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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.
The jury said that eBay's "Buy It Now" option, which allows auction surfers to do the same thing, infringed on Woolston's patent.
From: Another patent of his (February 1999)...
Auctioning an uniquely identified item (e.g., used goods or collectibles) with a computerized electronic database of data records on the Internet includes creating a data record containing a description of an item, generating an identification code to uniquely identify the item, and scheduling an auction for the item at the computerized database of records. The item is presented for auction to an audience of participants through a worldwide web mapping module executing in conjunction with the computerized database. The data record connotes an ownership interest in the item to a seller participant on the computerized electronic database of data records. The worldwide web mapping module translates information from the data record on the computerized database of records to a hypertext markup language (HTML) format for presentation through the Internet. Bids are received on the item from participants on the Internet through an auction process that executes in conjunction with the computerized database of data records. Auctioning of the item is terminated when the auction process reaches predetermined criteria. The auction participant is notified of the high bid in the auction process. The unique identification code is provided to the auction participant with the high bid to uniquely identify the item.
Seems like this fool was trying to go after EBay by filing patents that were VERY similar to what EBay had already been doing. Nevermind "Buy it Now", he wanted it all.
Someone will undoubtedly reply to this saying they have patented posting on /. patent stories.
Actually, it's not the PTO's fault. If anyone is to "blame" (and how can you determine blame unless you've actually read the patents and heard the evidence) it would be the jury that found the infringement. Remember, even if the PTO grants a patent, the courts can still strike it down as being invalid.
I may be interpreting the original patent wrong (IANAIPL), but it seems like the intent of the patent was to establish a series of franchised nodes throughout the US through which consumers would put up items, buy items outright, or bid on auctioned items. Sort of like a little kiosk at a local store that you would go to visit (the patent used the example of a man visiting a card store and putting up one of his cards for sale, while the owner was using it as an online storefront), complete with a digital camera and a printer to put out a bar code that could be affixed to the product to track the order (I'm guessing for purposes of sales fraud). It doesn't even seem to be very similar to EBay's business model.
:)
Then again, I could be misinterpreting it
Not that this is really news, but the plaintiff, Thomas Woolston, who brought the suit, is a patent attorney..
it's not the jury's fault: the problem is with US patent law, which allows the patenting of business methods. This isn't an example of Congress being bought, it's an example of a legal system out of control.
Historically, patent systems in most countries haven't allowed business methods to be patented. This had always been the case in the US - the most well known precedent involved a guy named Hicks in the 1890s who tried to patent a bookkeeping method which he claimed reduced shoplifting; he successfully registered the patent but it was held by the court to be invalid.
However to just about everybody's surprise, the Federal Courts overturned all this in the State Street case in 1998, and the AT&T case a year later. The law is a mess, but it seems anything "useful" can be patented.
It's extraordinary that so radical a step (and one that's arguably a violation of the US constitution) can be taken by the US court system, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seems willing to do anything about it.
so don't blame the jury.
End of rant.
My company recently applied for two patents for which I am named the "inventor". the patents are pretty obvious ideas. In my opinion, there is nothing there worthy of a patent, in other words, there is nothing that is not obvious about the ideas.
While speaking with the patent attorney and describing the details of the "invention" he said that his job is to make the patent as broad and general as possible (read vague) to make it easier to litigate an infringement. You could see his mind working as he worked out the patent application in his head.
While I agree we need patents to protect intellectual property, patenting obvious ideas, not even actual working inventions, is amazing. Customers have been able to "Buy it Now" at any retail store in the world since the dawn of time! Why is it that when we get a computer involved we need a patent and ~$30 million USD in compensation for this idea?
The attorney would constantly look at other things we were doing and ask about them. The only plus to this is that I'll have my name on a few patents soon, if you call that a good thing. I was also told that if in a few years the need to litigate the patents arose I would be deposed. I'm imagining myself at a different job in a different location getting a letter saying I need to be present at a law office some where!
The bottom line is that this is in no way a good thing for anybody
I disagree. It serves as a message that "he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword". If companies like eBay keep getting slapped like this, if the IP wars become too absurd, then maybe the message will get across that our IP system must change. And maybe real change will happen. As long as big and powerful companies can do all the slapping without getting slapped themselves just as hard, nothing will change.
ebay plays the exact same game here. They are banning people from using vauge e-commerce buzz phrases from advertisements regarding to ebay, claiming a patent. They have even started a business group to sell the rights to use these words. They get what they deserve./ m08/i07/s0 2 (the banning)2 4/rtr10094 38.html (about the selling of words)
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03
http://www.forbes.com/newswire/2003/06/
I clicked on the article and all it really says is that the jury found that eBay willingly infringed on his patent. If we take this to actually be true then this settlement sounds about right. The Buy Now feature is something that eBay uses to attract people. By attracting people eBay makes money, tons of money. If they did see this first somewhere else then they should pay that person for his work.
The $30m is stated as punitive, a pretty good slap on the wrist. Maybe next time eBay will actually license a patent from the little guy and save some money in the long run rather than have a free lunch
i'm serious. the way patents are going is out of hand. a new, more stringent patent system is probably needed, and it seems the best way to achieve that is to simply scrap the USPTO and start over with it.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
If a large corporation like ebay can't win a case brought up against them for infringing an obviously frivolous patent then what chance do the rest of us have?
"obviously frivilous" how? Why would you possibly imagine a patent is obviously frivilous after surviving a jury trial? Certainly, the patent may, in fact, be invalid, but where do you come off suggesting that the patent is invalid at all, let alone obviously frivilous?
If they failed to show that there would be irreparable harm from future use than how did they show that there was harm from prior use?
You are confusing apples with oranges. "Harm" comes in many flavors, and the law remedies the harm of patent infringement in various ways.
One way, that is at law, is an award of money damages to the plaintiff for the infringement, in no case less than a resaonable royalty as determined by the Court. However, sometimes a plaintiff cannot be made whole by money damages alone, in which case such irreparable harm is remediable by an injunction -- a court order to stop practicing the patent.
This result is unusual, because irreparable harm is usually presumed, not irrebuttably, in a patent case. Ebay must have satisfied the Court that it reasonably relied upon an effective license due to the conduct of the other side.
Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.
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