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Amazon Sued for Patent Infringement
theodp writes "Amazon's 10-K SEC filing discloses that the e-tailer has been sued for infringing on Soverain Software patents for Network Sales Systems (5,715,314 & 5,909,492) and Internet Server Access Control and Monitoring Systems (5,708,780), aka the Open Market patents, aka the Divine cashectomy patents, which Soverain obtained in the wake of Divine's bankruptcy sale."
Is it just me, or are more and more companies trying hard to find every single person/company and sue the crap out of them?
5,715,314 is ultra-general. One could use this patent to sue every site on the 'net that uses secure E-commerce. I suspect the judge will bend over backwards for Amazon. If Amazon looses, it will be one of the most destructive legal precedents in US history.
I have no idea why everyone complains about patenting their products, as its the same thing as our right to free speech.
Free speech was meant to protect unfavorable or unpopular speech, such as telling Bush to go sit and spin on a nuclear warhead. The first amendment prevents the government from hacking off my head for showing disapproval for the dimwitted President.
This is exactly the same for patents. It protects smaller businesses from having their ideas stolen by huge corporations.
Of course, free speech and patents are applicable to everyone. If the government were to abolish the patent system, it would be just as bad as abolishing free speech. Without small businesses, the world's economy will always be controlled by huge corporations who have no respect for the little person, like you and I. Of course, at this current time the world is pretty much run by huge corporations who lobby with millions of dollars to politicians, but soon in the future, laws will be passed, and that problem will be gone.
Come on.. Amazon's patent of cookies (which they didn't invent) and web browsing (which they didn't invent) and the Internet (which Al Gore invented) aka One Click Shopping, makes them a deserving target for another stupid USPTO case.
Can somebody tell me which government agency is actually run by sane, competent people?
Your point is all great in theory - And what do you suppose we should do about companies who do nothing but come up with ideas to patent so that they can sue the pants off companies trying to make a buck bu innovating?
I mean specifically companies who file patents (or just 'acquire' them) with less than zero intention of themselves turning the 'idea' into a marketable product, and less than zero intention of licensing said 'ideas' to companies who would LOVE to turn them into products.
Every third day there's Yet Another LawSuit filed by "Jim Bobs Tech Patent Company" which has ZERO business (let alone INCOME) other than lawsuits they've filed "protecting" their patents.
Is THIS the state of affairs your previous "patent system" is supposed to encourage?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
when will the govertment shut the patent office down and sue all their employees for idiocy. And at the same time give up the "patent" software and non-technical things?!
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While at the same time its good, because in USA anything can happen, and USA is getting weaker so they have less and less rotten influence of the wolrd, and being ridiculed by cuba and other minor nations. So maybe its good you fight over shit...
In the not too distant future, lawyers will prowl around hospital delivery rooms delivering preemptive lawsuits to newborns.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Is it just me or are companies starting to use Law Suits as a business model.
For example the Music Industry has got it down to a fine art. Find a consumer, sue them for millions, they can't afford legal costs so they settle for around 3 - 5 grand, move onto the next.
They could potentially make more money this way out of indiduals then by having them buy CD's.
Just my thoughts anyway.
Clearly the USPTO cares little to not-at-all as to the actual content of a patent request, as long as what it describes hasn't been patented already.
They're quite happy to rubber-stamp "First Post" on almost any document no matter how trivial, irrelevant, or land-grabbing the actual verbiage and let the courts fight it out amongst themselves.
I guess someone way-back decided that Lawyers in the US didn't have enough work to justify their existence (not to mention their hourly rates)
These days there's a virtual plague of lawyers, we'd be feeding them RAT POISON if someone hadn't made it illegal already.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
outsource
It's not sane at all that any one person should be able to take monopoly rights over a simple phrase just because it's brought him some notoriety. If it's his reading of the phrase that's so special, he doesn't need to worry about whether anyone else will use it. It not, then what's so unique and special about the phrase that it deserves such protection?
I've written quite a bit of code that was patent infringing. Often I didn't realize it was so until much later (backing store, for example), but I've generally decided that I don't care anymore.
In most cases the infringing code was something I invented on the fly and coded in a short period of time. Thus obvious and simple solutions to common problems.
There are THOUSANDS of software patents filed DAILY, and it's truly not possible to do patent searches every time I write another 100 lines of code. The only thing that keeps the current legal system from sending the entire software industry into lawsuit deadlock is the fact that most companies make very little effort to ever enforce their patents.
Partly this is because all major software companies have cross licensing agreements with all other major software companies. This is mostly just a safty measure to help avoid major lawsuit conflicts. Notice that individuals and small companies are left totally vulnerable.
If IBM or Microsoft or HP or whoever decides to really cut loose then almost all individuals, open source, and small companies would be shut down. However they don't because it would be bad news for most everyone. Besides if they really cut loose, then the final result would be a major rework of the relevant laws. If they did that, they would haven't this extra weapon to pull out when needed.
And from time to time they do (IBM at least, I assume they aren't the only ones), just not in a high profile way.
plus-good, double-plus-good
You know what would be a great idea? X. Too bad it would cost a bunch of money to develop X into something usefull...if only there were some way to help try to ensure that I could recover the money I spend developing it...
