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."

Comments

How can anyone stand up and say...

[junklight]

that this patent system is fair or protects anyone?

The person who holds the patents - even if they are valid - did not do the difficult thing which is set up a successful company around the idea. If he had been trying to run an auction company and had been driven out of business or was being threatened by ebay then maybe he would have a gripe. But ALL this guy has done is have a fairly obvious idea (lets face it - letting people sell stuff to one another is not that new - car boot sale patents anyone?).

The patent office should take a long hard look at what it is trying to achieve.

Re:How can anyone stand up and say...

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent office should take a long hard look at what it is trying to achieve.

The patent office only cares about achieving profit.

Re:How can anyone stand up and say...

[Sirch]

The person who holds the patents - even if they are valid - did not do the difficult thing which is set up a successful company around the idea

Most of the time, the applicant doesn't have the resources, either technical or financial, to build up a successful company around one patent. Most patents are issued to people who have filed them for things they have invented whilst researching and developing for a parent company, which then has the resources to back the project.

ALL this guy has done is have a fairly obvious idea

Everything is obvious once it's been done, isn't it? The best inventions are the simplest, and their genius shines through by way of seeming an "obvious solution". But they aren't - it needs someone to actually think laterally around the subject, or to have a flash of inspiration to solve a problem in such a way. My favorite examples of this sort of thinking are a matchbox manufacturer who cut costs spectacularly by putting a striking surface on only one side of the box (when there had been two previously), and British Airlines saving thousands by way of halving the number of olives in their Martinis.

I'd love to be able to come up with these ideas myself - the guy who invented TetraPaks has made a fortune for himself and his family - but, sadly, it takes a true flash of inspiration and creativity. By no means am I taking sides in this eBay thing - I haven't looked into it deeply enough...

Re:How can anyone stand up and say...

[swb]

The person who holds the patents - even if they are valid - did not do the difficult thing which is set up a successful company around the idea.

The natural argument that occurs to me is that I may come up with lots of ideas that would be highly impractical to start a company and sell. Let's say for laughs that I design a new CPU or a new airplane. I could spend the next 20 years just trying to figure out how to get a fab built or a production line running and never actually make & sell the gizmo that I designed.

However, the design is impractical for me to build, not impractical for Intel or Boeing to build. So instead of me forming a successful business around making my design, I license my patents to someone who really can make and market my designs.

I see your point, though, and would argue that perhaps patents shouldn't be licensable, only sellable and only enforcable by the owner of the patent IF they are actually using the idea in their trade after some grace period of for "development of trade", ie the time between desinging the thing and actually getting it to market.

So if I come up with a great new CPU design and patent it, I have some grace period where I get enforcement of the design without having to market my CPU. I can either start making CPUs or sell the patent outright. Whoever I sell it to has to start making my design or they can't enforce the patent.

This would clear some egregious uses of patents; the supression of innovative designs and the profiteering of patent holders who don't actually contribute anything to the economy. Wouldn't affect patenting of obvious designs (eg, 1-click) but it could really help software patents, since you'd actually have to be *making* software that did something, not just blocking someone else from doing so.

Re:How can anyone stand up and say...

[the bluebrain]

• My favorite examples of this sort of thinking are a matchbox manufacturer who cut costs spectacularly by putting a striking surface on only one side of the box (when there had been two previously), and British Airlines saving thousands by way of halving the number of olives in their Martinis.

... or Subaru saving tens of thousands by not quite topping up the engine oil in new cars by 1/2 litre.

I'm quite glad *such* things can't be patented, at least: cutting costs by cutting corners. Great business idea, but the innovative thing about them is that they wouldn't occur to a product designer simply trying to make a good and usable product, because they don't make design sense. Hooray for "good value", but I wouldn't call it revolutionary.

As for this case: non-obvious *to whom* is always a question. Another important question is how hard something is. Examples:

• A McPhearson shock absorber: ingenious (IMHO), hard to get right, needed a lot of R&D
• Any rocket engine or similar: check out things like SCRAM jets. No moving parts (apart from the fuel pump), but engineering magic nonetheless. Needs a lot of R&D
• ... and so on

Compare stuff like this with web auctions, and they fade into "oh, like taking part in an auction over the phone, yea?" ... to which the answer is "uh, yes". And when you take part in an auction by phone, you can, for instance, tell your (human) agent to increment your bid in small steps, to win, up to a certain limit. Or only to bid during the last 30 seconds. And so on, ad absurdum.

