads Patented
gopherdata writes "The Oregonian is running a article about a company, Exit Exchange, that claims to have invented the pop-under ad and is currently in the process of patenting it. According to the article the company hopes to collect royalties from other companies using pop-under ads. Are two lines of javascript worthy of a patent?" On the other hand, this is one stupid patent
I'd love to see held up, just so that the licensing fees could discourage advertisers
from attacking their potential clients.
for 2 reasons, one, to give a victory to the little guy, the start-ups, and 2, to make peopele pay royalties for those things, so that maybe we'll see them less. on the other hand, we get rid of one advertising technique, we'll probably get something even more annoying next.
why?
Okay, let's think about this for a second. If Javascript was written to allow pop-under windows, obviously this feature had to be written in JS, and tested at some point. So are we to believe that Exit Exchange actually wrote this part of the language and tested it? I think not. Surely there must be an example of prior art out there, then.
Or maybe I should patent using X language to add two integers between 25 and 50 together. It's the same thing, I'm using X's built-in add operator to do something specific.
So yes, this patent is retarded.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
This Usenet-thread from comp.lang.javascript, dated September 1996, shows that this technique was commonplace years before they filed their patent application. Try a search for "window.open()" and "window.opener.focus()" on Google and you'll find plenty of other examples.
I believe someone from Cisco or something like that is the owner of the patent for the hyperlink. Interesting, isn't it?
blog & fiction: jd87
I have two things that personally I find much, much worse.
1) Popups on close. Window spawning hell is what initially made me get (slightly) serious about using a filtering program to weed out javascript.
2) The most annoying yet, in my mind, is what I've recently seen on Yahoo (and I'm sure other places). They now have started to adopt "floating" ads, which move around on the screen using either flash or DHTML and do not pop up a new window at all. Instead, they cover the content of the main window with moving animations and other crap. I know that these have been around for a few years, but haven't really caught on too well until now. Perusing some of the trade rags to see what the enemy is up to, it appears that they are starting to gain popularity and probably will continue to so long as the people doing the campaigns are the ones used to designing for television. They want your attention fixed on their product for a given amount of time, without any way of getting what you're really after before they're done promoting to you.
For an example of one company I found who creates these things (and a place where you can see what I'm talking about if you haven't seen them yet), see www.eyeblaster.com
this will set a horrible precedent.
Um, it's already been set. Have you seen the kind of patents being handed out recently? Like the one on slashdot a couple weeks ago for using text and images on a webpage for commerce?
How many other things then could be patened? Links?
They're working on that.
Seriously, I think this is kind of funny. The more silly patents that get granted, the more irrelevant our patent system becomes... Ditto for copyright law. It's a joke, and becoming more of one all the time.
I like how google jokes on their lab site: Please email us your ideas, comments, suggestions, and patent infringement notices or post a message on the newsgroup for the particular demo you're referencing. (emphasis mine)
Btw, interested persons might enjoy checking out that labs.google.com site (thanks to k10k for the link..)
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
Patents have gotten out of control. I am not the world's biggest GNU fan, but in this area I am in full agreement with Richard Stallman. Software patents (along with any patents on algorithms, processes or methodologies) are absolutely despicable.
I don't know who to blame more, the filers for inhuman audacity, or the USPTO for criminal negligence.
We just got hit by a stunner at work today. One of our competitors (number three in the market) has disclosed a patent for a configuration utility identical to the one we (number one in the market) have had for six years. A configuration utility! There's obvious prior art. It's obvious to anyone in the field. And the only innovation they showed was copying verbatum our name for the utility. How much do you want to bet that our company is going to roll over and license this "technology" from our competitor?
The sad part is that patents have become necessary to protect yourselves against other people with patents. No matter how much you abhore them, they're your only defense against those that don't. It's the IP version of Mutually Assured Destruction.
A patent for pop-under ads doesn't suprise me. Nothing surprises me any more. I've been told flat out at work "let's have a brainstorming session and come up with some new patents." I don't have any yet. I fear that I'll be fired if I don't come up with any disclosable ideas soon. Is there any market out there for software engineers that don't believe in software patents?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
No, I don't think so. Your example was a re-design of an existing product. These folks didn't even do that. The 'focus' method in javascript was designed to put windows in the front or back. They just decided to use that method. It's like saying "HTML will let us put as many options as we want in a pull-down menu. Hmmm...our menu has 27 items. Let's patent the 27-item menu." Or, it's like patenting the "Close This Window" link found at the bottom of many secondary web pages. It's just a common-sense use of some programming commands.
Evil is the money of root.
Bottom line? They can quickly figure out what works, and what doesn't. So, when you see something stupid and annoying and wonder how the heck they can get away with offending people...it's because they've got numbers that prove that it works.
It really is like something out of those science fiction stories where big brother adjusts the propoganda and policy in real time in response to instant opinion polls.
In this case, we would be arguing for this patent, because it will stifle the use of what it patents, thereby holding back progress and whatnot in a field where we don't want to see progress.
In other words, we're promoting this patent as a device to hold back innovation :) I'd like to see a
patent lawyer agree with that one.