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NCR Patents the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "We all know about NCR's lawsuit against Palm & Handspring, but I haven't seen much press about patent infringements they are claiming against some of the biggest sites on the planet. According to documentation that a friend's company has recently received, their patents protect everything from keyword searching to product categorization. Patents to look for (and filed in 1998) include 6,253,203, 6,169,997, 6,151,601, 6,085,223 and 5,991,791 . IMHO, this is absolutely outrageous and is likely to cause billions in both legal fees and eventual licensing fees (eBay, Amazon and MSFT have already licensed from NCR). How is this not the lead story on every site? every day? Maybe because no one wants to get sued for having an online business."
Patent 6085223 describes the method to look up the very same patent using the USPTO database by clicking on this url! The patent office is violating the patent!
At least, by making patents available on the internet like this they make them sort of "open source" so that stupid patents like this one will be challenged as soon as someone finds out.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Another shining example of the US patent office's brilliance. What child has never done that on a swing before? The children at the US patent office, obviously...
Prior art does not invalidate a patent or make an invention unpatentable unless the prior art covers every single part of the new patent down to the tiniest details. You can patent something that's already patented with only a slight addition. You'll have to have a licence to use the other patent to implement the invention, but you can still get a patent that grants you a limited monopoly to just the new parts. Since the time this article was posted until now (when I've seen dozens of people claiming that these patents are invalid due to prior art) there is NO FUCKING WAY that people who were unaware of these patents before could have figured out wether these should be valid patents or not.
In summary: prior art doesn't mean you can't have a patent. It just means you have to list it in the "prior art" section of the patent and licence the old patent to implement your "improvement" to the old invention (assuming the original patent is still valid).
Simple: make software-patents illegal. They're really plain stupid stupid stupid. Software is NOT a device but merely a list of commands which controls a device. Such a list of commands is sometimes called a recipe - a list of actions which you should perform to reach a certain goal. Recipes should not be patentable, otherwise the way I move my hand when jerking of can also be patented (good luck trying to proof prior art:P). Or the way you move your mouth when saying "Anarchy". All actions:) What kind of agent (me, you or a computer) performs those actions should not matter of course. Patents are meant for fysical things. It's just the retardedness of the patent office that causes them to consider computers and software some sort of magical thing. Their way of thinking has become a bit like that the inquisition - driven by utter ignorance and FUD. Someone should either educate them or just kill them for stupidity.
0x or or snor perron?!
Nothing is going to change until we start suing the patent office to recoup costs on claims related to gross negligence on the part of the patent office. A method by which a remote client can query a database and recieve a result? We're not talking about a child on a swing here, we're talking about patenting things for which entire industries have existed since the 70's. This is gross negligence of the highest order, with prior art just a quick altavista search away. Come to think of it, Altavista is prior art.
This gross negligence on the part of the patent office is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars, while adding absolutely nothing to the general pool of knowledge. If the underfunded patent office found it was more resource-efficient to hire competent personel than it would be to simply fail at their appointed task, then we wouldn't have these sorts of problems.
I say we get a class-action suit against the patent office. Any lawyers with me?
The ______ Agenda
adjusts tin-foil hat
Personally I think there's a major backlash campaign being given unspoken support from all the old-money dow-like companies. The internet is something they have never understood, and view it only as a threat to thier way of doing business.
The legal system in no way supports the proliferation of free technocratic society, but serves only to perpetuate old-money institutions.
You will never find a retired programmer on the bench. You will find a trial lawyer of some 30 years experience whos outlook is based entirely on precedent(think 1970s and 1980s). This was a time of farms, banks, automobile production, petroleum embargoes, and cold war.
90% of the serving officials in the 3 branches of government were lawyers before being elected senators, or supreme court judges, or in many cases presidents. Very very rarely will you ever see an engineer or scientist turned politician.
We are a fundamentally misrepresented class of people. Our priorities are largely askew from the priorities of the "majority voting public". All we want is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited computing power, and to be left alone. These 3 things are very much within our technological/finacial means as a nation. If the $200billion spent on the defense budget was poured into building a broadband infrastructure we would have it. And we all know how quickly processors and storage mediums improve. Simply said there are no real technological bariers towards the implementation of what the majority of us here want.
But none of this will happen because old-money has become aware of the threat of giving abundant resources to "everyone". They will use the legal system as a means of slowing/crippling/dismantling the "internet" until it is no longer functional.
Said again, the "internet" is under siege from old money...and it is nothing if not a war. Throwing file-sharers in jail, patenting hyper-links, all of this is insanity...but in war you use whatever means necessary to destroy your enemy. We, and what we represent, are the enemy of old-money institutions....and they will leverage every resource in thier means to destroy us.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
If it's a joke, why was it approved? Why is it in the US PTO database? I would think a joke would get a good laugh, and then cause a reject letter to be mailed out.
If jokes get into the US PTO database, that makes the system a joke. After all, if it is a joke and not marked as such, how do I tell a joke? Perhaps the patents referenced from the main story are all jokes?
At this point, I hope you see the folly of your comment.
It is ILLEGAL to steal money and to cause monetary damage to other companies (*ahem*hacking,sharing mp3s,violating DMCA*ahem*) and this is no different. They should be held responsible for their actions.