Slashdot Mirror
Small Firm Claims Patents On e-Banking Processes
bth writes "The New York Times has a
report that DataTreasury Corp is suing banks over 2 patents that 'describe a way to store and retrieve transaction records electronically.' A patent search reveals US6032137 and US5910988, each having the title: 'Remote image capture with centralized processing and storage -- System for central management, storage and report generation of remotely captured paper transactions from documents and receipts.' From one of the abstracts: 'The system retrieves transaction data such as credit card receipts checks in either electronic or paper form at one or more remote locations, encrypts the data, transmits the encrypted data to a central location, transforms the data to a usable form, performs identification verification using signature data and biometric data, generates informative reports from the data and transmits the informative reports to the remote location(s).' It is good to know that someone has managed to finally invent a system that can store, retrieve, and securely transmit financial transactions."
Is small business ever going to wake up and realize that the current IP regime is a direct threat to them? No...? Guess not. Guess they'll just have to get used to paying the protection money...
After all, that's capitalism. Government-enforced monopolies on basic business concepts is, I mean.
so is it time to patent the ski mask and note as a secure system for the anonymous transfer of funds?
"United States Patent and Trademark Office Denies Patent for Something Completely Obvious"
~Philly
This might actually be a good thing for fixing the current US patent fiasco. The banking industry has plenty of lawyers and political clout. Maybe some change will come out of this suit.
someone call Poland... :/
Just means more anarchy to sit back and watch.
Well that and I don't have investments in banks.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Patents should be limited to physical inventions. They should also be REVOKED if the person/company filing the patent cannot provide a working prototype within a reasonable amount of time (ie, I certainly can't patent a warp drive, but I could patent something like a hocky puck that acts like a hovercraft to play with on a basketball court)..yeah, I came up with that idea and then a couple of years later, somebody had made that exact toy. DOH!!!
Ideas and mathematical formulas (including computer programs) should NOT be patentable.
Well...if someone already patented the combover (U.S. Patent # 4022227), then anything is possible. Go for it!
in the uk they aren'tat least not at the moment
After reading both patents and looking over all attached diagrams and drawings I'm surprised. The patents are completely devoid of any technical data at all. I can make flowcharts for a warp drive and a cold fusion reactor too. I thought a patent had to contain some technical detail about how the device being patented was supposed to work. E.g. where is the source code for any of this? I couldn't find it anywhere in the patents.
It's not a bug. It's a feature.
Face it, the American industry is unable to compete on the merits of its products alone. European and Japanese companies design better products, and achieve a much better build quality. Chinese companies cannot be beaten on costs, and their quality is rapidly improving, too.
So, if you're a CEO, how do you face this hopeless situation?
You might want to compete on price, and outsource your manufacturing to China, and your services to India. The "only" issue is: how long will it take for the local subcontractors to start making the same product without giving you a cut?
You might want to compete on quality. The problem here is that, unlike most German or Japanese companies, in which a sizeable share of directors have an engineering background, most American companies are led by marketers, accountants, or lawyers that don't know a single thing about what they're selling - yet they do not want to give up their power to those nerdy engineers.
In other words: the American economy is shafted. But wait, there is one field on which America remains unrivaled! Lawsuits!
Thus, as it was impossible to gain a real competitive advantage, corporate America decided to give itself an artificial one. Thus, the entire IP nonsense was born.
Of course, the Chinese never intended to buy this crap - and it now appears that Europe doesn't want it, either. As a consequence, it will only add an unnecessary burden on the already beleagered American economy.
Small Company Is Specializing in Suing Banks
By JENNIFER A. KINGSON
New York Times
December 25, 2004
It is a company whose only business, other than one client, appears to be suing other companies.
The lawsuits contend patent infringement, yet the defendants are usually not electronic commerce companies, but a relatively new target: banks or others in financial services. The company, the DataTreasury Corporation of Melville, N.Y., has sued companies that it says have infringed on its two patents, which describe a way to store and retrieve transaction records electronically. Generally speaking, this is already the way that credit card transactions are processed and, increasingly, the way that paper checks are handled, too.
