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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."
...Amazon has aleady patented the use of Irony...on the internet!
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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?
Filing patent infringement lawsuits is hard work.
Someone needs to come up with a "One Click(tm) Patent Infringement Lawsuit" system. And then patent it...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
They basically announced that they now own the Internet market
Couple this patent with the Eolas patent and you pretty much own the whole shebang.
It's official - software development is now a relic of the Old Economy where companies actually create products. So passe'. The New Economy is all about data mining for litigation.
And then while we're too busy in the courtrooms to notice, and our production skills so atrophied from lack of use, the aliens will land and take over.
"It's a cookbook!!!"
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?
I don't know much about the patent laws but it seems to me that companies that use concepts that someone patented, and who implemented them with no knowledge of the patent shouldn't be able to be sued. I shouldn't be expected to research to determine if the solution I came up with on my own is patented. The burden of proof should require that the infringment was wilful. As a pratical matter someone who didn't wilfully infringe in the first place would have to be able to coninue using what ever was patented... Maybe I just don't see the big picture...
1. A network-based sales system, comprising:
...and don't say "you must be new here" :)
at least one buyer computer for operation by a user desiring to buy a product;
at least one merchant computer; and at least one payment computer;
How could they possibly know that Amazon has exactly this setup?
2. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 1, wherein said payment message and said access message each comprises a universal resource locator.
This sounds exactly like one-click to me.
Amazon's one-click patent was filed September 12, 1997; whereas this was filed October 24, 1994. How could the one-click patent be filed if it was alreay there?
4. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 1, wherein said access message comprises a buyer network address.
5. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 4, wherein:
said product can be transmitted from one computer to another; and
said merchant computer causes said product to be sent to said user by transmitting said product to said buyer network address only.
What?!? Said product is transferred to the buyer network address only? I never shipped any of those books I bought from Amazon to an IP address!
15. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 14, wherein:
said payment message comprises a payment amount; and
said payment computer is programmed to ensure that said user account has sufficient funds or credit to cover said payment amount.
Surely this already existed. I doubt every time someone swiped an American Express card before October 24, 1994, a human being was called to look up an account balance in a paper ledger.
39. A method of operating a shopping cart computer in a computer network comprising at least one buyer computer for operation by a user desiring to buy products, at least one shopping cart computer, and a shopping cart database connected to said shopping cart computer
Funny, I figured you just needed a program to do a shopping cart, instead of a whole computer! Here we have a buyer computer, merchant computer, payment computer, and a shopping cart computer. Wow.
I'd look at the other patents, but I'm getting dizzy....
"but soon in the future, laws will be passed, and that problem will be gone"
Fantastic! And we can celibrate this new era of equality in our flying cars.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
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.
Unfortunately, this part is pure fantasy. If you want to get in power, you need money. To get money, you need to promise favours/sell out to the people with money. With shitloads of money, enough to spare some on politicians. Thus effectively, the people with shitloads of money are the ones who make policy. The interests of people with [shitloads of money|power] and those of the common man will never coincide. The only way to keep shitloads of money/power and have it mean something, is to make sure the average man has a lot less than you.
Of course thes problems all go away if the people revolt and make sure that the ones who want power never have it.
</rant>
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I am going to be hiding in some bunker in a fetal position (unless that is patented too) because very soon, individuals like us won't be able to do anything without law enforcement arresting us. FBI (and RIAA) monitors my internet activity waiting to catch an illegal thought (or illegal byte). Corporate lawyers are watching everything every small biz does, to see if we violated any patents or copyrights, so that they can sue our savings out of us. Where is the freedom that we constantly preach to others?
All your favorite sites in one place!
Regarding the first patent ever granted anywhere, "In return for his monopoly, John of Utynam was required to teach his process to native Englishmen."
Later, when the U.S. came up with its patent laws, it went like this: "The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries."
Nothing really about protecting small businesses. It has always been about sharing knowledge with the public in exchange for a limited-term monopoly. In practice, this rarely has the effect of protecting small businesses, most of which make their money off of actually doing stuff, not litigating.
Personally, I think patents are a bad idea in the general sense. Ideas are worthless in real business, it's always the implementation that counts.
However, in the present reality, patents aren't going away any time soon. It seems to me that if one must extend the patent concept to software, the only real way to get the public benefit demanded by the patent system is to require working source code to be published with the patent.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I know I shouldn't be feeding the troll, but does that mean you're saying that you were stupid first?
Are all of you forgetting that only a few years ago, some laywers were actually thinking of applying for patents on specific stylized basketball moves, so players could "protect" their "style"? And famous boxing ring announcer Michael Buffer(sic) has the phrase "Let's Get Ready to Rumble!" trademarked. If you tried to use that phrase as an announcer on a sports show, he could sue you for trademark infringement. -rl
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.
that's a dumb as the Aussie who re-patented the wheel
As an Aussie I would like to point out that said patent was filed with the specific intention of how mindless and overly general patents will be approved even though there's a bazillion trillion reasons why they should be thrown out with much hilarity.
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
Every other form of invention or creative work is protected by either copyright or Patent. Not both. Software should only be copyrightable not patentable because it is an expression of an idea. This allows other entities to emulate, imitate, and make competing versions of the idea. Patents protect an idea or invention. Copyrights protect a particular expression of an idea. Copyright terms need to be shortened for certain but software patents are extremely disruptive because they do not require that the actual code even be written. In addition patents are far more expensive to obtain than copyrights and they benefit mainly those with big pockets and those who think they are gonna use the patents to sue big pockets.
The other big problem with software patents is that the Patent office is totally out of touch and is essentially selling patents, not reviewing them.
Business models and methods should also not be patentable
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.
