Slashdot Mirror
Patent Cases Hurting Small Businesses
smudge writes "An Information Week article states that multiple small businesses with Web presence are being sued by PanIP LLC. The claims in these patents being asserted in the lawsuits refer to 'a
computerized system for selecting and ordering a variety of information, goods and services' and 'an automatic data-processing system for processing business and financial transactions between entities from remote sites.'"
I'd think any patent that uses phrases like "a variety of" is too vague.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
"The patents, No. 5,576,951 and No. 6,289,319, cover, respectively, an "automated sales and services system," and an "automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."
Vending machines anyone?
Jason Lotito
Patent abuse should really be punishable. I mean, patents were made to stifle innovation, they were made to promote it. Now we've got every tom-dick-and-harry patenting blatently prior art things, or just commonplace market things, and attempting to sue people out of existance.
Let's just make it that if you patent something that is reviewed, and sounds like a dug-headslap type thing - you get a toenail pulled out with a pair of pliers. On severe cases - just bring back public stoning (no, not drug induced bliss - bludgeoned to h*ll with big fu***** rocks) for the offending numbskull, and his/her lawyer.
Too bad these people seem so be trying to get their money from suing others rather than perfecting the magic of E-commerce, which they basically claim to have invented.
It seems that the disease that is PanIP has been spreading...
Namely - any store or business with a cashier.
Some one needs to phrase the job of the US Patent office really vaguly and then get a patent on it. Then sue the patent office for patent infringement.
hmmm, wonder if i could make this into a business plan and get some VC behind me...
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
is 1996 seem a little to recent to have a good claim for a patent? now if it had been around 1990 then sure I could see how they think they have a good patent, but 1996!!! my god....businesses were doing web sales for a few years before these yokels said "hey that sales system is not patented..."
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Can you imagine if this lawyering tactic and blatant abuse of an overburdened patent office had taken place 150 years ago. I could patent things like "a way to use electricity for an artificial light source" and then I could have sued Edison or perhaps I could have patented "a method of towing freight along metal rails" and the railroad and locomotives would have been sued into non-existence. Its insane.
Please file a protest for patents 6,289,319 and 5,576,951
c /mpep/document s/0841.htm#sect1901.01
"1901.01 Who Can Protest
Any member of the public, including private persons, corporate entities, and government agencies, may file a protest under 37 CFR 1.291. A protest may be filed by an attorney or other representative on behalf of an unnamed principal since 37 CFR 1.291 does not require that the principal be identified."
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pa
Jason Lotito
I seem to recall not allowing patents that were "utilitarian in nature" listed somewhere in law...I don't remember exactly where though. Might not even have been US law, but if anyone knows where this was from, let me know...now I'm curious.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And yet another part of the article bothers me...
It seems scarry how some coperation may potentially come after me, for me using a system I invest a mild amount of trust in, just because I -trust- the system. They coming after me, just so they can use me as a stepping stone to attack E-bay is even MORE frightening.
And I was scared using my credit card online.... This may cause much worse damage.
In the United States, people currently can sue each other for any reason and any thing, and usually win, thanks to the corrupting influence of trial lawyers in Washington, DC.
There is hope, however; tort reform is taking storm in many states, and it's preventing such frivolous lawsuits from taking place.
If you don't want these small businesses to be persecuted, then drop the keyboard and write your state and federal Congressmen by snail-mail and demand that he or she fight in the Capitol for real, meaningful tort reform.
Don't wait until tomorrow -- do it now!
1. one doesn't need to be making sense to get a patent. you can find a patent relates to a algorithm that 'can compress arbitary data by at least 1 bit' (note that this results in compression of anything to 0bit (or even less.) upon recursion.
2. revocation of patent is possible but usually impractical since this requires a lot of time and money (ask your peear who's doing as a law costs draftsman and they'll tell you that.)
3. Somebody would tell you the availability of the overseas outsourcing possibility. this is still vulnerable as your business model does not change. you can help, however, if your company is based on somewhere which is not on the states though.
4. Now, IAPNAL (this P stands for presumably) The heart of the case lies on the word 'automated' with its relationship to prior art.
5. What we can do is write to progress (oh no, congress) to get somebody proposes a new patent system.
Seems to me that the solution is somewhat obvious, and implied in the article. It is likely that they will try to sue some of the big players with deep pockets if they can collect enough in settlements. Don't you think Amazon would be well served to help these little guys squash this thing in the first round before it gets any momentum.
