Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Amazon Sued for Patent Infringement

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the but-not-the-one-click dept.

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."

10 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Not Another One! by Wiser87 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Not Another One! by smr2x · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More like every company trying to find every single thing that isn't patented.. then patent and sue! What is this world coming to?

      It would be nice to actually have a _few_ good companies out there, but all these patent lawsuits are proving that companies just don't care. They're in search of profit and will do anything it takes to get there.

      --
      .
    2. Re:Not Another One! by Mr.+Troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...

      --
      Kiss my shiny metal ass
    3. Re:Not Another One! by scooby111 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think that the problem lies in the patent or the copyright itself. The problem lies in the process.

      The US patent office simply provides a patent for nearly all applications. If you can afford the fee, you can get a patent. You are responsible to enforece your own patent. Thus other patent holders are also responsible to prove that there was prior art that nullifies your patent. The US patent office should simply deny all patents of ideas and processes. An applicant should be required to show a working product or design that can at least be modeled. Ideas and processes are simply to brad to enforce.

    4. Re:Not Another One! by PianoComp81 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe software patents should be done away with, but I can't believe that you'd really agree with getting rid of all patents.

      Take drug patents: it costs a lot of time and money to just come up with a drug worth patenting. Drug patents give incentives to corporations to create medicines to help people because they know they'll be able to regain a lot of the money they put into coming up with the medicine.

      Taking an all-or-nothing stance is ignorant.

    5. Re:Not Another One! by jmv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Let me see, the guys who invented Ethernet, IP, DNS, HTTP, ... don't get a dime (from patents at least), but the guy who said "hey, I think eventually someone will use that to sell stuff" gets all the money. Sounds fair?

      --
      Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
    6. Re:Not Another One! by dbc001 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually that is indeed the case. Many companies use exactly that strategy and are even able to raise significant amounts of money for exactly such a "business plan".

      As far as I'm concerned, that's the kind of people that the media should be calling "pirates". Such actions are openly malicious and predatory. Unlike internet pirates, who are rarely malicious and incapable of causing any real world damages other than some sort of make-believe lost-possible-sales bullshit.

  2. Come On by use_compress · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. They have it coming... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. Why software patents are not a good idea by 0x0d0a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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