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."

Comments

Rehash!

[pavera]

Geeze
thats another repost of a story less than a week after its initial posting...
come on guys...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/ 22/015241 &mode=thread&tid=155
thats ridiculous!! 1 day!
come on

Re:Rehash!

[tomgilder]

And it was originally posted in May

Re:Rehash!

[ShavenYak]

I'll read through the original two posts that /. posted on this story, and repeat all the high ranking comments. Man oh man, I'll be famous.

I've patented that idea, so don't make me sue anyone.

Hah! I don't fear your patent, there's plenty of prior art!

PanIP is...

[NotesSauceBoss]

Lawrence Lockwood
5935 Folsom Drive.
La Jolla, CA 92073
619/454-4475

According to this brief.

He lost a prior suit for the same patent against American Airlines in 1994, charging that the SABRE online reservation system (and the Travelocity offshoot) infringed on his patent, according to this article.

I'm still hunting for other information.

Re:It's a fraud

[Zeinfeld]

One patent has been filed on November 1996, the other on September 2001. As the hyperlink patent controversy showed, all you need to do is to prove that the concept that's been patented preceeds the date the patent has been filled. I became an Amazon.com customer in August 1995 - more that a year before the initial patent has been filled. As such, the patents will be overturned as soon as a single entity challenges them.

Unfortunately not, read further this is heavilly submarined:

This is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 08/116,654 filed Sep. 3, 1993, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,309,355 which is a continuation of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/396,283 filed Aug. 21, 1989, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/152,973 filed Feb. 8, 1988, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 822,115 filed Jan. 24, 1986, which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 613,525 filed May 24, 1984, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,567,359.

The bastards have been using the Lemelson technique. Under the corrupt rules of the USPTO the inventors are presumed to have invented the stuff thery described in their 1994 filing in 1986.

The US is the only country in the world where you can backdate a patent claim in this way. This is how Lemelson got his corrupt bar code patent, after bar codes were invented he added them to his 1950s paten on 'machine vision'. Fortunately the bastard is deservedly dead and you can't libel the dead in the US so we can describe him in the terms he deserves.

I don't think that the pan-ip claim would stand an actual lawsuit. The prosecution history of patents that have been submarined tends to be full of exclusions and limitations that are not present in the actual patent.

But no, the fact is that the US patent system is far more corrupt than even the average slashdot user would think. Forget the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft, the USPTO is the real enemy.

Re:How would the founding fathers feel about this?

[MisterFancypants]

Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. He believed writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not create art. So in the US Constitution, it says:

I agree with the gist of your post, but Jefferson didn't believe any of those things (writers would not write, etc). He was, in fact, against patent & copyright as general ideas. His writings on these issues in the Constitution represent the ideas of others involved in the process whom Jefferson grudgingly compromised with.

Re:Sue the patent office?

[u19925]

In US, you can't sue any government office for making any law, enforcing any law or passing judgement unless you can identify individual or agency acted in bad faith deliberately. Thus you have to prove that USPTO employees or officer had some personal interest which resulted into acceptance of this patent (or something else which indicates possibility of crime).

Article has it wrong

[Wraithlyn]

Well, from a brief glance at the patent in question, it appears to NOT be a patent on "using graphical and textural content on your e-commerce site." as the writeup claims.

It is more along the lines of using these elements to create a customized presentation based on an individual's profile. To quote the first line of the patent (Emphasis mine):

"A system for composing individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles."

So it's not quite as absurdly broad as the article makes it out to be. Not quite, I said.