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

We're doomed..

[phuturephunk]

Lawbooks are the new Market Cornering Tool. We can't find new business models to innovate with, so we'd rather sit around the country and sue each other into oblivion..

This country is in for some major comeuppance in the next couple decades.. Its gonna get NASTY.. Just you watch..

Increasingly often nowadays...

[JessLeah]

...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