Slashdot Mirror
PanIP Drops E-commerce Patent Lawsuits
Darlok writes "Back in October 2002, PanIP sued 50 small businesses, claiming patents over basic E-commerce functions. One of the defendents set up a group defense fund, and in the last week, contributors to that fund have been notified by e-mail and this notice on the fund's homepage that PanIP has agreed to drop its lawsuits without any licenses being issued. The U.S. Patent Office is currently reviewing the patents in question. Hopefully this will set some sort of precedent ..."
I posted my take on this story four days ago on my journal.
Here's what it says about it:
The message board and all the pages within the site are now gone, and there's only one single page that briefly outlines what happened.
But big fat question marks are all over the place. What happens now? The fifteen or so defendants who banded together to fight are off the hook, at least as far as PanIP is concerned, but what about the dozens of others? Has PanIP dropped all of its suits, or just the ones against the members of that group?
At the bottom of the page is a sort of cryptic quote: "Don't let the things you can't do stop you from doing all that you can," which I take to mean that among the things that couldn't be done was to utterly defeat PanIP and prevent its founder from continuing his campaign of lawsuits against e-commerce companies.
Back in January, the founder of the PanIP Group Defense Fund had placed a warning on the site that PanIP was sending threatening letters out to businesses who had previously been left alone. Were those letters a last-ditch effort by PanIP to generate the capital necessary to continue the fight over its patents? Or was PanIP anticipating settling its way out of paying the $19,000 in legal fees awarded to the defense group following a determination by at least one judge that PanIP's defamation lawsuit against the group was an illegal SLAPP under California law?
Should e-commerce businesses breathe a sigh of relief that PanIP has backed off, or should they be more worried than ever? If PanIP starts up its campaign of lawsuits anew, will the next round of targeted companies similarly band together to fight off the suit?
The former website of the defense group states that both of PanIP's e-commerce patents are facing re-examination by the USPTO. The "automated sales" patent has been under review since August, according to the old version of the site, which never mentioned that the other patent was actually under review. If they are indeed both under review, can PanIP even file any new lawsuits?
I do not mean to denegrate the defense group in any way... standing up to PanIP was, in my opinion, the correct and brave thing to do. And, at the same time, carrying on the fight when an olive branch is offered with few, if any, strings attached would have been foolish. I don't blame the defense group for opting out of a longer, uglier fight, and I salute them for standing tough as long as they did. Just getting the patent office to re-examine both the patents was quite a feat, one that very well might get both patents invalidated and send PanIP packing in the end, after all.
But if the patents are re-affirmed, you can bet that a whole lot of businesses who'd never heard of PanIP or its patents will be hearing all about them real soon.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
The PanIP Group Defense Fund is saying that it's going to dissolve because the all lawsuits against group members are being discontinued, in exchange for the group willing to give up the already on the books order that PanIP pay PGDF's legal fees. Uhm...
To me, this is not a result the outside world should be cheering. It's a settlement that protects the asse(t)s of the group members, but it's not a knockout blow to PanIP. PanIP is giving up nothing but the right to pursue an appeal that they weren't likely to lose and create an even stronger precedent. The PGDF is giving up the chance to extract real money from PanIP.
Boo! Hiss! Bad move!
The PGDF shuuld not be folding. Just because their orginal case has been settled does not mean they have become pointless. They should be seeing through that the patents be invalidated, and keeping the group in existance so that anybody sued by PanIP in the future could get quick and easy access to the resources that worked before.
As their website domain has always said, you could be next to be sued by PanIP if you're doing basic e-commerce on the Web. And nothing in this settlement prevents that happening. PanIP's plan may be to just let this group fade away, and then sue another group of defendants hoping that they don't join together into a large enough group to squash them like a bug again. It's a little too early to be putting the fly swatter away.
The lawyers.
I used to think the same thing until someone pointed out the actual details of this lawsuit. It is defintely interesting. McDonald's was told repeatedly before this incident that they served coffee way too hot, something like 10-20F above the average. This lady just wanted a very small amount for medical bills, McDonald's bascially told her to go screw herself. In the end McDonalds was slapped with such a big fine because they were so far out of line with how they served the coffee in general and not because of the injuries to the old lady.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
My apologies if this seems offtopic, but I just need to point out that not all cases that appear frivolous are truly frivolous. Found via Snopes, from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, here are the actual facts of the McDonald's coffee spill case:
Facts Sheet: McDonald's Scalding Coffee Case
That uses far too much regular English and not enough of the word "said." My take:
Method for organizing users ("slashdotters") in the creation of a cascade of TCP/IP ("Telecommunications/Internet Protocol") traffic in the form of page requests ("hits") to an unequipped personal web server in order to remotely overload said server ports or network throughput ("bandwidth") limitations causing service interruption ("slashdotting") in distribution of said pages resulting in the return of multiple HTTP ("hyper text transfer protocol") errors including, but not limited to HTTP errors 404 and 501 as identified in RFC 12345 Section 6: "HTTP Error Codes," produced and disseminated from said server to said page requests from said cascade using said technology.
True story.