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
If you read the patents that are the basis of the lawsuit the case has no merit. The patents are for video loan terminals, not internet business. I don't know how the two are the same?
...
pant pant pant
[/end_rant]
It boggles the mind to think about what kind of qualification process would keep letting through all sorts of patents that any semi-competent engineer would recognize as obvious and/or prior art. Maybe it is just easier to rubber stamp the applications so they can get to the bar early.
OK, Amazon.com, Buy.com, bn.com, and anyone else who wants in should set up a fund to hire someone to club the kneecaps of everyone involved in this stupid, stupid lawsuit. My usual style would be to hit them in the face with a frying pan, since it is almost impossible to misinterperet that action as anything other than sheer and utter revulsion and hate, but sometimes the frying pan just doesn't do the job.
I mean, seriously. This is one of those 'just when you had accepted the fact that things couldn't get any more stupid or pointless, you were harshly proven wrong' things. I'm going to patent candy and beachballs and start collecting royalty payments from kids, those pathological users of unlicensed intellectual property... (No, don't even try and apply logic to that one. Trust me, don't.)
I'm ready to put in $20 for the hitman. Who is with me? Hey, it worked for the blender source code.
(OK, I'm not an evil person. I really just wish they would drop the lawsuits and grow a spine and some clue. That would be far preferable to having to spend money on a hitman. I mean, uh, I hope nothing bad happens to them. But I'll probably smirk if something does. No, wait... If the police ask, I had nothing to do with it. Yeah, that's the ticket...)
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
Why even have patents? Call 'em trade secrets. If someone can figure out what you did and do it better, faster, cheaper, and easier, tough luck, it's their achievement.
Think about it for a moment. What are the long-term results of what we see here? Patents are supposed to foster innovation by offering protection. This innovation, in turn, is intended to support capitalism and all of the nifty inventions we see every day. What we are now seeing is that _abuses_ of the patent system are feeding off of the energy provided to capitalism in the first place! What do you think will happen? Could it reach a point that businesses will be less willing to produce products for fear of litigation (one business already has, according to the article)? If so, what is the threshold of this point, and what forces could we emphasize in opposition to it?
I don't want to see innovation stifled "in the name of IP" leaving us with a modern version of the Dark Ages. With the increasing emphasis of individual or corporate profit (Enron, WorldCom, et. al) to such levels that it tips the balance of capitalism, perhaps it is possible that the contribution of individuals and small business to the GNP could decrease significantly.
Remember what fueled the Dark Ages (AD 500 - 700) - fear of prosecution/persecution. How is that different from what we see here?
How about from the no-shit-sherlock-thanks-watson dept.
Seriously folks, these issues have been discussed before, and the most prominent of problems has been identified that the patent system was funded by -- and for -- large corporations. What small business is going to have the kind of funding needed to defend a patent against a large corporation?
Additionally, a small business that knows it has rights on a patent issued by a large corporation is going to have a difficult time proving it -- financially, at least.
The PanIP seems to be runningn apache, so they can't be all evil. ;) Seriously, the website seems to be showing the index page for the empty web directory - go check it out - there is one link "stats" - which doesn't allow access without a password. First person to crack their site and put up some proof (e.g. "we are blood sucking vampires") gets all my karma, respect, and a vitual beer.
XML causes global warming.
At a minimum, the government should legislate that the patent holder must prove there is a 'case to answer' before any defendents have to touch their wallets. Maybe small businesses should even be exempt from patent claims altogether.
This whole thing reminds me of a recent set of high-profile cases where Australian local councils paid $100,000s for people tripping on a crack in the sidewalk!
Once people figured out that it was generally cheaper for councils to pay them $10k to shut them up than to fight the claim, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, hoping for a 'lottery win' payout.
The patent system will remain broken until the 'lottery win' mentality no longer applies.
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
Most (if not all) of these bad patents we have been reading about lately in the news have to do with human leaches trying to get money without working for it (the lawyers do all the work).
It's easy. For patents just come up with some broad, utterly asinine idea that people have been doing long enough that people will not stop.
This works for the same reason that sending a bill for $15 to a large business works; the company will pay the small fee because it is cheaper to do so than to investigate every questionable bill.
With these bad patents, if the price is low enough then most companies will pay the licensing fee instead of the greater cost to fight it in court.
The only solution that could work is getting the people working in the patent office a clue. How about some redundancy so it would take at least 3 people to review patent. That way if we can get at least one of those three to be a person who has common sence, problem solved!
Or is this just wishful thinking?
