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New Patent for Serving Ads to Newspaper Sites
mshiltonj writes: "Global Network announced today that they have a new patent on 'serving ads via a computer to a network of newspaper websites.' They are actively going to enforce the patent too. I heard, but could not verify online, that they placed a print ad announcing the patent in the Wall Street journal. 'The placement of this ad is the first in several steps we intend to take in order to notify key industry participants that we have been granted this patent. We are following proper legal protocol by publicly informing members of the publishing and advertising industries who may unknowingly be in violation of our patent,' commented Mr. James Mason, President and CEO of Global Network."
What? The damn thing was filed in the year 2000 and just granted lasted month. This is very likely prior art all over the place, although IANAL.
The patent is here
-Sean
Are they going to try and claim that any newspaper site that has advertisments on it falls under their patent? Good luck with that :)
A day without sunshine is like, you know, dark.
(if this doesn't show) that the goddamn patent system has broken down when it comes to IP Law and current in use technology, I don't know what will...
Sad.
If they start suing newspapers, they really are insanely stupid. There are somethings you don't do, and suing members of the media establishment is one of them.
If this company gets a single judgement against them, I'd be very willing to bet that every newspaper in this country will present patent reform in a very good light, and start reporting on all the insanely stupid patents out there.
You mean they think we don't see enough ads everywhere already?!
...do they eat babies too?
There were proposals from the patent office to close down the patent office, because "everything potentially patentable had already been invented." I think that we need to go back and revisit that decision, in light of the obviously decreased usefulness of patents in promoting actual innovation.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
They said:
- A method of placing a plurality of online newspaper advertisements according to claim 1 further comprising the step of associating at least one packet of information which is downloaded onto an online accessing device and which causes said online accessing device to send a signal to a website displaying a derivative advertisement link if that website is subsequently accessed by said online accessing device with said derivative advertisement link.
They meant:I would patent common sense in patent awards, and could claim no prior art with some validity, but I'm afraid that the licensing revenue would be pretty damned small.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I've decided that the US patent office has decided to scrap its founding principles in favor of the pinata approach: The pinata breaks, the goodies fall, and the first person to claim the most goodies wins. Doesn't matter if someone else has similar goodes, or even if there was a fight over the goodies. The person with the goodies wins.
Same thing with patents today. Doesn't matter if there's prior art or if you stole it from a competitor or if you acquired it after the fact. Patent it, then threaten everyone you know with a lawsuit for infringement.
At least the government has legal restrictions on what it can/can't do...Modern corporations lack both legal and moral restraint. It doesn't help either that USPTO will give a patent for anything it doesn't understand.
What is your Slash Rating?
if you read the text of the patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=6401075&OS=6401075&R S=6401075
There is actually some "unique" material in there. Their system claims that it can take an ad of any given format, reformat the ad, and then automatically redistribute(redisplay) the ad in whatever format the site requires. I am not too familiar with ad systems, but this seems unique to me. Sample usage: a politician scans a flyer (the limit of their technical knowlege) and then hands it off to this company, who then can on the fly reformat it and display it on a variety of publication's sites.
Also remember, if someone else can replicate it "clean room" style, then the patent has no effect. IE, if you lock 10 guys in a room w/out ever having seen such a system and tell them to make one, they can use that and NOT be in violation of the patent. Patent law also protects everyone from patents that are "easily recreated by people skilled in the area." Hence, if any programmer or team of programmers can reproduce this system without having seen it, you cant patent it.
-K
I have the patent for brachiating oxygen. Stop BREATHING now.
ok, if read this article and then look at the evolution of news on the internet, specifically BLOGS (http://blogger.com), you realize how BIG this actually is.
news is evolving to a point where INDIVIDUAL people (like DRUDGE for example) are serving news from their own homes. now... when news sites want to subscribe to articles posted by a famous BLOG newswriter, what patent will hang over this??
you guessed it.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
IANAL, but doesn't this mean that they're the only ones who should legally be allowed to serve banner ads to multiple sites that can vaguely be classified as newspaper sites? This one included? Can we get a lawyer out there in the /. community to translate the patent into english?
Um... usually it's only one newspaper per network... right? The NY Times and the Washington Post don't exist on the same network.
Dear lord, someone blow up the USPO before they do something intelligent.
Patent stupid nonsensical patents. Then sit back and watch the royalties roll in.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I think that the technical verbiage is, "obvious to one skilled in the Art."
