Slashdot Mirror
San Diego Company Owns E-Commerce
Kernel Panic writes "Looks like you can now be sued for using graphical and textural content on your e-commerce site. As everyone who has an e-commerce site does. A company in San Diego was granted one patent for using graphics and text to sell things on the web and another for accepting information to conduct automatic financial transactions via a telephone line & video screen. They have started their crusade with smaller companies that do not have the financial resources to fight back so as to build a "war chest" to take on larger companies like Ebay and Amazon. One site has taken the offense after becoming one of the first defendants of 50 companies so far. Curiously it appears the company was formed in March of 2002, less than a month before filing for the first lawsuit."
How can we expect the patent office to keep track of all the prior art that there is out there when CmdrTaco can't even keep track of prior art for posts on Slashdot?
Mmmm.. Donuts
I wonder why those snipers in the United States pick all the WRONG targets.
Moderate +1 Funky please
--- Eat my sig.
I could side with Amazon when they patented one-click because that might be attributed to a certain order of code, but this is such blatant intelectual property exploitation that its ridiculous. Its sad that the patent office is giving these sorts of patents away and its sad the congress isn't setting specific laws limiting the grants of intellectual property patents. the guys at youmaybenext.com are doing a noble effort but there should be an extensive effort to fight tech related patents like this. i couldn't find any across google but does anyone know of any?