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
This Lockwood guy sounds like a real pro. He's been at it for at least 10 years. He sniffs out broad new technological trends in business - the kind of thing you might read about in a Forbes article - and then cynically abuses the weakness of US Patent Law by patenting a vague expression of that trend. He never intends to produce anything with his "ideas"... he just slinks into his hole and waits for the real innovators to come along so he can extort money from them.
He's going to lose any court case--that's almost a given--but in the meantime he's hoping that enough of his small, carefully picked victims cave in and throw him $30k, or at least a few grand to make him disappear.
The key to wiping the smirk off his face is to make sure no more of his victims cave. Sure, lawyers aren't cheap, but the 30 companies have to realize that there is no way they can lose this disgusting and frivolous lawsuit, especially if they work together.
The Patent Office is unequivocal. "All patents are presumed valid once they're issued," says Brigid Quinn, deputy director of public affairs.
This would be funny if it wasn't true, but there decisions are legally binding until challenged, as you say.
I was talking to a friend about a more libertarian or maybe even anarchistic legal system where the government wouldn't be the only entity with the legal standing to represent the public at large. I know, there could be real problems (like SLAPP style prosecutions for any law they can find on the books). He's really much more libertarian than me, since I think there really is a constructive role for government to play, if only they were effective and actually represented the people.
He was telling me that there is a legal mechanism where you can try to force the state to take legal action. I forget the technical legal term, but it basically translates as "do your job", and he was telling me about an example (which I also forgot). Maybe the patent office can be sued under this framework, but you still have the basic catch 22 that they didn't do their job in the first place, so it will be difficult to enforce an effective remedy.
What they REALLY patented was pretty much *ANY* database. It even looks like a series of labelled pictures in a word document would violate the patent as written.
All it'll take is one person to take this to court to get the patents invalidated. They're atrocious.
paintball
Well actually it's: "an organic system for extracting and concentrating oxygen from gases present in the atmosphere".... Or am I full of hot air?
A system for the disabling of logical, rational thought; a system that creates random decisions and has no method of control or accountability?
Sorry. I really don't think you can patent the U.S. Patent Office itself.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I was talking to a friend about a more libertarian or maybe even anarchistic legal system . . .I think there really is a constructive role for government to play, if only they were effective and actually represented the people. . .I forget the technical legal term. . . and he was telling me about an example (which I also forgot).
Yeah, I like smoking weed with my friends too.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
So please don't put all the blame on the patent examiners; while there are plenty of idiot examiners, a lot of this also has to do with bureaucracy's normal functioning: higher-ups trying to cut corners and save a buck.
Actually, I checked out the patents, they do use the word plurality, however :) ...
They're retarded. Both require that the 'textual' and 'graphical' content of the site be from a 'CD-ROM' or 'optical device'. I know of very few sites that do this. Additionally, the first patent defines that the device which essentially serves contents require a device for displaying graphical content. I guess the patent doesn't take into affect that some people host their shiznit on boxes without a monitor.
So, fear not the whores.
(I hope the lawsuits backfire on that blasted company)
The same tactics (not necessarily the same abuse) have occurred over the lifetime of the patent system. There was a previous /. story (I'm too lazy to look for it) about how patent litigation stifled the development of the airplane until in WWI the US government refused to honor the affected patents. Then innovation just took off, if you'll pardon the pun.
Also, I believe Edison had several patents covering the light bulb. (And thousands of patents covering other things.) It may be obvious to you but it was certainly not obvious in 1879.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I don't think one-click Amazon has any interest in invalidating ridiculous patents, and I don't think this ridiculous patent holder has any intention of harassing the big guys. At least not until someone not capable of putting up a sound legal defense looses in court first, setting a precident.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
what are the current job reqs for the patent office? Do they have different division? Meaning is there a patent division for internet technology, a patent division for genetic pateneting, etc?
Decisions about patents are obviously being made by people who have no idea how these things work in their respective fields. Are they just checking the patent claims for grammer, and that all the checkbox's are filled in? We need people working there that actually have a vague idea of what is being patented. I dont understand how anyone semi tech-literate could allow these pass, hell I dont know how anyone literate could let these pass?
Imagine if people start claiming necessary carpentry skills like 'the process of putting a a variety of small steel spikes in a piece of wood' - that'll cover hammering, screwing, etc. Or 'method of subdividing wood into smaller pieces.' - sawing.
How is this any different?
I always wondered why the american patent system is so wierd. The european system is so very simple.
