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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
That is not to say that patents are, in themselves, bad things. It is for what they are granted that is the problem.
If someone creates a totally new end-product, with a working prototype, and wants to find capital to produce and sell it, I'd say awarding this person a patent is the right thing to do.
If someone knows of a problem and thinks that you could possibly solve this with a computer, and then applies for a patent for "a method to solve this problem with a computer" without actually implementing this method, I'd say this person is just hoping someone will solve this problem eventually, and when it is with a computer, his cash register will start ringing. That patent application should be rejected. Unfortunately, nowadays patents like these are granted.
What is possibly even worse is that patents are granted not only for (ideas for) end-products, but also for (ideas for) obvious small steps that are part of many solutions. This is especially a problem in writing software, since writing software consists of stringing along thousands and thousands of small steps to form a new application. In the current environment, each of these steps may or may not be patented, and there is no way to find out if they are before the release of the software. And afterwards, you only find out if you are summoned to court (and even then it is not certain, unless you cannot afford such a good team of lawyers as - to coin a name - Microsoft can).
What's the solution? I think there is only one: abolishing all patents which are not granted for working protoypes of end-products. Personally, I think such an end-product can just as well be a software product as a more tangible product. But not an idea, or a process, or an algorithm.
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.