Slashdot Mirror
SBC Patents Links, Dynamic Pages
Oculus Habent writes "Robert Cringley has an article on a patent that SBC aquired. Patented in 1996 is the concept of linking to dynamic content with a static element of a page. First approaching museumtour.com, a small site, and asking them to obtain a revenue-based license, SBC appears to be trying to set precedent. He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art."
Wow of all the things. Static content ona dynamic page. Soon peole will be asking for patents on text because they had the idea of symbols and letters representing words.
I guess you have to sue Slashdot too, cause of the preferences page too, right?
I'm patenting 1 and 0's
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
SBC isn't a villian for trying to bully small companies with a horde of lawyers, any more than a dog is a villian for humping your leg. It's the expected nature of the beast.
Nevertheless, when the dog starts humping people's legs, we cut his balls off. SBC will need similar treatment to stop their anti-social behaviour.
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by being such an asshole)
Haven't others claimed this before? IIRC, a British telco tried this a year or so ago.
How on earth do they propose to collect on this? Shut down millions and millions of web sites? I'm getting this imagine of a corporate exec or lawyer rampaging around his office "You wanna mess with me?! I can shut down the INTERNET! Bwahahahahah!!"
Is this the latest in dodgy business models after the dot com crash - profit margin by lawyer?
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Microsft Patents Ones, Zeros
In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
Software Wars
I'm going to patent the use of an absorbant cellulose polymer material for cleaning the defecatory organs. Then you'll all be shitting yourselves...
http://www.uspto.gov/ appears to violate this patent itself !
What? Not hard to blame them for patenting some twiddling thing and then charging other people for those people's creations? They're fucking assholes. What's sad and absurd is that it never occurs to anyone just how sleazy, reprehensible and disgusting practices like this are.
We don't need prior art. We need firebombs.
Pissing contest over? :-)
You couldn't patent patents themselves. But, you CAN patent a business model. Why not patent "a method for using patent law to extort money from legitimate businesses"? The only drawback is that (sadly) it would be trivial to come up with prior art. Still, it would make for a nice piece of political theater to illustrate the ridiculousness of the patent system. And who knows? If the system is screwed up *enough* you could win and either stop people from using your patent or get rich by forcing them to license you patent.
Up until this point I had been spending a large amount of my time writing dynamic html code that usually had links in it for various employers.
Now that this is patent infringment, my employers are far less likely to want to deal with it and instead we will just put up static text - which is way easier.
I hope I still get paid the same... or hell, a raise.
also, I'd like a nap.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
get sued by sbc and slashdoted in the same week.
As you can see, this person did not pay his royalties and thus, his link displays as text.