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."
In Germany, and I believe in other EU countries, there is a law against mass lawsuits clearly designed to get money -- this is called an "Abmahnwelle" in Germany (literally means "wave of suits"). If some lawyer or company tried something like this, they'd get reprimanded and possibly even disbarred in Germany.
An example: about a year ago, a couple of clients of mine got notice of a lawsuit from some newly founded organization claiming to protect consumers; the clients' websites were supposedly in violation of an obscure and archaic bit of German law (basically they failed to note specifically on the site that information sent via an e-mail form is stored -- well, duh). Because of the "potential damage to consumers" due to "infringements on their privacy" (i.e. the theoretical number of consumers who could use the site was astronomical), the suit was valued by their lawyers at a high amount, thus theoretically forcing the clients to pay a minimum amount of damages to the organization if they chose to settle.
Word got around quickly that just about anyone with an e-commerce site got just such a letter, complaints were filed against said lawyer, and the lawyer got seriously shat on (and the suits were withdrawn) and the organization was dissolved.
Anything like this in the US?
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Not this makes the granting of this patent any easier to swallow, but...
It should be noted that the patent which was granted seems to apply specifically to sales-content which is tailored towards specific users.
"individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles" -- USPTO #5,576,951
Since most small e-commerce sites using GPL'd commerce software like Agora.cgi don't even support customer login, they'd be less affected by this than the big boys like Amazon and Ebay. (Not that this will ever hold up anyway).
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Is it possible to sue the patent office for approving such an obvious patent? After all, the defendents against this patent need to spend time and money in court because the PO royally screwed up. Someone needs to take this issue to court, get the patent thrown out, and then use that as a basis for a lawsuit against the PO. That would be a major wake-up call.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
We'll see a lot of "dumb patent clerk" posts. But I think the problem is fundamental to the patent system and can't be fixed with smarter patent clerks.
My understanding of the system they make it fairly easy to grant patents. Since all inventions filter into the patent office, it would be hard for them to get anybody who could make informed choices on everything. The technology is just too varied. How many folks here can speak on Nuclear facilities, chemical enginerring processes, and medical tools and be able to say which is good and which is bad? Besides, by definition, patents tend to have a lot of new stuff, that there are no experts in yet. How can you make a judgement if somethings a real invention, or just snake oil? You can't.
A granted patent isn't a guarantee. It is something that can be fought and contested. Here is where the system determines value. The good guy is supposed to win these. The problem is that the fight has costs. Even if you know you should win, you have to hire attorneys. You have to take depositions, find prior art, all that fun stuff. So a lot of folks with little cash take the only choice they can see, capitulate.
The problem is that we can't legislate ethics. there's no real law against somebody being a patent shark. Sure the guys a jerk for doing it, and the lawyer's a jerk for taking a case with no merits, but we'll always have slimeballs. You'll have low end companies filing nuisance suits, and big companies with more $200 an hour lawyers than you have total employees doing it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a patent attorney. I am curious as to whether this is current practice.
So tell me what makes them different from the RIAA? If they are successful, will they get Congress to pass laws extending the life of patents indefinitely? Will famous celebrities (Britney, etc.) do public service announcements telling people not to violate these patents by patronizing the evil scofflaws that run e-commerce sites? Will we see ISPs forced to provide customer information, as they track down violators? Will sites providing free open source ecommerce software be taken down?
PanIP, meet Hillary Rosen
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
This invention is directed to data processing systems designed to facilitate commercial, financial and educational transactions between multimedia terminals such as automated sales workstations, information dispensing networks and self-service banking systems. Specifically this invention is directed to a tool for augmentation of sales and marketing capabilities of travel agency personnel in conjunction with computerized airline reservation systems. This invention also relates to financial service application processing, and interactive delivery of informative, educational and recreational audio-visual programs to the home, school or office.
Interesting... the main focus of the primary patent is the Airline Reservation industry. The later patent adds the "Finacial Industry."
It should be interesting to see how this partnership group stands against a company like Oracle. Because, by this partnership's defined attack, Oracle is a prime target. And I know the Oracle folks have a ton of patents protecting their technology, which basically is the backbone of e-commerce.
In addition, Micorsoft's FrontPage is in direct violation of this patent. And we all know that Microsoft has its own wing at the patent office.
Should make for some serious attorney's fees for some lucky companies.
I do hope someone takes these clowns to court and challenges the incredibly flimsy patent upon which they rely.