Wow, I'm inspired. What better way to make a living than to let somebody make a fortune through doing business, and then extract that fortune from them by using lawyers and a piece of paper that says "I thought of it first" that they hand out at the patent office like candy.
I'm going to run to the patent office tomorrow with my new patent idea:
A method of extracting capital from another party by patenting a method that the aforementioned other party has already successfully used to earn revenue.
No, wait... I think that's a little too specific for the patent office. Patent plan B:
I'm rich!A method by which a party, called the 'seller' receives monetary compensation in exchange for providing goods and/or services to a second party, called the 'buyer'.
Replace all your hordes of workers with a handful of lawyers. Pay them % of the profits. Sue anyone listed in the phone book. (pat pend.)
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
Now if I could only...get out of this....chair......ah, fuckit.
Wow! I'm making money already!
One way to fix this is to get rid of software patents altogether, as the European Parliament vote in September 2003 tried to do.
But as long as American lawmakers don't understand the damage done by software patents, one other possible workaround would be to build a Software Patent Defense Organization (SPDO) after the model of NATO. I described that briefly in a book on software patents I published in 2002 (in German).
The basic idea would be to copy Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Members of the SPDO would treat any software patent based attacks on any member as an attack on themselves and promise to retaliate with all means at their disposal.
That might be a deterrent even for those obnoxious outfits that have no business themselves except that of suing from overbroad patents, so they can't be impressed by any counterclaims based on defensive patents. They would still need to assess the threat of having to fight every member of the SPDO at the same time.
The IBM and Apache open source software licenses cancelling all rights in retaliation to a software patents based attack are one step in this direction. But stronger measures might be necessary to keep the system from collapsing.
Basically it's just like spam. With the amount of damage by spam rising exponentially, people get annoyed and angry, and start to ask for strong countermeasures. With the amount of damage by software patent lawsuits rising, the same will be true here.
If even Amazon gets sued, now might be the point to start considering building a collective retaliation option.
Lenz Blog
'Ignorance of the law is no excuse.' I had that quoted at me by a judge long ago (I was 18, and had a *lot* of speeding tickets).
Is there anyone out there who could rattle off every law we have on the books?
I am often fond of saying, "You break the law as soon as you wake up in the morning." I can't think of *anyone* I have *ever* known in my entire life that hasn't broken a law at least once a day. (Those who are in comas need not apply)
Take your car. You have a air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror? That's reason enough for a cop to pull you over - obstructing your view. Driving to work? Did you signal every turn? Did you look both ways? Is your gas door open? (I got pulled over for this.)
Your computer. How many have at least one mp3 or software program you 'shouldn't' have? Copyright infringement. Coding software? You've probably run into a software patent and don't even know it. Bought cigs for your kid brother? Spank your child in public? Pee on the side of the road? Stole a pencil from work? Ate a piece of candy from the bin at the grocery store? Have a garage sale without a permit? Give false information on your taxes? Walk across the middle of a street? Litter? Give someone the finger?
Granted, lots of this stuff is just rude behavior, and some of it isn't illegal where you may live, but who can possibly know all the laws on the books at any one time? God forbid you travel to another state and have to do two weeks of research in order to make it to the other side.
People will decide that they have no choice. Ignore it. Why bother? Everything you do is illegal, and moreso every day. Corporations ignore the law, and when caught, ignore the punishment. Politicans are making more laws all the time, yet are largely above the law.
I'd love to say that freedom for the US will be decided this November 2nd, but I know better, and I wish more people did too.
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.
There is no need for patents on software, we already have copyright laws which should be used rather than the extreme overkill of "software patents". Look, there is no risk to companies who innovate in software... noone's shelling out a Billion $ to develop 1-click shopping, thus no need for them to have a monopoly on something as asinine as 1-click shopping for 20 years. In hardware, a company might spend a billion$ trying to develop a product before it can ever come to market -- that's a detrimental impact on that company's bottom line, and they should have a 20 year monopoly. If a company could not receive that monopoly, in most cases, they would not have a necessary incentive to spend a billion$ on R&D and the product would never come into existence. Contrast that with software innovation... Does anyone REALLY BELIEVE that without software/internet patents there was no hope that the world would ever be blessed with 1-click shopping? Does anyone really care about 1-click shopping? Of course this little company would still have developed 1-click shopping, because it didn't cost them anything extra to develop and it pays instant rewards in increased sales. Do you think for a second that we wouldn't have browser plug-ins without patents? Do you think for a second that we wouldn't have turbotax, halo, amazon, ebay, slashdot without patents? Of course we would! The question is what do we NOT have because of software patents. What companies are being shut-down, stifled, put out of business -- what REAL innovations are being stamped out because they might "infringe" on something as asinine as 1-click-shopping? Everyone agrees that without industrial patents, we wouldn't have 1/10th the innovation in aerospace, electronics, mining, or environmental science... but without software/internet patents we'd have more innovation that we do currently. Whose really benefitting from all these software patents? A: The Gov't and the Lawyers... that's it, it ain't us folks, so don't let anyone feed you a line about how these software patents are designed to "bring innovation to the consumer market"... that's a crock. The reality is we'd have all the same software innovations we have today (most likely more), but due to an increase in competition, the software might be a little less buggy and would probably be a lot cheaper, too.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
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.
Drug patents differ a lot from software patents.
Drug patent holds one specific substance and the methods to produce that substance. Software patents are dangerous, because they hold a result.
Could you agree that a medical company could hold a patent for curing impotence or AIDS? Of course not! Such a goal isn't patentable, and so should it be in software too. One painkiller isn't enough, there should be room for other substances too and therefore you can only patent your methods, not the result.
Copyright laws are IMHO enough for protecting your code. No one can copy your work, but they are free to achieve the same results your software has, as long as they make their own work there. Imagine if someone had patented databases.
?SYNTAX ERROR