Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Did you know that Overture owns Altavista?
Granted they're not where they used to be, but I bet there is quite a bit of expertise (aka. patents) in that portfolio.
This buyout is much more complex that looks at the surface.
No, the LZW issue *is* about an obsolete 256 colour graphic format -- people are still using it, and steadfastly refuse to switch to its successor. Look at slashdot! Every image on this page is a GIF!
LZW was not a textbook compression algorithm when it was *invented* in 1983. It was -- gosh darn! -- INNOVATIVE! It *deserved* a patent, in 1983. Let me put it this way. 1983. ZIP had not been invented. LHA had not been invented. RAR had not been invented. GZIP had not been invented. COMPRESS had not been invented. All the popular LZ-based algorithms you use today (deflate, LZX) had not been invented! The most popular compressor at the time was ARC, which only used HUFFMAN compression. LZ77 and LZ78 were only just starting to be used. Most people thought of Huffman and RLE when you said "compression".
The problem was that in 1987 Compuserve thought GIF WASN'T patented. Unisys only put them right about that in *1994*. And GIF would be DEAD now if the Mosaic and Netscape authors hadn't chosen the format they KNEW was patented to be the lossless image format of choice in their fabulously successful web browser.
Does my bum look big in this?
I was just trying to head over to www.kuro5hin.org after visiting slashdot and mistankenly typed www.kuri5hin.org.
Guess what? It takes me to this overture search page. Makes me wonder if they've patented the use of commonly misspelled domains. The odd thing is that the whois database says that kuri5hin.org is not registered. The IE status bar briefly showed contact with auto.search.msn.com before turning up the overture page, which is also bothersome. The most logical explanation is that overture is the default search engine for my IE install. But how did it get that way? Do they just hijack unsuspecting user's browsers?
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.
Yeah, it's declaratory judgment, not summary. Summary judgment is a motion filed in an action, whereas declaratory judgments are used to define legal rights. However, since it doesnt really make a difference in the substance of the story, carry on...... I'm such a tool.