Among the dozen or so companies that DataTreasury has sued are J. P. Morgan Chase & Company, one of the biggest banks; the First Data Corporation, the biggest credit card processor; and the Electronic Data Systems Corporation, another big processor.
DataTreasury declined to comment for this article, as did most of the companies it has sued.
The suits are wending their ways through courts in Texas that lawyers say are well known for upholding the rights of patent holders. They seek unspecified - but treble - damages, and to ban the companies from using the processing architecture that the patents describe.
This type of litigation is unusual for financial services, which has taken for granted that there are certain basic ways to process payments. Although banks did not bother to patent these systems, others did, especially after a 1998 court ruling broadened the definition of a patent to include business methods and processes. At the time, the United States Patent and Trademark Office was swamped with technology-related applications, and knew very little about the processing of payments.
"Obviously, no one has a patent that covers all checks or processing," said Michael D. Bednarek, an intellectual property lawyer who was once an examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office.
Companies like DataTreasury may have a patent on an aspect of the process, but "even that arcane feature may be something that has been done before," he said. "Patent officers aren't necessarily experts. Almost certainly, if they were aware of this, they wouldn't allow someone to get a patent on it."
A new check processing law, known as Check 21, raised the hopes of DataTreasury and other such patent holders because it gave banks broader permission to shred paper checks and keep electronic images of them. The law took effect in late October.
DataTreasury is clearly hoping for a bonanza. According to court documents, one of the two law firms originally hired to file the lawsuits is working for a contingency fee of 40 percent, with a cap that was raised from $100 million to $225 million.
So far, two companies have paid DataTreasury to settle: Affiliated Computer Services, one of the nation's biggest information technology suppliers; and the RDM Corporation, a small Canadian company that sells hardware and software for payment processing.
"It was a nuisance lawsuit to us, and it was the most efficient decision to settle it for a minimal amount," said Lesley Pool, a spokeswoman for Affiliated Computer. She would not say the amount, but an article in The Dallas Business Journal, which DataTreasury has linked to its Web site, said it was $50,000.
As for RDM, DataTreasury issued a news release saying that the Canadian company would pay a fee for each check imaging terminal it deploys and "a per-click royalty for storage of electronic documents and check information, calculated at around a 50 percent royalty rate."
Before Affiliated Computer settled, it did answer the lawsuit in court, calling DataTreasury's patents invalid and unenforceable. In papers filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Affiliated Computer accused DataTreasury of deceiving the Patent and Trademark Office by
Paying for a patent is the cheap part. It gets more expensive to prevent enfringement. I have doubts about this company going up against the goliath corporations using this technology.
What the hell? Is this what our legal system has come to? "Nuisance Lawsuits"?
This is not sustainable, and the situation could harm our judiciary processes right to the very core.
All your base are belong to Google.
Banks have been doing this for over twenty years. Remote machines scan documents (checks/statements etc), store them in a local central database. Then nightly these transactions are electronically moved by the FED.
I hope IBM/NCR sue the crap out of this company.
Merry Chistmas and enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
Enter the idea you have and the Google "patent search tool" will tell you how many patents you would violate...
Seriously, this has gone way too far and I can only see how this hurts business, consumers, innovation and the little guy.
-- Thought I would put a SIG here but that would have caused a patent violation
The point of IP is to allow the inventor of an invention profit from their creation. The other point is of IP is that because the patent is made public society gets to keep the invention once the IP has expired.
A key feature of most IP implementations is that you can sell a patent to another company. A lot of the problems with the patent sharks could be solved if this were not possible.
If a patent can't be transfered then sharks can't get hold of it. You should have to renew a patent every year.. making keeping huge portfolios expensive.
In the software patent world, I think one small change would make it (more) aggreeable to FOSS. Make the time the patent lasts much shorter, like on the order of five years. That way, FOSS is protected. In software, if you haven't made your millions in five years then your not going to full stop. This would also protect FOSS from huge damages claims if they are caught infriging since the time to claim damages over is much shorter.