Naturally, you can equally tell any hypothetical computer agent the same thing, if the agent is programmed to accept such commands.

Maybe the last bit is only obvious to typical /.ers, i.e. techies, but my point is that there is no research, there is no development, there is hardly even any inspiration: in the example above, imagine some dude taking part in an auction by phone 50 years ago. Any "innovation" claimed by an "inventor" of web auctions could be, would be, and has been "researched" and "developped" by the dude 50 years ago while he was talking on the phone. And by all the other dudes & dudettes, thousands of times over - and yet it is patentable. *That* is what bugs me.

If and when you happen to re-invent something (as in the case of the original article, as far as I understand) that has already been patented by someone else, there is no "onus of proof", neither on yourself, nor on the patenter. Even if you *did* invent whatever it is from base up, it's already patented, and you must enter negotiations for a license to use it, the cost of which may by prohibitive to your undertaking.
Fine, in that case you're just SOL; better luck next time. The fact that the patenter may not be using the patent (i.e. producing something based thereupon) is just secondary bummer.

But where it gets really buggy is when you, as an inventor, are severly encumbered by a minefield of trivialities. "Hey, we could do auctions over SMS" ("short message system" - big in Yurp, not so much in the US) ... uh-oh ... has it been "patented" yet?

Anyway - I'm in rant mode. To the last I can only paraphrase The Matrix: "There is nothing to patent."

Why can you patent an age old concept?

[MikeFM]

Auctions have been around for 1000's of years in some form or another. How can anyone claim to own the idea? I certainly remember online auctions before EBay was even a pipe dream and even before the web came into being. Taking a common idea and slapping 'online', 'electronic', 'web', etc on it does not make it a new idea. Spreadsheets were a new idea.. there really is no real world equivilant.. but online auctions are obvious.

I'm all for screwing the big corporations but get with the show and invent something real and stop trying to get rich off pantenting the obvious.

Too much!

[tanveer1979]

I know I know, many people are right now saying this is bull shit and all.
I decided to come with a short list on what had happened if 50 years or 100 years before such stupid patents had been accepted, note that what is stupid today may not have been stupid 50 years before, so its kinda contexted to that era. lets start

• Flying... Yea man dosent fly, if somebody can then its very much patentable, infact much more patentable than swinging sideways in a swing.
• Using fire for locomotion... think in that era it was actually an achievment
• Using non matter to transmit information, ie radio waves instead of paper

Scary huh, these are a few examples. By having thse stupid patents all we are doing is creating a ditch for the future generations. Ever wonder why all researchers and scientists prefer europe to amer.?..

Novelty

[Drownedrat]

I may be mistaken but I believed one of the conditions on granting a patent is novelty.

There seems to be a lot of patents being issued for an old idea in a new medium.

An online auction is still an auction. Putting a picture, or a song on a computer doesn't stop it being a picture or a song.

Patents of this kind are purely money grabbing schemes, often by people who have spotted the new medium & have no plan to exploit the idea, just rip off those who do.

It's basically a different type of domain squatting. (Wonder if I could patent it as such...)

D.

Sort it out Timothy

[OrangeSpyderMan]

Come on - get it together. Of the handful of stories you've just put up, some are reposts, some are badly written, some are untrue (cf. Bill Simon). What is wrong with you? Can't you or don't you read the stories before you publish? Don't you read the links the story includes, or check that the story isn't already up? I can understand you not doing it for all the stories that are submitted, but please at least do it for those you chose to publish.

This could be useful to help you decide if you really are an editor or not.

Re:We really need an open patent "office"

[AnnaBlack]

In order to make effective "prior art", you need to make what are called enabling disclosures. That is, you need to not only explain what the idea is but also how to do/implement/build it.

That's also a point about a lot of the patents that some Slashdot readers object to; *what* they do is not novel but *how* they do it may be. The exact way eBay run online auctions is clever and innovative (whoever it was thought of it first!). The idea of auctions themselves, even online, is not.

Anna B

Re:This can only speed up the collapse of patents

[nagora]

Does anybody really believe that in, say, 20 years time, patents will still exist?

Given that the whole of US copyright has been distorted just in order to protect Mickey Mouse, I'm not optimistic that patent law will be reformed in this century.

TWW

Re:This can only speed up the collapse of patents

[PerryMason]

Does anybody really believe that in, say, 20 years time, patents will still exist?

