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X10 Pays $4.3 million In Damages For Pop-Unders
Black Perl writes "The Seattle Times is running an article entitled "California brothers win $4.3 million award against X10." Apparently, pop-unders are "proprietary" technology and a "business model" that X10 stole. I have mixed feelings about this. I love to see X10 get its due for the pop-unders, but proprietary technology it is not." Haha. Patents are funny.
I have all but forgotten about Pop Under/Over/In the Middle/Whatever ads since using Mozilla Firebird. The builtin pop-up blocker is truly lovely.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
...if there are any movements underway to end this bullshit? There are always loads of stories on slashdot about patents gone awry, but I never hear of any groups working to destroy the current setup.
Suggestions?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/20/tech/mai n578996.shtml
*snip* One of their first big clients was X10, whose security-camera ads soon began appearing all over the Internet.
"When we found out they weren't paying that bill, we were beyond distraught," recalled Chris Vanderhook. *snip*
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
is that they take the focus off your current browser window. You'll be trying to type something into a form and halfway through what you're typing you lose focus and get cut off.
Thank god for netscape/mozilla and now the Google Toolbar. I haven't seen a popup or popunder in months.
2 Lines of JavaScript isn't a business model. Although I hate X10 I hope they get this idiocy appealed. If the brothers do win, I'm patenting displaying message boxes to notify users of stuff, and then suing everyone for 3 billion each. Except MS, whom I'd sue for 1 trillion dollars, since their software displays error message boxes every few seconds.
No, it's not much more complicated. It was, however AdvertizingBanners.com's business model when X10 hired them. X10 subsequently copied the code and stopped paying AdvertizingBanners.com. If X10.com had implemented pop-unders without a contract with AdvertizingBanners.com, or let the contract expire first, there probably wouldn't have been a lawsuit. (IANAL)
Well, Slashdot needed Yet Another Patent Story. It doesn't matter if the editor never even dreamed of actually reading the link, and instead inserted such witty banter as "Haha. Patents are funny."
Slashdot is corporate-owned and is all about page hits these days, I'm afraid.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You complain about the sub-millisecond increase in latency with proxomitron, but not about writing 1/3 of a desktop program in JAVASCRIPT? go figure.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Exactly why isn't it reasonable for them to sue for the money that their contract says they should receive? And where in the article does it mention patents at all?
If there are patents involved here somewhere, then fine, but if there aren't, I wonder whether the Slashdot editors actually took the time to do some research on this matter before making some off the cuff remark about patents simply because it makes more people want to reply angrily.
It doesn't help much if we start calling EVERYTHING a patent issue.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This is not what patents are for. Patents, much like copyrights were created to provide a cost justification for innovating. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?
Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented. If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.
Patents were created as a way to encourage innovation and that is precisely the opposite of what it is accomplishing in situations like this. Do you think, for one moment, that the pop under ad would never have been invented if it wasn't for patent protection?
Personally I'd be content to never see another pop-up or pop-under ad ever again, but this is just an abuse of the system.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The process of opening a window in javascript gives you two distinct ways to make that window behind everything else, a (large) negative z-index, or by sending it to the back directly.
These event handlers and interpretations of parameters were programmed in specifically, they are not an artifact of some grander scheme or natural phenomena. Clearly, the designers had the idea of a window opening up behind it in mind at the time the language specification was designed.
I have a hard time believing you can patent the idea of putting an ad onto an existing media and calling that a business process.
Could I patent selling and printing ads in the background pattern of dixie cups and disposable paper plates?
That's what I see in this situation. Maybe you CAN do that, in which case (throws hands up).
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Actually, what I'm saying is:
1) The terribly witty "Haha. Patents are funny." and the fact that it was submitted as a Patent topic is evidence that Slashdot isn't just biased, it's full of idiots. The issue doesn't even involve patents, though the story that's linked is less a story, more a soundbite and doesn't really explain what happened very well. The REAL issue is simply that X10 didn't pay their bills because they thought that they could take advantage of a bunch of punk kids and get some free work. Oops - guess not.
2) If you didn't think to hide the popup windows behind the browser, don't gripe because someone else did several years ago. Besides, stupid patent or not, it's a moot point because the terminology used was "propietary technology", not "patented technology". How JavaScript on the client side can really be made proprietary is beyond me, but whatever - that's an entirely different story.
On a similar note: everyone freaked when Microsoft patented that crap about customized pages on a network, but few understood what really happened or even thought about it first. When the patent was actually filed in 1996, the idea was reasonably unused. Just because it's commonplace today doesn't mean it was then. Beyond that, the document clearly made a bunch of "fodder" claims that noone in their right mind would ever attempt to defend before getting to the meat of the patent where some very precise, legitimate claims are made.
If the average Slashdotter would apply even 5 freaking seconds of critical thinking AND read the goddamn articles before they commented, there'd be half as many dumbass comments because the knee jerk tinfoilers wouldn't always be screaming about things they don't understand. On the -1 side you have trolls and people with unpopular opinions. On the +5 side you just have idiots with popular opinions but no merit to back them up. Hell, they usually don't even understand where the opinions originally came from or what they're about. What's the difference between the trolls and the idiots? Not much, says I, except that the trolls are smart enough to know they're just causing trouble.
I have my share of biases too (being anti-Microsoft is one of my favorites), but at least I don't try to pass them off as a legitimate understanding of complex issues just because the people with mod points think that any formulaic response deserves to be modded to +5.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
"Spammers exist because people buy from them. It typically takes from 1,000 to 10,000 spams to make one sale. If you buy from a spammer, you are PERSONALLY responsible for the next 1,000 to 10,000 spams sent... Including the porn spam sent to your kids."
I imagine the same goes for pop ads. I would like your address so I can break your legs on behalf of the 10,000 people who saw an X-10 pop under that you personally financed.
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