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:(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: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:(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.