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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."
On second thought, perhaps I should just consider suing Microsoft for infringing on my US Patent #173087007: A Plan and Method for basing a multinational technology corporation in the state of Seattle.
Is he going to sew them as well?
Or is he just going for a quick buck?
If he was computer savvy enough to patent all of those elements, surely he would've noticed long ago that ebay was using them. Here's what court would look like: Ebay's Lawyer: The plaintiff did not make any effort at all to alert my client of the alleged patent infringements. Plaintiff's Lawyer: My client registered these patents right before hiding under a rock, your honor. He only recently emerged and was shocked to see that not only were his patents for an online auction site infringed upon, but his patents for the Graphical User Interface, the Electronic Mouse, the Interweb, and Caffeine! Judge: The plaintiff is either insane, stupid, or both. It is also clear that he was simply biding his time so that he could squeeze as much money from this poor, innocent, multi-billion dollar corporation as possible. I am a banana. Ebay: My spoon is too big! Judge, plaintiff, and Ebay, Singing: M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E. No further questions.
The article never mentions anyone named Bill Simon. Given that a man by the same name is running for Governor of California and is constantly protrayed by his opponent as a scandalous and shady businessman, the crew of slashdot might just want to be a little more careful about what they allow on the front page. Libel tends to be expensive.
Somebody please try open a open-"sourced" patent office! As we all know, patents cannot be claimed if they allready exist in some sort of written format. So we need a forum where we can post all kinds of ideas, and then claim we own them if somebody try patent them.
Does anybody really believe that in, say, 20 years time, patents will still exist?
Seriously, things have changed in the last 100 years. Physically making something new is no big deal any more - there is far more money to be made in software, and we are increasingly going to see countries that couldn't care less about I.P. blatently ripping off U.S., Europe, and Japan patented ideas, and open sourcing their product.
Open source is difficult to apply to hardware - you can open source the design, but it doesn't really make it freely available to everybody. That might change in the future, but seriously, who has the ability to fabricate a cpu themselves? Maybe some of the larger universities, for example, but not Mr Average.
Software, on the other hand, is easy to open source. We are increasingly seeing software doing what should be done in hardware. Yes, this is stupid in some instances, (E.G. Winmodems), but very cool in some instances, (Transmeta Crusoe CPU).
Now, say somebody made a completely generic CPU - this is not a new idea, it is called a ULA - Uncommitted Logic Array. Not quite a CPU, but a ULA which is intended to be used as a CPU would be cool. Now, you could just program it to emulate an X86, MIPS, ALPHA, whatever you wanted. Patents on a lot of those would have expired by the time this technology was available.
So, fast forward 20 or 30 years, (maybe less, who knows)...
To build a computer, you buy the following:
* Motherboard - very little on it, basically a passive back plane with a few USB 10.0 connectors on it.
* CPU - cheap as anything, probably under $10, because it's just a huge ULA - in the same way that a RAM chip is basically a whole load of transistors, not much logic like a CPU of today, (that's over simplified, but bear with me).
* Whatever peripherals you want.
Now, you just flash the ULA with whatever microcode you want, and this is the clever bit, you can either use a proprietary microcode from, say, Microsoft, or Intel, which includes DRM, and a whole load of bugs^Wfeatures, or you can flash an open source microcode from China, which is freely available, customisable, and updated frequently.
In that world, what would be the point of patenting anything? There wouldn't be any hardware worth patenting.
FWIW, electronic spreadsheets where created from paper spreadsheets, a technique which is used in theoretical mechanics to compute resulting vectors in space.
If you lookup the story about spreadsheets from Dan Bricklin, you will find that they really started from this concept.
With computers, you can automate many things which where previously cumbersome.
However, with computers you can do things that are impossible in reality : magic, anti-gravity, maybe we should go for patents on these because we can implement them on a computer...
Was looking for that link . . . . but you found it first. Is there a statute of limitations to claim patents? I mean if patent a time machine, but never develop it . . . can I claim it when someone else does?
If you don't like this . . . MOD someone else up.
