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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.
I'm going for the patent rights on the use of black typeface on a white background for the purpose of displaying details of and discussing stupid patents
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.
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
Maybe he can put his patent up for auction on eBay...
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.
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.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
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.
Now that someone big enough to pay off congressmen is getting picked on.
Damn shame it's not Amazon.
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.
-
- - 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.
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.
_sig_ is away