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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?"
As consumers become more informed, the pay-for-ranking search engines will fall by the wayside. Just about everybody I know uses Google exclusively specifically because the results are objective and almost always bang-on. Yes, you do get ads with Google results as well, but they're always either directly on top in the sponsored links area or relegated to the paid boxes on the right side.
And, often times, I do click on those paid listings when it's something I really need. The signal to noise ratio is extremely poor when you go to a site in which the top entry pays $0.01 more than the next highest one up. Who's to say which is really the better one? When it's a matter of shelling out the most money, the relevancy goes completely out the window.
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Gifs are "free" now, right?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It is kill the competition by any means necessary. Now even reverse engineering in danger thanks DMCA. All you really have to do is add some kind of "security" encryption mechanism (Lexmark anyone) in your product and anyone can be sued under the DMCA. Congress should be ashamed of itself.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
The EU is in the process of modifying patent laws and practices, partly after US/corporate pressure. Hopefully we can avoid the worst of the US patent excesses along with it's accompanying lawsuits.
...this sort of thing (i.e. legal wrangling in place of real "innovation", to borrow Gates's term) is becoming The Way Business Is Done.
I don't like it any more than you do, but let's look at it this way: This sort of thing WILL continue until the public is not only MADE AWARE, but MADE TO CARE about these issues.
Which, of course, is unlikely at best, and impossible at worst.
In my humble opinion and experience, there is only ONE way to motivate the Wrath of the Public nowadays, and that is to convince them that their money is at risk. The public will generally not raise an upcry AT ALL any more (the '60s having brought to a close the era of widespread, effective social upheavals of any sort), but when they do, it inevitably surrounds a "they're trying to take away my money, and I don't want them to" sort of issue.
So, there are only so many ways to deal with the growing problem of corporate litigiousness:
1) Somehow convince the public, in such a way that they could not be swayed again back into the corporate fold by extensive "PR" campaigns like the SoundByte campaign from the RIAA, that this sort of thing threatens their money (highly unlikely, but as I noted it's the only way to mobilize The Masses)
2) Move to another country-- but if it's anywhere even remotely civilized (e.g. Europe, Australia, Japan, etc.), chances are that they are already working on DMCA-like and other pro-corporatocracy laws there... if they've not already passed them!
3) Become a criminal and go burn down corporate infrastructure (and/or murder the "luminaries" of the Corporatocracy world, e.g. Darl McBride, Hilary Rosen, and of course BillG)-- likely ineffective, and even more likely to land you in jail and/or Death Row for the rest of your life (though may I be the first to say that the day Microsoft awakens to find their Redmond campus burned to the ground, I will hold a HUGE party...)
4) Commit suicide in disgust. (A bit extreme, but I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind. We are living in a global plutocracy, and it's frankly very depressing.)
I wish there was a better way, and I'll probably be modded down as a Troll for being so negativistic, but hey-- I'd like to think I'm somewhat insightful. When Dubya was elected, the first two things I said (after "Oh, shit!") were that (1) we would get into a war (or wars), and (2) that the MS v. DOJ matter would end in MS getting let off with a slap on the wrist. Both came true. So maybe my negativistic attitude here is right-on. I really don't see an end in sight to all of this. The only thing that could stop it is for the economy to collapse so much that even Upper Management would be begging for crap jobs like the rest of us... and I really don't see that happening. In ten years, everyone in the US could be reduced to eating rice and drinking tap water, but Bill Gates will still be worth dozens of billions of dollars, and Darl McBride, as likely as not, will be living on a private (and very posh) island somewhere...
One very important point that the Public doesn't realize is that in a recession, or even in a Depression, all that money that people used to have does not "disappear". The total number of dollars floating about in the US is ever-increasing (even as the value of the dollar fluctuates). What happens during recessions and depressions is that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Do you really think that when 99% of the people have fallen on hard economic times, that their money simply disappears into thin air? Nonsense. It means that the other 1% are getting fatter.
