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EBay Subject of Patent Action
spatrick_123 writes "Yahoo! is reporting that a man named Bill Simon is pursuing action against EBay, claiming that he hold patents on essentially every aspect of their operation. Whether or not this is a precedent setting case, it is certainly a large one in terms of what is at stake financially and it will be interesting to watch it play out."
Interesting none the less.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
I just did a quick search on the USPTO and there are indeed a patent listed for "Woolston" (who was named as the inventor in the article). For those interested, the page is
Patent 5,845,265 - Consigment Nodes. It was filed back in 1995. I haven't looked at the claims etc.
While doing the search, I noticed some other auction patents, such as one titled "Distributed Live Auction" that is assigned to Amazon.
it's about a guy called Tom Woolston, not Bill Simon. The latter happens to be the subject of an apparently related headline, where Bill Simon is being sued by eBay and not the reverse.
Bill Simon is running for Governor of California and created this clever parody site about his opponent, incumbent Gray Davis. Ebay is not too pleased.
Make sure to get the facts
Errr, no.
Those are the claims made by one side.
E-bay claims Woolston came to them trying to sell his patents. They claim the relevant patent claims were added in a revision long after the original filing date - after E-Bay was up and running which would the patent invalid. E-Bay also claims to have found prior art which would also render the patent invalid.
If you want facts, Woolston has also sued Priceline over a different patent (yet to be resolved), and GoTo.com over YET ANOTHER patent (settled out of court).
This guy is making a career of filing patent suits. He has yet to actually win a case.
Even if he did win, many people think this entire class of patents should never be granted in the first place.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A patent is, first of all, not even a constitutional right. The constitution says that congress may provide inventors with certain rights to their invention. This lead Jefferson et. al to set up the first patent board some 200 years ago.
Now, for a patent to be granted, the invention it describes must be:
New
Useful
Nonobvious
For a good definition of new, see new
The useful property is questionable, but the nonobvious is very interesting, see nonobvius
A quote from this link:
It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an
idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of
manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate
invention.
And that kind of sums it up...
Another purpose of the patent idea, combined with licensing, was to open up trade secrets. Let the rest of the world know how we do it, so that all may benefit. But, if you want to use it, you need to license it.
Again, a good idea spoiled by insane capitalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a genuine capitalist, but it is scary to see what happens when capitalism goes berserk.