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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.
So if I as a feature to a browser that lets you automatically play a sound file, then someone can patent using that feature to emit an advert? Sounds like the patent should belong to the browsers who added the feature that lets you do a pop up.
is that when I went to read the article, I got a classmates.com pop-under. Are they being sued, too?
When the going gets tough, use Johnson's Going Tenderizer
I RTFA, closed the window and found what? A Pop-Under ad!
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
PS, just for those of you who aren't familiar; X10.com is not really related in any way to the x10 protocol or x10 devices, don't let x10.com sour you to this awesome technology. x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
This story has nothing to do with patents,(as far as I can tell anyway). The word patent isn't even mentioned in the story, and proprietary != patented.
It would appear that this is about X10 hiring these people to do pop unders, and then not paying them. Unfortunately it's impossible to say what the real
story is from this very short article.
From what I've read in other articles about this suit, they were sued because they refused to pay the commission for all those pop-under ads. Imagine if you started a company and designed a banner ad for a company. Your contract said you get a certain amount for each time it is used. Then after the company owes you half a million dollars, they decide not to pay. That is what this is about, not patents. Read here for more information
*sigh* ... Typical...
Swimsuit models? You know, the ones sitting around my pool that I have to monitor 24/7?
Damn it to hell...back to 'The Clapper' I guess...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
And to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Watch out now!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...and you KNOW they'll get some serious dirt for the appeal by spying on scantily clad women sunbathing.
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?
I really can't understand this. Anyone who toyed with javascript and the DOMs years ago noticed that you could effectively do pop-unders with two lines of code:
w .focus();
window.open('ad.htm','myAdWindowTitle');
windo
Or something like that. Is "pop-under technology" really more complicated than that?
# Erik
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!
Actually, according to the CNN article, it wasn't a patent issue... The brothers in question were running an advertising company from their home, with whom X-10 contracted to do their advertising, and then X-10 refused to pay their bill. So, no patent issue involved, only a customer's failure to pay their bill for a service.
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.
I just upgraded to X11 and all thos pop-unders are finally gone!
I made pop-unders all the time when application programming. We called it a bug. Is that prior art?
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.
...and actually got a good deal. Lot's of stuff, neat, for a fair price.
It is my secret shame - responding to a pop under (it was a popup at the time I seem to remember).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Patents bad...popunders bad...patent stops pop..unders...ehhhhhhhhH!
[Head-explodes]
Please help metamoderate.
Yeah, I have a couple of X's who are pretty lame too. 'Course, I didn't find that out until I was dating them!
I don't see how the ruling in the brothers favor is idiocy. The only idiocy is in X10's IT staff who couldn't hack up their own.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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
There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.
a) x10 reneged on their contract, and owed $564,000. That's pretty clear, and should be remedied.
b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Holy #$%! Let's get to it!
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
You guys owe me a LOT of cash.
Funny how the rotation of the spin on a story reverses depending on where it's posted...
I read about this about a week ago on Yahoo.com's WML news site on my cell phone. It was an AP story, I believe, and they presented it basically as these 3 brothers battling out the big evil X10 corp that didn't pay its bills and tried to take advantage of these poor, young kids. Yay for the brothers!
You hit Slashdot and just because it involves "patents" (a 4 letter word as far as many here are concerned, no matter what the context) the spin is that it's this big evil patent abuse and oooohhh run and hide and put your tail between your legs and oh-no-tinfoil-hat-syndrome all over. Oh no! The brothers are evil! Boo!
Give it a rest, already... technology that's only "obvious" after you've already seen it once isn't really "obvious". I hate stupid patents too, but if you look at the facts of the case instead of just saying "oh no - patents - automatic sheep mode on!" you'll realize it was a fair and square fight and a good decision by the court. Get a grip, already.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.
And how is this a patent issue?
Tell you what: why don't you go ahead reference the patent in question at the USPTO site...oh, you can't you say? Is it perhaps because there is no patent in question?
Granted, there is a valid debate on the merits of this so-called "proprietary" technology, but this has nothing to do with patents.
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!
The company that only last year billed itself as the world's largest online advertiser has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random