AT&T Sues PayPal and eBay for Patent Infringement

theodp writes "AT&T on Thursday fired the latest shot in the escalating Web patent wars, filing suit against PayPal and eBay. AT&T issued a press release alleging that the PayPal and BillPoint payment systems infringe on AT&T's 1994 patent for the mediation of transactions by a communications system. Besides e-Payments, the AT&T patent purports to cover e-Voting, e-Auctions, e-Gifts, e-Donations, e-Wishlists and e-Referrals. e-Gad! e-Yikes!"

Comments

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[ewhac]

"Hot stuff can burn you." Duh. However, there are three things to keep in mind about the infamous McDonald's coffee lawsuit:

• The burns were very serious, requiring skin grafts, because,
• McDonald's coffee was really fscking hot at 190 degrees Fahrenheit -- 22 degrees shy of boiling -- because they claimed it tasted better that way; and,
• Many other people had experienced and reported the same problem to McDonald's in the past, and they did nothing about it.

It was principally those factors that led the jury to find against McDonald's. McDonald's now serves their coffee at a cooler temperature.

Schwab

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

The coffee was scalding, way hotter than anyone should expect from a coffee machine. The lady was 79, sat in her son's auto, and spilled the coffee in her lap whilst removing the lid. She suffered full-thickness burns over 6% of her body and was hospitalized 8 days for skin grafts. Treatment continued for 2 years. She asked McDonalds for $11k to cover her medical costs. They countered with $800.

During discovery, it appeared that McDonalds had previously settled with some 700 previous burn victims for up to $500k.

Get more of a clue here.

(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already!

[cgranade]

Lovely. Yet another attempt to bash Gore over a statement he never made. Gore said that he is the father of the Internet, from the perspective that it was his bills that gave DARPA the funding it needed to create the Internet. Whether or not this meant he was the Father of the Internet is highly debateable, but at the very least, he did not say that he invented the Internet, despite what the O'Riley's of the world would have you believe.

Re:(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already!

[GreyPoopon]

Lovely. Yet another attempt to bash Gore over a statement he never made. Gore said that he is the father of the Internet, from the perspective that it was his bills that gave DARPA the funding it needed to create the Internet.

Well, the transcript doesn't lie...

CNN "Late Edition" Transcript:

BLITZER: ...Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What have you to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: ...During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Now granted, he doesn't claim to have INVENTED the internet. Instead, he claims to have CREATED it. What he REALLY did in 1986 was articulate somebody elses vision of widespread connected computing, and he introduced a follow-up bill to facilitate more widespread access to the network. I don't want to take away from his accomplishments because they ARE significant, but claiming to have created the internet alludes to illusions of grandeur. So yes, Al deserves to pretty much be mocked for the rest of his career over that statement.

I think most people agree that, historically speaking, the Internet evolved as a result of the work done during the early 1970's on the ARPANET project, where TCP/IP was developed. The WWW concept, which makes the Internet much more useful, was developed primarily by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN.

Re:(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already!

[squiggleslash]

No, he doesn't claim to have created it. He claims to have taken an Initiative through the Senate, the Initiative being the one to create the Internet. That's all he claims.

If you want to argue he's a terrible speaker, I can't fault that. But it's absurd to suggest that he was trying to make people think that he, a politician, created the world's most significant network. That was clearly not his intention.

And Vint Cerf, who with Jon Postel can be genuinely described as one of the co-inventors of the Internet, certainly disagrees with the "He said he invented it" spin on the subject. To quote:

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.

I think Gore is being unfairly maligned here.

Re:(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already!

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, your "correction" is even more laughably wrong than the "distortions" of the Right.

Gore's role had nothing to do with DARPA. DARPA had the funding and created ARPANet three years before Al Gore was elected to Congress. Gore's bills, while they did provide funding for Internet expansion, did not fund the expansion through DARPA. They funded the NSFNet and NREN, both of which were administered by the NSF, not DARPA.

And what Gore literally said was that "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Now, using this thesaurus as a guide, I'll subtitute just one word with a near-synonym, and we get:

"During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in inventing the Internet."

Note that no substitution of synonyms or near-synonyms in Gore's statement expresses the actual truth, which would have been something like:

"During my service in the United States Congress I was one of the foremost advocates for funding the middle stage of Internet development between the DARPA era and the 1994 backbone privatization."

----

What amazes me the most about the Left is that it can draw such fine distinctions between "invent" and "create" while ignoring that the claim itself was unambiguoulsy a vast overstatement of the case, yet cannot draw a distinction between "Niger" and "Africa", or "sought to acquire" and "succeeded in acquiring". You'd think it has ideological blinders on . . .

Re:(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already!

