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Google and Yahoo Settle Overture Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Google and Yahoo have apparently settled their ongoing lawsuit involving patented on-line ad technology owned by Yahoo subsidiary Overture. (U.S. Patent 6,269,361). According to reports, Google will issue 2.7 million common shares to Yahoo in return for a license. Read more about the infringement suit here. This move is expected to lower any potential downsides to Google's upcoming IPO."
Just because some story involves the law doesn't mean it involves our rights online.
The fundamental precept of American law is the right. Thus all legal issues in American courts involve rights to some degree or other. All such questions of rights are inherently a question of your rights even if your are not a party to the action.
In this case the question is the right to develop and deploy certain methods of list sorting for use online. That would be your rights, as per above.
So what portion of this issue do you believe does not fit into the catagory of your rights online?
KFG
"That would net Yahoo as much as an additional $149 million at the high end of Google's expected IPO price range, and leave the company with a 4.1 percent stake in Google. After the IPO, Yahoo will also hold 4.95 million super-voting of Google Class B shares, a 2.1 percent stake."
It's very common. For example, in almost any story involving the purchase of a company for $XXX million (particularly ones from the ex-dot-com days) the deal is actually for stock, not cash. It's also common for companies to swap options or warrants as part of some deal.
Shares have value, even if a company isn't public. It's simply a little easier to place a value on a public company, since you have so many opinions floating around in the market.
And I presume you know everything about anything in your field as well? People do make minor mistakes sometimes.
That said, I stand corrected. I guess my knowledge for Jeopardy has been improved. That story is likely not atypical for that era, with all the railroad trusts, etc- money talks. Also, today you have 1 year in the US to file a patent application from the first sale or public disclosure anywhere in the world. Meucci would be out of luck today, as it was a decade before he filed anything.
Not being an expert in 19th century patent law, I can make a few comments about if this happened today.
1- The US is a "first to invent" country, which awards patents to the person able to prove they invented it first. The rest of the world is "first to file."
2- The US now has the Disclosure Document Program, which will serve as evidence of the date of conception of an invention. You still need to file, and cannot sit on an invention for years. The filing fee is $10.
3- Provisional patent application, which has less statutory disclosure requirements, has a $85 filing fee. Often used for filing a journal article before publication.
It's funny how you only list actual inventions that were patented, like airplanes, telephones, and flowbies. I, and most everyone else attacking the US patent system, have no objection to patents on inventions. You completely sidestepped how the US has abandoned the Mental Steps Doctrine prohibiting patents based on mental steps - software patents. Patents based on what amounts to a sequence of thoughts. Patents like this Yahoo patent.
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If I have software to carry out this Yahoo patent, and rather than executing it on a computer I simply stare at the information and execute the described code mentally, am I violating the patent? Can a certain sequence of thoughts be a violation of the law?
And if not, if that mental process is not a violation of the law, if that mental process is not protected by patent, if that mental process is not an invention, then how the hell does a non-invention mental process become a patented invention when I take the single blatantly obvious step of simply using an ordinary old computer to speed up the exact same calculations I did mentally before?
This is not a patent on a physical process. It is a patent on a mental process and twiddling some numbers. This is not a patent on an invention, it is not a patent on an implementation. It is a patent on the idea of writing any software at all to do certain calculations.
I don't mean to yell at you. I'm angry about the US's dumbass software patents. I'd really like an explanation why "IP laywers" as a group are so keen on software patents.
>There are people in the third world right now who are laughing at your patent laws.
This is copyright law again
While it may be copyright infringment, the original poster was still correct. And not just the third world, and not just in cases of copyright infringment. Most of the rest of the world is "laughing" at our patents on software, at the notion that an end user who paid the copyright holder, or even who wrote the software himself, is violating countless patents simply running software on a plain old PC
Software should be protected by copyright. All great and wonderful. However there should be no such thing as software patents. Software should not get "double coverage" and be subject to "double restrictions". Patents were - and still should be - only granted for new and non-obvious physical objects and on new and non-obvious physical processes.
Oh, and business patents are rediculous too. Even if we were to accept the rediculous notion that a business plan was an invention, we don't need a patent incentive to encourage people to make money. The very foundation of capitalism is for businesses to compete to do it better and cheaper. And business method patents are generally software patents anyway.
One final note, if software patents and business method patents were such great wonderful and obvious things, then why is the US essentially a rouge nation in having them? Why does the US need to go around the world trying to strong-arm other nations into abandoning their well established patent laws that state that software and business methods are not inventions? It used to be that the US and the rest of the world were all quite well settled on the fact that software and business methods were not inventions. The US decides to reverse it's rules and now the rest of the world gets denied free trade unless they agree to a "Free Trade Agreement" stating they must reverse their rules as well?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Potentially more important than being discussed? See this piece at The Register for a different take.
How many shares are google issuing? What percantage will end up in the hands of yahoo?
IIRC, Google is issuing about 16 million shares (not including these 2.7) in its IPO, which comprise 7% of all its shares. So percentage-wise, not really all that much.