I bloody well do.

Think about it. Rich people hold patents. Rich people have money. Money buys people who make laws.

Laws dont get changed when rich people buy politicians, and this is the ultimate case. Every corporation holding a patent would be against it. Just because a law is stupid doesnt mean it wont get changed, doubly so when you've got a big lobby group campaigning against the change and this would be the biggest lobby group of them all.

This guy's patents are bunk

[Eagle7]

If you go here: http://mercexchange.com/invintprop.html

and check out this guy's company's site... the patents are bunk. He has patents for agents that search multiple auctions and marketplaces, he has a patent for routing packets based on hierarchical information in it's headers. This is stuff that 1) has very obvious analogs in meat-space, and is therefore no more of a leap than ecommerce is a leap from mail-order commerce, or 2) are things that any software developer worth his or her salt would come up with in the course of solving a problem involving, say, routing packets. This guy isn't and inventor - he's a patent lawyer who finds little obvious holes in the current canvas of patented technologies, and grabs the patents with the hopes of licensing them. I'm unimpressed.

Re:We really need an open patent "office"

[Marc2k]

What is the criteria to be classified as enabling disclosures?

For instance, if I have prior documentation on how to build a time machine out of a 1985 DeLorean, and just sorta fudge a step, scribbling out something about a "flux capacitor"...can I still nullify someone's later patent claim on the aluminum car/time machine? To what degree of detail does the USPO generally require to consider something prior art? Also, if the patent is on something abstract or limited by current technology, who's to say that a prior non-patent-filing claim of art would actually work, or even that the patent claim would work?

Re:Ebay's been talking to him for awhile

[Mr. No Skills]

I don't believe this guy is a nut

He's not a nut. He's a shrewd guy with an understanding of patent law and the dollars to go to court.

When you review his patents (see http://www.mercexchange.com), you'll find he's an expert at taking descriptions of business processes that have been around for years and placing "on a computer" at the end of them in a patent document. But there is nothing on his web site that indicates that he is a software designer, a database designer, a product developer, a computer scientist, or a business developer. There are no links to any actual products developed, or services delivered, or companies created. He is the patent equivalent of an ambulance chaser.

Re: "Consignment nodes"

[JWW]

That could have been said simpler:

I'm going to do an auction and use the computer for bidding and exchanging the money between the seller and buyer.

Dammit, BUSINESS METHODS THAT CAN BE MOVED TO THE COMPUTER SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE!!!

Re: "Consignment nodes"

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's where the suit falls down, e-bay is not the bailee of the articles. It never takes possession during the auction.

Re: "Consignment nodes"

[Cramer]

I read that patent application last time it was posted... it's still just as invalid. Let's look at the abstract alone:

allows the purchaser to change the price of the good once the purchaser has purchased the good No auction in the world works that way. You haven't purchased the good(s) until a price has been set (read: the end of the auction.) At that point, the price isn't open for debate. (So, this nut doesn't even know how auctions work.)

low cost posting terminals Define "low cost" and "posting terminal". I've used eBay from extremely expensive computers.

Plus, patent filings are not public knowledge, so, exactly how is eBay supposed to have "stolen" his technology when eBay didn't even know who this guy was until a year ago? It's called parallel discovery -- both independantly came up with similar ideas. eBay has made a very successful business from it; Woolston obviously hasn't and never will.

Re:Why not?

[ipjohnson]

I think its more the fact that you can't patent the idea of a regular auction so whats the difference between doing it in New Hampshire VS. cyber space.

Re:Why not?

[FreeUser]

What reason can you offer to distinguish methods that can be moved to the computer from those that cannot be moved to the computer?

The original poster can't, and shouldn't. He could have spared some verbiage and made the much more accurate statement:

"Dammit, BUSINESS METHODS SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE. " Period. The same goes for mathematical algorithms, conceptual ideas (which are supposed to be unpatentable in theory but for which patents are regularly granted), or even any specific idea or design which the patenting party has not built themselves first. No more patenting a matter-antimatter motor unless you've built and operated the damn thing first.

Re:First

[monthos]

yes i realise all that, i was more on the your first point, that he recieved a patent on such a generic idea.

And although ebay is current at 'fault' it just isnt right, the law is just a governing body to represent the moral values, its when we start valueing the words of what a law states more than what it means in its entirity and what its meant for, that we end up in huge disasters such as this, which should never have come to be.