[Zeinfeld]

Gore's role had nothing to do with DARPA. DARPA had the funding and created ARPANet three years before Al Gore was elected to Congress.

The ARPANET was a research project to design a network. The funding for ARPANET was about to end.

The Gore bill did much more than simply continue the original research funding, it was funding for a network to be used as a tool by academics.

The term Internet predates Gore's interest, but not by much. Without the funding of the US govt the Internet would never have existed, the ARPANET backbone would have been shut down and we would all be using DECNET, SNA or OSI.

The result would have been very different.

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that old mis-quote is getting about as old as the "Beowulf cluster.." joke.

Gore never claimed to invent the Internet. He claimed to have assisted in the legislation which allowed it to come into being. Here's a nice writeup on that little bit of history.

Misquoting that comment was just the beginning of the 4-Year-Lie which is the Bush administration.

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[ReaperOfSouls]

McDonald's coffee was really fscking hot at 190 degrees Fahrenheit -- 22 degrees shy of boiling -- because they claimed it tasted better that way; and,

Have you actually ever made coffee before? Here is the general recipe. Boil Water and pour through ground up coffee beans...

In general there should be a reasonable expectation that the coffee is close to boiling since that is how coffee is generally made. This was not a problem with McDonalds but a problem with people who have no consept of the idea that you are responsible for your own actions. The never ending Tobacco lawsuits, Fat lawsuits are just a continuation of the principle, that common sense has no place in our courts.

Re:What's next?

[eggstasy]

Bzzt. Wrong. Telecommunications comes from the greek "tele-" which means far off, distant, remote. Television - seeing stuff that is potentially far away. Telephone (-phone = sound, as in gramophone) hearing sounds, in particular voices that are supposedly distant from you.
"Telecommunications" are thus non-medium-specific. They can be wired or wireless, and consist of sounds, images or data in general.

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[Oddster]

In general there should be a reasonable expectation that the coffee is close to boiling since that is how coffee is generally made. Actually, the court involved in this case determined otherwise. I believe the court determined that the expected temperature for hot coffee is either 120 or 140 degrees F, whereas McDonald's was serving coffee between 180 and 200. This was (partly) the grounds for the ruling - nobody should have to expect that the coffee being *served* to them is near boiling, as in normal home-brewing, it never reaches near that degree.

Re:Frivolous McDonald's lawsuit

[Karadryel]

This was not a problem with McDonalds but a problem with people who have no consept of the idea that you are responsible for your own actions.

IIRC, the issue wasn't just that the coffee was too hot. The coffee *was* too hot (as other replies have posted here, you don't actually keep the water at 212 to make coffee, so it should be cooler), but beyond that McDonald's had received similar complaints about the same issue and (roughly) paid them off via settlements. Unsurprisingly, their records of those settlements made it much harder to argue that they didn't know the coffee was too damn hot.

The damages weren't recompense, they were punitive. McDonald's had a documented history of ignoring this issue and people being burned, so the courts encouraged them more formally to fix the problem.

The courts are screwed up in many ways, as I think anyone will agree. However, the perception of how screwed up they are is affected also by the sound-byte culture that's reporting these cases and the 15-second attention spans that're listening. The less information you have, the easier it is to argue that it's stupid/wrong.

Re:What's next?

[danielsfca2]

I'm pretty sure you can sue the government. Unless you're in China.

Here's a judgment from a (totally unrelated) case where somebody did.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

[cl.1] " ... obtaining at least an identifier known to the approving entity from the customer ... "

This requires the customer to be preregistered with the approving entity. This doesn't seem to be the usual method at present. Of course the interpretation depends on what 'known' means and we'd have to look at the description in detail and I can't be bothered ...

Interestingly, in claim 28, the identifier is strictly not provided to the vendor - perhaps the ID is supposed to be a CC number, in which case in cl.1 the approving-entity must _already_ know your CC details before the transaction occurs.

[cl.1] " ... communications routing system functioning during the steps to establish connections with the certain ones of the entities ... "

As far as I know the connections in a current online transaction are established by the customer (is this true for SSL?), it uses the tcp/ip routing system, but the routing system does not itself establish the connection. ATT may be able to wriggle out of this depending what the full text says.

Generally there is something a little dodgy about the claim ... it's not clear for example who is "receiving an indication from the approving entity whether the transaction is approved" and then "providing the indication to the vendor". It appears that the routing system is the only option, so what?, are we sending transaction information to be processed by a DNS?? It can't be the approving-entity that receives the indication as it sends it; it can't be the vendor as it is sent it by the receiver; it could be the customer - this would appear to be inherently insecure and I can't see current methods being like this, surely they have the vendor receiving the confirmation and then telling the customer.