;-)
You invent, then you patent, then publish. When you first publish or try to patent something that already is commonly used, forget it. It's not your idea, you could have found it anywere, so no patent is granted. Easy, simple and stupid actions like this can be prevented.
BTW the legal system is pretty wierd to... is that why coffee cups state that coffee is hot... Overhere we complain when it's cold, coffee should be hot and a normal thinking person only drinks coffee when it's not to hot. WHen you burn yourself, you're to stupid to drink coffee. (but in america you're smart and start sueing the supplier)
IMHO these rules, in patenting and the law, really prevent the Joe Common to use it's brain... Wait a minit... america is producing the biggest army and will start to invade every country that still doesn't listen... that's it. Keep the people stupid so you can use them...
Be afraid... for hot coffee.
... Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
is what comes to mind when I read "a computerized system for selecting and ordering a variety of information, goods and services"...
These small businesses should be able to defend themselves sans lawyer.
J
Contigency cases are a good way for people with few means to pursue strong lawsuits. They are illegal in Ontario, Canada (except for class actions), but legal for most civil cases in the rest of the coutry. The 'loser pays' rule along with caps on punative damages makes 'lawsuit bingo' very rare in Canada. No lawyer is going to take on a weak cas eon contigency if she thinks she might get lose and stuck with the winners bills.
Anarchists never rule
The PanIP Defendants web site mentioned in the article has a list of the 50 companies that have so far been sued by PanIP. Interestingly, despite the large number of e-commerce companies in California, none of the defendants are located in California.
Since the patent holder, PanIP, is located in San Diego the cases are taking place in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Since all of the companies being targeted are small out-of-state companies they are unlikely to already have an established relationship with an attorney licensed to practice in California. I wonder if PanIP is specifically targeting companies that are not in California, perhaps on the theory that out-of-state companies will be more likely to settle when faced with having to litigate a case far from home?
Biotech companies have been submitting patents of 140,000 pages in length. These may take some time to examine thoroughly.
Vagueness such as this rarely helps the plaintiff. Consider Claim 1:
Ordinarily, the preamble is not read into the claim, although it certainly can be in appropriate cases. But here --assuming, a bad assumption, that it actually serves as a claim limitation--, the addition of the words "a variety of" works to the detriment of the plaintiff. (Consider the fragment with those words deleted). In the absence of the language, the fragment is far broader, referring to all information, goods and services. With the language, which must be read to mean SOMETHING, a narrower set of possibilities is considered.
Does it mean: more than one thing, where each thing is either information a good or service; more than one thing, and different things, where each thing in one of the categories; or more than one thing, with things in two or more of the categories? Answers are found in the spec, the prosecution history and elsewhere, and it is stuff like this that gives defendants a chance.
I forget the technical legal term
Writ of Mandate. aka Writ of Mandamus A court order to a government agency, including another court, to follow the law by correcting its prior actions or ceasing illegal acts.
(BTW, IANAL, but more details can be found here in a legal dictionary)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I was implementing EDI 15-17 years ago.
that bathtub patent you referenced is a DESIGN patent. There are design patents for almost everything (you can find video game console designs etc). Design patents ONLY HAVE DRAWINGs.
Utility patents have drawings and a specification.
there is a big difference
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
...we need to go back to the time when you were required to submit a scale model of your patentable "invention" which would fit in a 12" cube and have all the relavent identifiable parts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
the patent has an effective filing date of 1988!
Look at the parent applications, it has priority back to 1988, which is prior to the people selling chocololate over the internet and prior to a lot of other art.
The patent process is far more involved than people here seem to think it is. If people would actually read the claims and look at the priority information, they would realize that things aren't as ovbious as they think it is. Doing so is hindsight. If a patent has priority back to 1988, you have to use the art available to you in 1988, not 1996!
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
IANAL - but IMHO there is prior art available that could turn these patents to where it belongs - /dev/null
IANAL either, but I do hold 12 patents and know a little about what prior art is.
Prior art simply is art that is in practice or was publically disclosed at the time the inventor claims he made the invention.
The fact that MiniVend was released in 1995 probably does not qualify it as prior art. The PanIP patent was ISSUED in 1996. The invention (and prior art) must occur BEFORE the original filing date which is in this case in 1984.
Unless you can come up with prior art in this time frame you aren't going to get anywhere.
Now what is particularly interesting in this case is the long string of CIP's. It would be rather interesting to learn what the expiration date of this patent is - it may be relatively soon since one of CIP's issued as a patent.