Oh yes, and one more thing to bear in mind. Many people's highest ambition in life is to become like these people. Most people entering the "IT" world (that sinister term for the fusion of inferior technology and businesslike ways) dream of being the next Bill Gates. And most people among The Public At Large not only respect corporations and corporate ty
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
They are the masters of leveraging patents. They come in with a big stack of fundamental patents and nicely say: "we've noticed that your company is enjoying our innovation... wouldn't you like to formalize the relationship?" Then two guys named Moose and Rocko help you with your pen.
Heads up - DMOZ is owned by AOL.
This is getting absurd. Anything that challenges Google is now immoral? Look, the US has a patent system. OVerture did not create it. They are just using it. If they didn't you can be sure someone else would have. The bottom line is that they submitted the patent and it was approved. Write the US patent office if you have issue with it.
I'm imagining that maybe an even-worse scenario for the web than some quality web sites becoming unavailable due to there companies being litigated out of existence, is a universal presence of web sites whose functionality is twisted in bizarre ways by the demands of avoiding IP lawsuit threats.
Nothing is going to be quite as frustrating to me as having the web sites I visit being generally well-executed and useful, except for pockmarks of infuriating work-arounds to avoid the mandates of common-sense IP restrictions. Think of workarounds for bugs in an application, but the bugs can never be fixed.
I think, ultimately, all the dot.com companies will suffer from this patent infighting. All consumer desires have alternate means of satisfaction in a market economy; unfortunately, people might find going back to the phone to conduct business the necessary next step in the web's "evolution".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
So is this the way the search engine competition will be won?
No, because a) Developing workarounds is much cheaper than licensing. & b) Performance is all people want from a search engine. Unless a lawsuit can severely and permanently damage the utility and overall performance of a search engine, even a substantial one time monetary loss shouldn't be expected to doom an established site.
Litigation is inherently a negative sum game. The players litigate, one takes a portion of money from the other (or not), and a percentage (usually 30% or more) is pocketed by the attorney.
Even in the most just and reasonable situations, in which one person is truly injured by another and deserves compensation, the litigation involved decreases the overall pie available to the two principles (remember, that ambulance chaser is getting a third of the money).
When it comes to vastly more insidious things like patent and copyright law, wealth is destroyed for millions simply to line the pockets of a few, with the overall pie shrunk by orders of magnitude just so a few can reap a little more money than the free market would entitle them to.
This is simply the logical extention: get a patent on a business method and eradicate all competition by enforcing the patent. Increase your own wealth modestly (or immodestly) by destroying vastly greater sums of wealth that others might, through their innovation, enjoy.
Patents (and to some degree copyright) are antithetical to free markets and the competition required for capitalism to function in any real sense, and business / software patents are certainly the most offensive of the lot.
Make no mistake about it. The United States, through its litigiousness, is playing a negative sum game with itself, and the only end result of this nonsense is that the entire American pie shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, until there is little or nothing left and the entire nation, intellectual property attorneys excepted, is impoverished. And once the entire economic system collapses, as it surely will if competition is eradicated in such a manner, even they will be joining the rest of the starving masses in the street.
It is an ugly future, one which our attorney dominated policy makers and judiciary have created for us, and one which almost all of us are certain to live to see reach its logical conclusion.
You are right. It is going to get very, very nasty. Indeed, if patents aren't severely curtailed or banned outright (business model and software patents in particular), and copyright rolled back and restrained to its historical role, American capitalism is likely to experience much the same catastrophic failure that communism did, growing ever more ineffecient as ever more monopolies take over ever more once-competative markets. Opportunity is already decreasing, and the curve will accelerate, until there is little left for any but a few priveleged.
We have lawyers, litigiousness, but most of all, patent law made by, of, and for patent attorneys to thank for this appalling mess. Don't expect it to get any better anytime soon, if ever.
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