And if they don't challenge an Oracle or Microsoft, maybe Oracle or Micorsoft should challenge them...
The sad thing is, panip has already had success doing this. Many victims settled out of court, as they couldn't take the financial risk. Of course, if they don't settle, panip mysteriously stops bothering them. This is blackmail, pure and simple.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
When I talk about the scope of patents and copyrights being outrageous.
Life should not be patentable.
Business models should not be patentable.
Its fucking bullshit.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Hey guys. Took a quick look at the patent.
I think it may be invalid. I worked on Minitel in France in '86. Minitel did the same type of thing that this patent describes. There must be a few patents that pre-date and invalidate this.
If I recall correctly, minitel was initiated in 1976. It grew into a major structure by the early 80's in France. It was called teletext and you could buy online using a graphical interface.
Of course, I am not a researcher. Don't have time to spend on this.
Maybe one of you energetic folks could pick up the ball on this point.
Did any one notice the "Add to cart" listed above the patent ? Wonder if the Patent office will get sued for using this ?? if not then they should be first !! They made their bed.. lie in it !
These keep coming up and up and up. When they first started I was still convinced that patents where needed, but after a few years to think about it, I don't think they are good for anything. The usual arguments are
A) Patents secure investment.
Bullshit, making profits secures investments. If you spend millions developing a drug, then sell the drug and make your money back. Sure someone else can just reverse engineer it, but you went to market first and you should be able to copyright the name, etc. If you patent it, realize you can't make money, then it just sits there and you make money off nothing. Sell you research, data, etc.
B) Patents encourage invention/invation.
Again BS, making money does that, plain and simple. Patents seem to be only applicable to small things these days anyways. You can't patent something like MS Word, or Winamp, that's what copyright is for. No, you patent the MP3 codec, or some stupid alogrithm that calculates grammar.
Copyright servers the real purpose, not the patent.
It has been a long time since something was such a great new idea that it deserved a patent. Even new transitor technology doesn't deserve it, mainly because it is based on years and years of others time and thought. Without all the academic bodies working on these things do you think we would really be at 90 nm manufactoring processes. Intel and the like may make it a reality, but they sure as hell don't deserve all the credit. Patents take away the credit.
Anything worth patenting would require years of R&D. Someone maybe able to reverse engineer for a fraction of the cost, but more then likely would rather just pay you for the data, etc.
Even if someone bumped his head on a toilet and invented a time machine, I still don't think it should be patentable, why, because with most technology it should be very carefully handled. Coroporations care about bottom line, and rarely about the right and wrong of something.
I'd be willing to compromise and just change the laws. Pretty simple. Can't patent a naturally occuring substance, ie. a gene, and can't patent a concept, must have a working prototype in order to obtain the patent, and no prior art. Also, the law should patchable. Basically allowing congress to easly remove a concept or an idea from being patentable. If the law was already that way, it would be easy for congress to pass an amendment saying genes couldn't be patentable.
As the poster above pointed out, the government is generally IMMUNE from these kinds of suits.
But it IS a time-honored sport to challenge the validity of patents (in a lawsuit against the patent owner) and then seek to take depositions of the patent examiners who were involved in the grant of the patent. Though the Patent Office will try to limit the examiners' testimony to essentially zero, it still REALLY tweaks them no end to have their examiners called to the witness stand.
This patent, by the way, looks like a complete piece of garbage that had claims tacked onto it years after the fact. These later-thought-up claims had virtually no relationship that I can see to what was actually disclosed when the thing was originally filed.
It's an ABOMINATION.
If the patents are invalidated by the courts and there is any evidence that the company might have known, then all the people who settled can civil sue for their money back plus punitive damages. Last I heard in California punitive could be as much 300% of actual damages.
In my view, patents provide a valuable service in our society, protecting people who create value from those who would steal it.
No, in your view, patents provide a way to make money. If you were really interested in protecting those who create value, you'd be focusing your efforts elsewhere. No value was created by the filing of the patents that you are now trying to "enforce". The real value was created by the architects of HTTP, SSL and HTML, as well as the multitudes of programmers and web designers who actually put in the work to make the World Wide Web what it is today. What did your client contribute to this edifice? Nothing, and you know it - if not now, then soon, when you're sued into oblivion. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Perhaps you should take up something easier, like selling Amway products?
