Overture To A Patent War?

Shackleford writes "CNET has an article discussing Yahoo's proposed $1.63 billion buyout of commercial search specialist Overture Services on Monday. Yahoo would acquire 60-plus patents related to technology and processes for indexing the Web, as well as for pay-per-click and bidding systems to grant sites higher placement in search results. The search market is expected to be reap $4 billion in revenue by 2005, according to researchers. As the industry matures, the competition for a piece of that large pie could lead companies to bulk up their IP legal teams, much like in other industries such as online advertising sales during the dot-com bust. And Overture sued FindWhat.com in February 2002 after FindWhat filed a summary judgment request in a New York federal court in an attempt to fend off any potential infringement charge from Overture. Two months later Overture filed a second lawsuit, charging Google with patent infringement in its pay-for-performance ad system. So is this the way the search engine competition will be won? Through patents and lawsuits?"

Comments

Guh?

[RyanFenton]

So wait... Pay-per-rankings, paying huge sums of money for existing ideas rather than innovating, seemingly random earnings expectations, and plans to be able to litigate against semi-competitors rather than cooperate/compete and grow...

So.. they're buying their way into obscolescence? Great idea guys.

Ryan Fenton

Google?

[DigiShaman]

So what's to become of Google? Could this force them to shut down overnight?