EBay Fined $29.5M in Patent Case

pigreco314 writes "As reported by Washington Post and many others a federal judge Wednesday ordered online auction house eBay to pay $29.5 million to a Virginia inventor (former CIA engineer) who accused the company of stealing his ideas." This case has been going going on for awhile, but this looks to have some finality. Patenting "Buy it Now" is almost as stupid as One Click Shopping.

Comments

Verdict and Patent in question

[angle_slam]

From this useful Slashdot post:

• The jury's verdict.
• U.S. Patent 5,845,265.

You can't steal an idea

[dmeranda]

...to a Virginia inventor (former CIA engineer) who accused the company of stealing his ideas.

Why do people always use the wrong words? You can not steal an idea, except perhaps in some far-out science fiction where neuron transplants occur (Spock's brain?).

Now you can copy my idea, you can be inspired by my ideas, you can derive the same idea I had by examining some tangible expression of the idea (e.g., product reverse engineering), or you can have the same idea as me all on your own. The later is actualy the most likely reason why two individuals have the same idea, they just had the same thoughts. Thoughts are not mutually exclusive.

Now, you can steal blueprints, computer printouts, prototypes, webservers, money, or even customers; practically anything that's tangible and where ownership is by nature mutually exclusive. But you can not steal ideas.

If I actually could steal your idea, then three things must be true:

• You no longer posses the idea you once had as a direct result of my actions,
• I obtained the idea directly from you--I did not come up with it on my own,
• You did not not give me permission to do the above two things.

Short of that, it's simply not stealing. So the headline should have more correctly read:

...who accused the company of using the same ideas that he had.