That is, the idea can't be something that would natually come to the mind of a a domain expert.
Rather funny wsn't AOL advertising on their networks back in 95? Wouldn't it be 'obvious to someone skilled in the art' to add adds to on line newspapers since they have adds on their paper print?
I hope they do go after all these on line advertisers. Then we could get ride of al these stupid adds on line ;-).
I think that doubleclick as well as many others were doing this long before this patent was filed, and IMHO it is very vague.
"inputting configuration parameters" .. uh this is done so that you can set your banner size to 480x60 and the other sizes.. hmm what I wonder what the the IAB (http://www.iab.net/) think of this.
Only 'flamers' flame!
- This will put ads on newspaper websites.
- It will try to make placement relevant. For example, ads for financial services would be placed on web pages from a newspaper's website's financial section, or inforamtion about a company's San Francisco store would be included with the ad that goes with a page from the San Francisco Chronicle.
- It would centralize billing arrangements, for example, you would pay Global Networks once for advertising instead of making deals with 50 seperate newspapers.
- It would customize the size of ads to each newspaper website's adspace specifications.
- It would track page views and click-throughs.
So, already Double-click does the central billing and usage tracking. Almost all ad-serving websites use one of a couple standard sizes, making resizing unnecessary. The only thing useful about this patent that has not already been in widespread use for years is the targeted content based on the site or page. (Double-click's targeted ads are based on a web surfer's use patterns).The specificity of newspaper websites makes this patent pretty limited. I don't see them making a lot of money off of it unless the internet advertising market rebounds and the current ad model changes significantly. Still, eographically targeted ads are something that advertisers have wanted to be able to do for a while. The nature of the internet makes it difficult. It's hard to tell where a paticular person lives. Using geographically centered sites like newspapers might be a good model for pulling off this trick.
I wonder if this is not a way for Global Networks to bump their stock price, by advertising the fact that they have patent portfolio.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
A dutch judge has just ruled that online job offer companies may rip job ads from newspapers and place them online (http://www.rechtspraak.nl/uitspraak/frameset.asp? ui_id=36590 , sorry, it's in dutch). Any patent on this will surely be regarded as (excusez le mot) bull. Job ads can be considered public announcements, and definately not patentable. In a way a newspaper placing job ads already has an automated way of doing this.
.nl based site that puts .us job ads online, and their patent is worthless.
Now I just have to make a
Okay, let me get this straight...
They will be contacting those who are
"unknowing" using their patented idea.
Taken out of all the legal mumbo,
this sounds like they're saying now that
they have the patent, they're going after
the prior art, and asking for money.
or did I miss something?
Remember this? A lot of people still do it. If I "advertise" my website using a banner exchange, it will get displayed over several other websites, some of them might contain news. The more I display other people's banners, the more my own are displayed. If I provide an alt tag, I essentially changed my ad.
Seems like it infringes a lot of points of this patent.
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I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
When the ITO patents idiocy, only idiots will work for the ITO. Oh, wait . . .
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Urban legend. Never happened.
That's an urban legend.
http://www.tafkac.org/misc/patent_office_ul.html
Reformatting the ad may be novel; but, so what? As far as I can tell, the bit about reformatting is only mentioned in the description; not in any of the patent claims. And, while the description may have interesting ideas about potential applications of the patented invention, or, say, charming stories about flashes of insight, odes to the inventor's feline muse, and brief dissertations about the meaning of life, it has nothing to do with the scope of the patent. The patent covers only the invetions described in each claim. That is all.
Note: I just skimmed a lot of the "further comprising [...]" claims, and I hope someone will be good enough to smack me upside the head in a reply if reformatting actually is in a dependent claim somewhere. Not that that matters to the scope of the patent -- since things covered by the dependent claims are a subset those covered by the core claims anyway.
Now, the second part: You may have patents confused with copyright. Designing a substite system in a "clean room" style (e.g. ensuring that your design isn't a derivative work of whatever design it's substituting for) doesn't violate the original design's copyright. But, patents cover all devices that fit the claims, whether or not their designers knew about the patent and/or other devices under the patent.
Although, if the patented invention could be recreated in a clean room setting fairly easily, you might have an argument that it is obvious given the state of the art, and thus unpatentable. I'm not sure what exactly you would need to demonstrate to show obviousness, though.