From the article:
"The growth of online commerce has spawned dozens of lawsuits over intellectual property. One highly publicized case involved online bookseller amazon.com, which was granted a patent for the process that allows customers to complete purchases with a single mouse-click."
How on earth did they win that one? How do you patent a mouse click? Is that why everytime I want to buy something online, I have to go through several extra meaningless steps like. Are you really, really, really, sure you want to do this?
Who holds the patent on the two step online purchase Process forcing everyone to add a third step? You see how that can go on forever.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I think this is terrific news. (even though it has been posted before... [groan])
you see, we've been saying for a while that hopefully someone would try and take on a gigantic company with some totally bunk business method patents. Said giant company would enter in a big lawsuit, and the f'd up nature of the USPTO would be exposed.
Only thing that could happen bad is they settle. Which, unfortunately, is fairly common. But as long as they don't, there is really the potential to set legal precedent, because this guy (founder of MercExchange and holder of thee patents) did everything by the book. He tried to negotiate, he tried to agree to terms, he didn't hide his patent, etc. And it seems he was the first to patent this business method (online auction).
So if this is debunked, it won't be because of some petty reason. The overturning of this case could potentially throw into sharp relief the problems with patenting business methods, especially the ease of unassociated rediscovery, and the application of obvious things to the internet (when suddenly, at least according to the patent office, they become "nonobvious" [groan]). At least, it seems the case will show how stupid the USPTO is.
Of course, if the guy wins, none of the above applies. But I am counting on the power of the american legal system to prevail. And by "power," I mean "tendency," and by "prevail" I mean "have the person with the deepest pockets win." It is a fair assumption that ebay is going to out-muscle the guy, since they have a lot more to lose. Anyways, settled, won, or lost, I am hoping this case gets an enormous amount of publicity. Cross your fingers.
"Submarine patenting" does not quite fit this story - this is a patent that was in existence some time ago. But it is not always the case that someone with a patent that affects an existing product will win, see:
:) . I think we'd end up behind M$ if they had to protect themselves from this kind of idiocy, corporations come and go, but patents live for a long,long time.
Pavel v Sony Corporation and Others - The Times 22 March 1996
It's generally a case of "whoever has the biggest lawyer, has the strongest patent"
This particular case is not all that interesting in the "patenter vs. corporation" stakes because the patent was filed recently, and e-bay knew about it. They were obviously in the wrong.
What IS interesting is that this patent is ridiculously simplistic and obvious - so we're hoping for the big, evil corporation to beat the "little guy" inventor
p.s It doesn't matter if the "little guy" is little or not, he's an individual against a corporation, and that's how it will be viewed
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
I seem to remember bidding on items in USENET auctions in the late 80s and early 90s. Sure, it wasn't the WWW, but nothing fundamental to the business of auctioning online has changed since then.
Of course, it's not really this guy's fault that the patent system is so fubar.. If he didn't have the patent, Ebay surely would and they'd be buisy suing everyone else right now.
Anybody that doesn't think Ebay would be suing this guy if the tables were turned is a bit naive. Why do you think they applied for their own patents in the first place?
These dot-coms have done an incredible amount of damage to the IP system by patenting bogus business methods. Amazon, Priceline, etc. Nobody cared when it was just little guys getting the brunt of these archiac laws, but now that a popular company is getting hurt it just might get some attention.
Anyone against software/business method patents should be rooting for the injunction. Imagine seeing the Ebay site closed!
His next target will be force feedback joysticks--on his website is listed Patent No. 6,162,123: An electro-mechanical device for providing an input to a computer program and said computer program providing a tactile output through said electromechanical device to a user. More specifically, the present invention provides an electro-mechanical virtual sword game apparatus that receives positional information from sensors on the sword apparatus and the sword apparatus contains a propulsion gyrostat that under the control of a computer process may be toppled to provide a torque on the housing of the sword apparatus that may be used to simulate the impact of sword blows.
And I wouldn't count on patent reform any time soon. The economic world is a food chain, with law firms at the top. In this case the industry of patent law would have a lot to lose. Our legislators (who are bought and sold every day) will consider that first, though of course the fact that they are mostly lawyers themselves won't in the slightest way affect their judgement...