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."

Comments

What?

[smoondog]

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

Re:What?

[SpatchMonkey]

I don't know if you read the patent, but it actually describes a fairly sophisticated system for advert management.

We're not talking a few simple lines of code to insert a random image into a webpage here. This is a well thought out automatic process of obtaining, tracking and releasing adverts to many different types of newspaper website.

Wow, Marketing AND Patent Abuse...

[Dr. Bent]

...do they eat babies too?

Verbose

[SpatchMonkey]

These patents are terribly long-winded and verbose.

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:

• <IMG SRC="...">

Common Sense

[medcalf]

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.

The pinata approach

[shaldannon]

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.