There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, you're worried that someone will rip off your idea. Patents were designed in a day and age when the things being patented were *simple*. An industrial process, or a simple machine. The thing is, it's *really hard* to just duplicate the functionality of a worthwhile piece of software. If you can't just take the software (and copyright takes care of that), it's generally not going to be cheap or quick for you to reimplement the idea...and in that time, the original person has moved beyond where he was. Software needs patents much less than old processes once did.
Second, you're giving an example of an exceptional idea, something really amazing. The problem is that software development is so complex compared to earlier systems that you could find something to patent in almost every new system made. This is, frankly, not how the patent system is intended to operate at all.
Third, you talk about "expense" of developing the new idea. It really *was* expensive to develop some older things -- if you want to build a new machine and figure out how to make it work well, it could take many years and lots of expensive and painstaking ironwork -- and the simple result could be copied. However, software is (comparably ) incredibly cheap to work with. You think, write a hundred lines of code, and you have an implementation to test out and work with. You don't write up a blueprint and then have an implementation to test two months later.
Fourth, older devices were much more static. A plow is a plow is a plow. Maybe someone comes up with a way to hollow out part of the thing and make it lighter...then no improvements for a while. In the software field, there are constantly surging improvements. The whole goal of an engineer is to improve on existing systems...rather unlike the masses of plow companies, that might just produce different plows of roughly the same design. Patents are *much* more onerous in software.
I worked in a research lab for a while, and I think that I can safely claim that software patents are minimally useful to society. It's fairly rare that a really good, reasonable, legitimate software patent exists -- the type of research encouraged by software patents is of the "lock people out" variety, rather than the "make something better" variety. I do not think that research would be signifiantly impacted by a lack of software patents, and I *do* think that software engineering would be much easier.
May we never see th
This sort of booby-trap business model wouldn't happen if patent holders were required to take anti-infringement action within a limited time. If alleged infringement goes on in plain view for say, 2 years without any claim against it, then there should be no infringement claim. If Sovrain tried to victimize my company in this way, I would seriously look for a way to prosecute them as terrorists.
Why is is that companies can be sued over the most minute parts of technology (I'm just waiting for Microsoft to take someone to the cleaners over Wizard patent infringment), yet gaming companies can virtually rip off complete ideas and nobody bats an eyelid?
Consider these, uhh... "coincidences":
Alone in the Dark --> Resident Evil
GTA 3 --> Simpsons Hit & Run
Crazy Taxi --> Super Taxi Driver
Thief --> Just about every stealth first person game since then
In my opinion, the gameplay advances that were *unique* to the original games, and then turn up in games a couple of months later, should be questioned. Maybe if more games companies took the time to think up original concepts, rather than blatantly ripping off the innovations of other games, we'd see a healthier, and more enjoyable games industry.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
... Real innovators continue to design truly valuable new ideas, but are largely ignored.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
In the news.com.com article, there's an elegant statement of the real problem with such patents:
..."
....
... Maybe the same idea would work with patents? ;-)
"The Patent Office, being not a technical organization,
The USPTO (and probably similar agencies in other countries) has admitted that they have a very real problem in dealing with software patents. This was a rather new thing to them, and they have never been able to hire more than a few people with the right technical expertise. So they have basically taken the approach of "Approve everything and let the courts decide."
They know this is a disaster, but there's not a damned thing they can do about it. There aren't enough people with the right expertise, and even if there were, the USPTO doesn't have money to hire them. Their funding is controlled by Congress, and their hiring pool is controlled by The Market. So this will continue until Congress changes the rules or gives them the billions of $$ that the job requires. Or until millions of computer geeks decide to get a second degree in patent law and donate their time to the cause.
Until one of those things happen, we will continue to draw closer to the future that Bruce Parens described: It will become illegal to write software unless you're working for a giant corporation, because everything you write will be challenged in court as a patent violation.
Of course, we do have a similar problem with copyright. Ever since the laws were changed so that everything is copyrighted by default, it has slowly become more difficult to not infringe. Any sentence we write (including this one) has a growing chance of having been written before, and is thus violating the copyright of the previous author.
In the case of copyright, there is one way out, which is to make your sentences so long and complex that the chance of them duplicating what someone wrote earlier becomes increasingly minuscule, and you can be reasonably certain that a search via google (or any other search engines that may be developed in the future) won't find a good match, or at least a match that duplicates all the disparate ideas that you have managed to shoehorn into your convoluted, rambling sentence sufficiently well to violate any copyright that may be claimed on sentences that express only a few of the many concepts that you have managed to incorporate into your
(Hmmm
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I've taken a few MBA courses as part of my Ph.D. minor requirement. What floored me is how business students and professors treat patents. "Getting a patent" is part of nearly every business plan involving technology...I've asked "what if there isn't anything novel to patent". They treat me as stupid by responding that there is always something to patent...ALWAYS!
And then we went over a case study about a recent technology company that failed. They attributed their failure due to a lack of patent protection. However knowing a bit about the technology and company, it was obvious that this company wasn't doing anything novel...just trying to do it better and cheaper.
It wasn't their idea to start issuing these patents. They do it because they have to. Court decisions and new laws are forcing them to. To make matters worse, about half of all their revenue is siphoned off to other agencies, leaving them without the necessary resources to properly research patent applications.
The Patent Office knows that this is a problem, and they're trying to find a way to fix it. Unfortunately, Congress doesn't seem to want to help.