Slashdot Mirror
Liquid Audio Sues In Pitiful Attempt to Appear Relevant
Emily writes: "Another case
of patent abuse similar to the PanIP nonsense previously reported in Slashdot. This time, it's Liquid
Audio suing geotargeting company Infosplit
over patent infringement. I read their patent,
it's hilarious! Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK. More seriously, these lawsuits
represent a serious threat to innovation in this country."
WPIDalamar recently filed a patent that covers "Determining people's location from their postal address". No prior art was found on this, and he intends to charge royalties to anyout who uses an address to travel to, ship items to, or explain directions.
until I read this, I always wondered why spammers send mail about crap that is only available in the USA to me, when any fool with half an ounce of intelligence can tell from my address that I'm in the UK. Thanks for clearing this one up, /.!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
10 A$="U.S.A";B$="Rest Of World"
20 Input "Where are you from?",IP$
30 If IP$ = A$ Then Print "Due to Copyright Resrictions you are not allowed to listen to or view this Liquid Audio Media!": GOTO 50
40 If IP$ = B$ Then Print "WTF? Only Patent Office fearing Americans may listen to or view this Liquid Audio Media! Not some godless pirates the likes of you! Away foul beasts!":GOTO 50
50 Print "Your Name has been entered into our database of repeat offenders. An agency ending in 'AA' should be visiting you shortly. Thank you."
60 End
Sorry I didn't comment the code very well...
No, what somebody has to do is create a scoreboard, where you rate the superperfluousness of the patent, and then try to estimate their success in litigating a profit from it.
.. we need to see if this really does work, and then feed that info back to these software companies .. to either encourage it until it flat-out breaks the system, or discourage it because it don't make no money.
Like cybersquatting - which, as far as I know, has been shown to be relatively unprofitable, despite every Tom, Dick and Harry seemingly getting into the act -
"Old man yells at systemd"
Any chance we could arrange a Slashdot interview with either the Head of the Patent Office (or their main P.R. guy) or with the Senator heading up the Patent Office Committee (whatever that is)?
It would be a very frustrating endeavor. These are the kinds of people that can actually defend patents like this with a straight face. They can sit there and talk about how we just don't understand the innovation and that these patents really are worthy of protection. And they'll never once burst out in maniacal laughter. They're that good at what they do.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer