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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!"
This has erupted. First USA Bank sued PayPal in September 2002. A year later PayPal countersued the company (now known as Bank One) and Bank One Delaware, also on patent infringement grounds. The companies settled those suits last month without disclosing the terms.
Apparently this would also cover 2checkout and other paying services as well. The question is, can Microsoft and other browser makers be sued for being able to submit credit card info through their browsers? It seems overly broad but then again aren't all tech patents?
e-vil.
If we haven't posted it once, we've posted it a million times; the USPTO is in complete and utter chaos with these tech patents. I don't the USPTO is equipped, or ever has been equipped to handle these technological patents (at least in regards to say computers and/or the internet technologies).
They need to set up a separate repository of information to store for computers, computer programs, and internet technologies that are looking for patents. They need to hire a staff that can handle the various searching for prior technology (prior art) for this very advanced stage of patent registrations. They probably also need to setup a complete different sort of organization of information to do/handle this.
Until the USPTO gets straightened up, I see a never-ending line of lawsuits for copyright and patent infringement with regards to computer technologies and internet technologies!
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Amazon sues AT&T for suing PayPal and eBay with Amazon's 'One-Click-Sueing' technology. Full story at 11.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
"I am seeing a situation where ATT would require licensing for every credit-card accepter on the Internet. That's not so fun."
That's a scary thought. Sounds alot like what SCO is doing (I know but I had to say it). IANAL however I have spent some free time reading through the laws regarding this sorta junk. I'm getting the impression that suing a 'user' of a product for use of a product isn't legal.
For example, if I read the New York Times and come across material I have no right to read am I liable? From what I've gathered it's not my fault nor my problem. The New York Times will be liable for their product not me the consumer.
On topic now... most of these patents look rather vague. I've looked over a couple of them already and it's about as undefined as you can get. What is the patent office doing? Accepting money and issuing a patent without looking at what they did?
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I don't sincerely think that any of these websites were even aware of AT&T's work as they developed online payment systems, etc. - much less copied the idea from AT&T.
I think the key is that it was obvious at the time that payments would be accepted online. The same goes for a lot of the technologies they claim are covered by this patent. So a bunch of people found a means to accomplish this obvious goal that was almost *expected* at the time simultaneously.
I don't know much about patents but might this fall under the category of "obvious" which I think is supposed to be unpantentable?
It seems someone writing a check to Western Union back in 1880 to wire money across the continent on a telegraph line was "process(ing) payments over a communications system"
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Well, the transcript doesn't lie...
CNN "Late Edition" Transcript:
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.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
If drug companies could patent their products with the ease that the USPTO seems to allow IT patents, then the first company to apply for a patent covering "something that makes sick people better" would pretty much have the market cornered.
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:
I think Gore is being unfairly maligned here.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Of particular interest are claims 5 and six, which sets forth
5. The method set forth in claim 1 wherein:
the communications routing system is a switching portion of a telephone system; and
the step of receiving a transaction specifier includes the steps of:
receiving a special telephone number in the switching portion; and
using the special telephone number to derive the transaction specifier.
6. The method set forth in claim 5 wherein:
the step of receiving a transaction specifier further includes the step of using the special telephone number to derive a telephone number of the vendor and
the step of responding to the transaction specifier includes the step of using the telephone number to obtain transaction information concerning the transaction from or provide transaction information to the vendor.
Claim 7 is similar.
In other words, to be a valid patent violation, the parties must use a telephone number to identify eachother. I don't know about you, but I've never given nor received anyone's telephone telephone numbers on paypal.
Now, AT&T may argue that IP addresses are a "special" telephone number... Which is utter bunk, as VoIP is after 30 years of IP just starting to exist. But even then, Paypal does not connect independent parties with eachother via IP address, but rather e-mail address. Any respectable judge would throw out of his or her courtroom a lawyer that attempted to argue that "telephone number" meant any system that involved routing, including IP, E-mail, Telegraph, AIM, Kazaa, and Shared Printers.
Overall it looks like the original patent wasn't quite that bad... A shared telephone authentication system based upon the telephone company's then-new caller ID system as an identifier. As AT&T noted in their patent application, this is a way to mediate a transaction over the telephone while shielding the buyer's information from the seller. What's bad is then taking this and attempting to apply it to all internet transactions.
You filed your patent application. It was accepted because it was sufficiently narrow. Don't go whining now because it wasn't as broad as you would like.
The ______ Agenda