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Online Auction Industry In A State Of Limbo
theodp writes "It seems the online auction industry is in a state of limbo after last week's ruling that eBay violated patents belonging to MercExchange. MercExchange said it will file an injunction against eBay to keep them from using the technology, eBay said it will file motions to overturn the verdict, and MercExchange is ultimately looking to sell its entire portfolio of auction-related patents. Names being bandied about as possible acquirers include Amazon, Yahoo and eBay itself. Whoever holds the patents may require other sites to pay them licensing royalties."
I've never understood the relevance of such silly patent battles. If they've let ebay and all hte rest of these auction sites get away with patent infringement thus far, why are they finally deciding to "stand up and defend our IP"?
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
The European Parliament will vote on patents in EU in just a few weeks - having a case like this go public _before_ that happens will only help us from having equally relaxed restrictions on software patentability as seen in the US.
Will most surely have patents on software soon, yes, but that will probably exclude "business methods". Algorithms will be patentable, "one click shopping" and "buy it now" will not.
it's in my head
I'm so tired of this "let's blame the lawyers" crap. Remember that it's the actual parties who file the lawsuits; lawyers are merely advocates for their clients. And, unless it's a bench trial, it's the general public that makes the decisions regarding verdicts and damage awards.
Whether you think society is too litigious is your opinion. But, to blame that on "lawyers" and not all the assholes who file the frivilous suits is not "insightful" at all.
If these patents continue to hold up, then either EBay will buy them for some stupendous price, or somebody else will buy them and charge EBay studpendous fees. Either way, EBay will continue to do business much as before -- the profits will just get divided slightly different. Big deal!
Now they have one more reason to fail, but it has nothing to do with market forces, freedom or the American Way. You telling me I can't do something obvious because you did it first is bogus. I might like to run a trading site for the fun of it, that's they way ebay started. If it makes lots of money, like ebay did, goodie for me. If not, no big deal. Me paying you money for nothing is not something I care to do. Screw off.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Pay close attention to this (block)quote:
That's right... According to the story, the only thing eBay can't do, is the "Buy it now" thing. Auctions go on as usual.
The second article says the same thing, approximately:
Last time I used eBay, there was no "integrated payment processor", and "fixed-price selling" was a new feature... In other words, they were doing well before those features, so I imagine they could do without them if things don't go their way.
I hate patents, but I hate sensationalist
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Behind every sleazy lawsuit is a sleazy lawyer.
Consider the number of utterly despicable lawsuits that are filed every day. Every one of those lawsuits represents a lawyer who is willing to take advantage of somebody else for his own and his client's financial gain. That MercExchange are assholes for making lawsuits their business plan goes without saying. That lawyers are assholes for screwing over society for their own financial gain has to be said.
Do me a favor and double it!
Rather then use "buy it now" technology, perhaps e-bay would move tward "end it now" technology, where users who are trully interested in an item can select to buy it, rather then the seller selling it. This way it should resolve the trivial issues of the IP of "buy it now".
Now if that sounds fucking stupid, it's no more stupid then someone claiming they hold the IP to "buy it now".
Near as I'm aware... OBO [or best offer] technology has been in use for as long as I can remember, employed by a vast amount of private citizens when selling things via news paper classifieds.
For those "unfamilar" with OBO technology... basicly a person is selling goods or services and lists an ideal price under the terms that you can buy it for that price, otherwise the selling will accept the highest offer they recieve. What we forget is offers can be higher or lower then the asking price.
For example, I was selling a 486 overdrive some years back. I put it up for sale for like $50 OBO, and I got offers higher then what I posted it for. Basicly I explained to all involved that my best offer was like $75 but a higher offer would be accepted and sold. Needless to say this pissed people off, dispite the fact I was trying to conduct the transation in a fair and honest fasion, and taking the "best" offer.
I would have taken $50 for it, but someone was willing to pay me more money in order to assure that they got it, as well as some assurance that it worked.
Now... I am not the inventor of OBO technology, in fact i'm not sure who is, I would *THINK* it's in the public domain, the fact that it's in common use.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar (who was a programmer working at General Magic at the time) as an online community (hence, e-Bay, for the Bay area up in San Francisco.) For quite a while, eBay was pretty much a personal website/community bulletin board for him, not a business (in fact, some cool code he hacked together for MagicCap devices lived at the eBay domain for a while - if anyone remembers the e-mail gateway for retrieving web pages.) I think auctions were just a feature of the site that just happened to grow into a big business.
Based on when most of eBay's current corporate officers joined (97-98), it is quite likely that eBay as we currently know it did not exist until probably 1996. Certainly, the Buy-it-now feature that eBay uses, which was ruled as violating at least one of the 3 patents that MercExchange is supposed to own, probably didn't get implemented until at least a year or two after that.
My question is whether these ideas (as detailed in Guaranteed Electronic Markets - 1999) appeared in print prior to the 1995 application date for the patents in question, given the existence of technologies like AOL, AT&T, and BBSes at the time. To be valid, none of the ideas embodied in the patents filed must have been published. I find that hard to believe - that the concept of haggling over a product with the option of a set price, as extended to a network (for example, over the phone network) did not exist in print prior to 1995. As for software agents, that seems like an obvious extension of existing software agent work prior to 1995. I mean, if you look at the patents in question, they cite lots of prior art which makes it clear (at least in my mind) that what they were trying to patent was neither novel nor non-obvious to someone skilled in the field in question.
Seriously, there wasn't any literature - even fiction, that featured the idea of auctions over a networked computer system,with software agents?