CD Connection has been around since 1990. I used to order imports and other discs from their server over telnet. I'm not sure when they first fired up their actual webserver, though.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
From the article:
"automated sales and services system,"
Prior to their patent, In 1988/89 I coded a program that did just that for a Food Distributor. Salesmen would dial a 800 number, and without any human intervention, the program would take the sales order, process it, and service it by adding the items to the stores next delivery. The salesmen were using symbol barcode readers with 300 baud modems.
"automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."
This is the patent that confuses me the most. I worked for a Bank. I moved money through the FED nightly. Our own patent office doesn't recognize how the FED works?
Is this company prepared to sue the FED???
I have source code available for lawyers to review once they have cleared it with my previous employers.
Ok, calm down, have a beer (gulp). Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
i worked for a company in horseheads, N.Y. called IST (www.istcorp.com) developing their new webpages. We got this lawsuit and were all astonished about its vagueness and absurdity. So astonished, in fact, that i sent a post in to slashdot asking to start a dialogue about this. needless to say, being that the moderators of this board are soo friggin stuipd, they didnt deem it worthy. needless to say, i did some investigation on my own. The owner of these patents is one Lawrence Lockwood, who i tracked down and tried to call. If you do some reasearch online, this guy had sued a few companies a few years ago, and appearantly won. We got this lawsuit, and after seeing that all of the patents have to do with airline ticket distribution systems. We figured that what they were doing was "shotgunning" their lawsuit. By that I mean, they were planning on suing a lot of smaller companies who cant stand for themselves, and hoping that they would settle out of court. Well we didnt, we called their bluff. And appearantly that was the last we heard of them.. mewonders if they got more persistant?
"Once upon a time men were lions and machines were mice, but since it was so long ago, now its twice upon a time."
http://www.blackanddecker.com
.. Stanley Tools lost the ability to protect the colours Yellow & Black (in association with their name & brand) because Dewalt Tools produced power tools in those colours for X years and stanley didn't file suit.
.. Since last i checked .. the colours Yellow and Black were not exactly paid royalties for their 'creative process'.
lets see how this company takes on a
multinational coorporation that is notoriously paranoid with patent laws - and has a legal precident along these lines. [Branding and presentation]
I'm pretty sure the cat is out of the bag on this one. [aside from the fact that I had thought you only have a limited amount of time before it becomes an almost impossible battle to win.]
For example
When they TRIED [because Dewalt was gobbling up their professional market presence] they were rebuked and basically told 'You should have done something about it 5 years ago.'
This, I would think certainly sets precident, of WHAT im not sure
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
The phone number is incorrect.
I might be able to guess what the correct number is, but I won't; I don't want some innocent third party getting tons of phone calls over this.
Lawrence Lockwood's name is on the patent, but it was filed in 1994, and PanIP wasn't formed until 2002. Are we sure that Lockwood is affiliated with the company? Is it possible he just sold them the patent?
Damn, you beat me to this point because my dsl connection was down last night (thanks earthlink/genuity, you shitheels).
This sure does sound like a "Lemelson" situation...the long string of "continuations" is often the sign of an aggresive strategy in obtaining claims, but the real tip off are the "continuation-in-parts"; a Straight" continuation is an application that is filed before the abandonment of its "parent" application, and which contains a reference to the parent application; It must have no "new matter" added from the parent application. The legal consequence is that the "continuing" application is acorded the effect of the parent application's filing date, principally meaning a prior art reference that would be a "statutory bar" (35 USC 102(b)) against the child patent might no longer because the parent filing date goes behind the the reference (35 USC 102(e), or within a year of the reference (where the inventor can still potentially "swear behind" the reference (35 USC 102(a))
But, the disclosure of the invention must be the SAME as the parent application; if there is "new matter" in the child application, any claims wich have any reliance on the new matter only get the child application's filing date; a child application in this case is called a "continuation in part", or CIP. A CIP may have different claims that rely on different parts of the disclosure, and the prior at will, therefore, have separate "competance" (i. e., based on the date of the the referencee rather than the substance of its content)relative to each claim.
with the rat's nest of applications shown in the subjecct patents it is a fair guess that the applicant tried to assert all the claims were entitled to the earliest date and haggle the office; analyzing this just adds another complication to the whole stew.
I remember getting a CIP that was transferred to me from another examining group; I found better art and just stood my ground; for some reason, the applacant did not appeal, but just kept filing continuations; as soon as I was aware of a refiling, I quickly issued a "first action final rejection"; applicant refiled. This charade contined for about a half dozen continuations; the issue never changed and was never really argued; a clear abuse of the system, but there was (and I don;t think there is) any legal basis to prevent this kind of abuse.