Compu$erve has had online job listings since nearly the beginning in 1979.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Along came Henry Ford, who along with perfecting mass production of the automobile, busted the cartel and the ridiculous patents.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Optical device== Camera ?
So I'm guessing they think the patent covers anyone who took pictures of their product and put them up on their website.
my point is simple. You can't use hindsight reasoning for why things are ovbious.
I'm not argueing that there isn't prior art that doesn't get around the patent, it is likely that the claim language makes it difficult to get around.
I mean really, how many different mouse trap designs are there. They way the US patent classification system is organized, you have hundreds of patents listed for each class/subclass combination for example class 348 is television and there are hundreds of patents in there, there just isn't one TV patent which covers every tv element every made.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
We seem to have reduced their website into a smoldering pile of silicon and aluminum. Keep up the good work, boys.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One solution may be to use an online store service, like Yahoo Stores, instead of roll-your-own. That way they would have to harass Yahoo instead of the mompop store. Of course you can kiss customization good bye.
Let's see if they have the balls to sue Yahoo.
Table-ized A.I.
But I have a patent on the creative use a system to demonstrate its foolishness, sometimes involving media such as plastic or monitors or maybe optical drives or some kind of storage, well anyway, there's somebody somewhere doing something.
The author will kindly pay up.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
the patent has an effective filing date of 1988!
Eh? What patents are you looking at? Either you are a troll or you didn't check them yourself:
Patent 5,576,951:
Inventors: Lockwood; Lawrence B. (5935 Folsom Dr., La Jolla, CA 92037)
Appl. No.: 210301
Filed: March 16, 1994
Patent date November 19, 1996.
Patent 6,289,319:
Inventors: Lockwood; Lawrence B. (5935 Folsom Dr., La Jolla, CA 92037)
Appl. No.: 347270
Filed: November 30, 1994,
Patent date September 11, 2001.
Where did you get the 1988? I am wondering if you are referring to the parent case text with abandoned applications that were referenced there? If so, the dates go back to 1984 and 1986. However, I am not aware of the rule that prior art has to pre-date any of the abandoned patent applications!
O.k. First, a disclaimer. I work as a software engineer in civil aviation and have worked on military areospace products previously. I have also had peripheral exposure to patents back in my academic days. Therefore, I may not be coming from the same background as you might. I also have not personally been granted a patent even though many of my coworkers have. With that said, though...
I have never seen a patent that was not implemented in an actual, shipped product. Usually, the patents are developed by engineers facing a specific problem who come up with a unique solution. If the solution is recognized as being novel and extendable to a general case, the patent process is kicked into high gear. By the time the engineer gets his pretty bass patent plate for his cube wall, the original solution is already embedded in a product rolling off the assembly line.
While I understand that there have been abuses of the patent process in the past (and, yes, especially in the software arena), the system works quite well, thank you. As to "stiffling innovation," I think you have to look at the big picture.
Patents allow for at least some protection against reverse engineering, which the trade secrets do not. Any time you ship a physical product, be it a be it an executable binary, a mechanical gizmo, or a new pharmacutical (sic), reverse engineering jeapordizes not just the final solution you came up with but (more importantly) all the R&D you placed into the product in the first place. For example, it is not unusual for thousands of new drugs to be researched for each one that makes it to the patent office, to say nothing of those that make it to clinical trials. If patents did not exist to protect against reverse engineering, then no one would put any money into R&D beyond specific, immediate applications - and we'd all be much worse for it.
Trade secrets can protect specific implementations. But it is patents that protect broader ideas as well as the up front R&D required to derive them in the first place. Expiration dates on patents force innovation to continue and prevent companies from sitting on their patents for too long. If you have complaints against the current state of the US or European patent offices, go ahead and gripe. But to condemn the entire concept of the patent is short sighted and foolish.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The CIP's mean that the patent takes original expiration date?
In some cases yes. I've had patents issue, and then updated (perhaps split to get better coverage on the patented matter) and the new patents have the expiration date of the original issued patent.
actually there is such a "rule" it is called 35 U.S.C. Section 120 you might want to look at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/document s/0014.htm and in particular heading 201.08
Again, most of the prior applications referenced in those two patents are *abandoned*; therefore, you need to look at the same page you referenced under heading "203.05 Abandoned". The only two relevant applications that were not abandoned that were also referenced were:
1. In patent 5,576,951, now has its own patent, which is patent number 5,309,355;
2. In patent 6,289,319, now has its own patent 4,567,359.
However, claims under these patents are not under dispute by the patent owner. Again, check them yourself before posting crap.