Slashdot Mirror
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."
...now available to the highest bidder.
to suffer from selfish individuals bent on thwarting innovation of technologies.
- Whoever holds the patents may require other sites to pay them licensing royalties.
Going out on a limb with that one, huh? Yeah, I can't think of many reasons for a company to buy the patent portfolio of a company whose patents on a key Internet technology were just upheld in court. Besides pulling a SCO, that is.Can we just refer to this kind of manuover as "pulling a SCO" from now on?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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?
Ebay should just take the easy road and remove online auctions from their business model.
They could turn themselves into a a portal, or maybe maybe a search engine. Maybe they could sell groceries and have them delivered. I wonder if the CEO has heard of push technology? Push will be the wave of the future! Why surf around for content when it can be delivered via a cute little cartoon caharacter.
I doubt this whole 'auction' thing will ever catch on anyway. None is ever going to buy a piece of junk from an unknown person over this here new fangled internet.
~Z
How the heck do you patent doing something that's been done for generations just because it's on the internet. It'd be like patenting giving stock quotes over the phone. It really ticks me off to see all these companies with nothing real to offer humanity getting patents for using other peoples technology. If I were ebay, I'd try and kill this patent based on the shear obviousness of it.
Still, I can't help but wonder if the reason America is so patent crazy lately is to get a leg up on the rest of the world. I'm pretty sure large parts of Europe will be tricked/cajoled/forced into honoring this crap eventually, and I know Iraq will (whether they want to or not).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What truly is non-obvious? The fact that this can be patented is truly ridiculous. I can't see how this is a case of patents protecting the economic goals of this country. In this case the patent produces the exact opposite of its original goal, it removes competition in the sector. Yet another reason to search for alternatives to our current IP system.
Photos.
The patents are not on holding an auction, but on the fixed-price Buy It Now feature
[opinion]which is even sillier[/opinion].
Take an existing event, which by itself in not patentable (ie an auction) and stick it on a have the participants interact through the internet, and all of a suddent, you have just "invented" the best thing since sliced bread (Patent Pending).
So:
1. Take existing "thing" everyone does
2. Stick it on the net, and patent it
3. Profit
Take that underpants gnomes!
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
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.
You aren't allowed to patent a business process (i.e. "the assembly line")
Courts ruled you could in 1998. Personaly I think the courts in question were smoking crack.
My plan for retirement:
1. Come up with a plan or method that sounds crazy, impractical, or stupid to everyone, and copyright it.
2. Wait 5 or 10 years for someone else to find a way to make millions off it.
3. Sue for copyright infringement.
4. etc...
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
This might be an important case, if ebay decides to try and challenge the legitimacy of the patents. If they win, it could set a good precident. If they lose, it'll be a disaster. I hope thats what ebay does, allowing MercExchange to make money off these absurd patents will only encourage others. Oops, it appears that I have a patent for electronicly displaying letters and numbers...
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!
To SCO (too skoe), v.t. (1) To attempt to collect royalties or fees for services or the use of properties to which the perpetrator has no rights, or to which the alleged rights are highly dubious. (2) To bully by means of expensive trial lawyers. Also, pulling a SCO (colloquial).
SCO-ed (skoad, skode), (1) past tense and past participle of To SCO (q.v.). (2) adj. Result of the action of a SCO-ing.
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
The job of these lawyers is to find and exploit legal loopholes to benefit the corporation they work for. A lot of them are scumballs. That's not to say that all lawyers are bad; that's an attitude I don't understand. There are many lawyers committed to things like bringing criminals to justice or fighting for the poor. They just aren't the ones driving brand-new Porsches. Still, many lawyers are willing to take a pay cut to work in the DA's office, because they simply can't stand the "do-it-for-money" attitude of many big law firms and corporate legal departments. If people were willing to look at the entire legal picture, they would find that it's like many others: a few high-profile assholes, and many people who toil away for good causes in relative obscurity.
By the way, I'm not a lawyer, but I do know several. I do not associate with assholes. End of story.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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!
I'm thinking more along the lines of businesses moving out as opposed to citizens. How about ebay moves its entire operations to Canada, or maybe Aus? We have decent webserver pricing, there's already ebay.ca, etc. Swap the domain name to a Canadian nameserver.
Such an incredibly stupid patent would have less chance of surviving Canadian court... not sure about Aus... but it seems that America is slowly poisoning its own economy. I mean, X years from now America will be so bogged down by bad patents and innovation-stifling technology/laws that it will be far behind the rest of the world in a technological sense.
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?
if you pronounce it "sco" as in "scope" instead of spelling it out then it's "pulling a SCO"
Repeal the DMCA!
This has been going on since the eighties. Maybe not on the Internet, but definitely within private networks of cooperating organisations.
See my journal, I write things there
Remember when Ebay got those retarded patents on showing thumbnails of items for auction? I think their whole schtick was that they had items from more than one database being presented in a single webpage or something. :P Well, this is karma.
I don't want to see anyone win here. I want to see the award reduced massively, and I want to see the person who filed the lawsuit vilified by everyone. I want the injunction to be granted and I want them to fight it out as long as possible while their online auctions taken down. I don't wany Ebay to sell out to another company. I want Ebay to enforce its online auction patents against everyone else doing online auctions and I want all online auction sites taken down.
I want this to be a big fucking huge giant mess that pisses every Internet user in the entire country off and has them asking: Why can't I sell my <worthless crap> anymore? How dare the government tell me I can't do this? You mean a bunch of *lawyers* can just take away the Internet?
It's wishful thinking, but I hope that Ebay goes all the way with this and tries to drag everyone down with them.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Client : So, should we sue him, send a letter or what?
Lawyer : Nah, that's just being too litigious, lets wait a few weeks and see what happens.
Client: Hmm, okay.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't know about other states, but in California the addition of MTBE was mandatory. It's an oxygenating additive intended to reduce air pollution. Now that the dingbats in state gov't realize they've traded a minor air pollution reduction for a major water pollution increase, they're "phasing it out". Not that I like oil companies (the gouging bastards), but the MTBE fiasco is a case of state stupidity.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Because lawyers have actually encouraged the creation of a legal system where advocates must use any dodge or ruse they can cook up under the rationalization that "the other guy's doing it too". Law school seems to encourage this sort of rationalization. I have two cousins and a high school friend who're lawyers and they've basically admitted to this, albeit under the rationalization that "they owe their client the best representation they can provide". One cousin, at least, also admits to the fact that it's rationalizing; but the other, he still proudly tells the following story: as a lawyer in the Army, he defended one soldier who robbed another soldier at gunpoint, which was seen by a third soldier. This third soldier was a key prosecution witness and repeatedly affirmed that yes, the gun was clearly a real gun. So my cousin gets the guy on the stand and, for forty minutes asks him a series of questions, all of which had been asked before, all of which were answered yes. So he's firing off these useless queries, and the guy is getting bored answering "yes...yes...yes...yes..." ad infinitum. So then my cousin slips in the question "is it possible the gun wasn't real?" and the guy says "yes...oh, sorry. I mean 'no'". He then hammered on this totally contrived "witness uncertainity" and got the guy down from "armed robbery" to just "robbery". He tells this story proudly at family gatherings. The fucking scumbag.
That's the problem with lawyers: they're encouraged to believe that the ends justify the means.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.