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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."
I'll bet that if they had tried really, really hard, they just might have been able to come up with a teensy weensy little bit of prior art.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Geeze/ 22/015241 &mode=thread&tid=155
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
thats ridiculous!! 1 day!
come on
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
And I thought I could BS a paper..just look at all of the crap in the "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" for both patents.
Even if you don't agree with the patents, you surely have to agree that these people clearly excel at the fine art of creating bullshit.
If only my English teacher could be as easily duped as the U.S. Patent Office.
the US patent office announced today that indeed, their collective heads are up their collective arses.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I had no idea anyone had patented this.
/.ers getting anything?
I better get in line to buy a license to this patent of theirs if I'm going to start my own web businesses. I'll just add this to the 'One-Click' and 'hyperlink' license expenses.
I'm having trouble finding an order form on their web site, though. Seems to be down or something. I better keep reloading until I get it. Any of you other
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
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.
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.
No. The American Trial Lawyer's Association has Congress giving it sexual favors. Laws against vexatious litigation are weak and unlikely to be strengthened any time soon.
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.
...for these companies.
VC: "So what's your great new idea?"
Future CEO: "Oh, we don't need a great new idea...we just patented an great old idea."
VC: "And how are you going to make money off an old idea?"
Future CEO: "Simple...we just sue everybody. No engineers, no tech support, no salespeople, no advertising, just lawsuits"
VC: "Brilliant! We'll make millions! [to secretary] Lisa, Get my army of lawyers in here...and call my congressman, I need to pass a few new laws."
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
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The "a senior executive at Pan IP" bit is almost surely bullshit, but the post is worth answering, because it represents some common misconceptions about both what IP law is for and about the "average /.'ers" feelings on the matter.
/. or anywhere else, feel that IP laws (patent, copyright, trademark) are fundamentally wrong and broken and should be done away with. I'm not one of them. The Constitution spells out the purpose of IP law very nicely; "to promote ... progress" and "limited time" are the key phrases. Good grants of IP protection serve this purpose, by rewarding the genuinely innovative thinkers who keep our world moving forward. Bad grants of IP protection, such as those used by PanIP, do precisely the reverse.
A tiny minority of people, on
Not everything should be patented, copyrighted, or trademarked. There are some ideas (e.g. "buying and selling things over the Web") that are a) not the invention of any one person or group of people, b) immediately obvious to anyone with a brain, and c) so widespread that any attempt to enforce IP law on them would have crippling economic effects. Generally speaking, I think falling into any two of those three categories ought to be enough to remove something from IP protection. I'm particularly concerned about (c) because it seems to be something that a lot of IP vultures Just Don't Get: when a bunch of people are doing something and nobody's bothered to file an IP grant application on it, just because you did file the application does not give you the right to deprive a whole bunch of other people of their livelihood.
And, oh yeah, on the off chance that you actually are "a senior executive at Pan IP": you and others like you are scum who contribute nothing to the world in which you live. You create no value of any kind, and would be of more service to humanity shoveling shit.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They know it won't stand up. That's why they're going after real small "mom and pop" businesses. Somebody who doesn't have lawyers on retainer, who can't afford the time away from running their business to fight it.
Think they'd try this with walmart.com or Amazon? The article implies they are considering it, but you know that's just bluster.
These sleazeballs aren't stupid enough to pick on sombody who could fight back.
Typical abuse of our legal system.
Without things like this there is no way Joe Public will ever realise anything is wrong
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.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.