While i'd like software patents to disappear in the US, it wont happen and therefore I believe a third way is needed. A compromise that restores sanity to the system. My suggestions would be a good first step.
Simon.
The title of a patent is meaningless. I read one last week for "Remote Control Device" which was a high pressure hydraulic hoze/nozzle that could be aimed from a distance, used in mining operations. There is no legal weight in a patent title and while the intention is that they are informative, there is uneven enforcement of that rule.
From one of the abstracts: 'The system retrieves transaction data such as credit card receipts checks in either electronic or paper form at one or more remote locations, encrypts the data, transmits the encrypted data to a central location, transforms the data to a usable form, performs identification verification using signature data and biometric data, generates informative reports from the data and transmits the informative reports to the remote location(s).'
The abstract of a patent has no legal weight. The rules regarding abstracts are more evenly enforced than titles, as the abstracts are useful to examiners, but the typical attorney couldn't care if the abstract recited a recipe for meatloaf.
Here are the patents under debate:
6032137
5910988
Linking to the actual patent is trivial, however undermines the element of FUD which wins the submitter such karma and peer approval. (Rather than mod this as a troll, proving at least to myself how correct I am, feel free to explain to me why failing to link to the patents themselves helps an intelligent discussion rather than perpetuating the FUD.)
The claims of a patent are the only part of a patent that undisputably carries legal weight. Any discussion about whether a patent should or should not have been issued that does not relate strictly to the claims is nonsense - it is directly analogous to praising Windows because you can use a mouse on a graphical screen. It is uneducated, pointless, and irritating to anyone who knows that other operating systems use mouse pointers and graphical screens.
Further, these patents will come under extreme attack if they are used in court. Merely having these patents is meaningless. When these patents are used against someone, he would be a complete idiot to not first question whether the patents can be invalidated in court. This is how the patent system works and this is why you can apply for a patent for under $2000 - a thorough search for prior art will cost over $100,000 and the USPTO cannot afford to give those out for $2000. Only the media and those who do not properly understand the existing system of patent litigation expect the USPTO to provide a perfect search of prior art for 2% of the market value of such a search.
In conclusion, while there may be a great deal of problems with these patents, and plenty of legitimate complaints about the how the system works, the submitter of this story addresses nothing but meaningless and baseless fluff. There would be more substance to the complaints if he griped about the poor scan quality of the documents. Please keep in mind that I'm not arguing the merits of these patents, but rather pointing out that the submitter addresses no valid complaints because, by analogy, he's busy arguing whether the Windows is better than OSX by pointing out how pretty the Windows desktop is.
But moderators, if you fear that facts might interfere with your self-affirmation, by all means convince me that I'm correct (regarding the subject line) and moderate this as a troll.
Does this even qualify? I thought a patent had to be pretty explicit as to how something works, so that theoretically, somebody could build the device themselves by reading the patent. Vague sections like:
"..transforms the data to a usable form.."
and
"..generates informative reports from the data.."
Seem pretty broad to me. That doesn't describe anything, really.
Someone's really gotta throw junk patents like this out before they even reach the (not yet existent) REAL patent examiners.
Seeing as that was a federally mandated act, I don't think congress is going to think too highly of this company's actions. This really might lead to patent reform, since the only two ways of getting congress to act seem to be to either pay them lots of money (or should I say "donate" lots of money to their reelection campaigns) or piss them off. The last time they really got fed up over something we got the do not call list which has been pretty successful.
So more power to this crappy little IP company, I can't wait to see what remains of them after congress is done. :)
There is a flaw with this way of thinking...
I worked for a company that paid me a bonus (roughly) $800 a quarter, used no call prediction software, no outsourcing and paid a decent salary and we still where profitable.
Now, this company has since merged with another and turned into a giant cash cow that pays almost no bonuses a year, uses call prediction software and outsources nearly 98% of its calls and they're having a hell of a time producing profits.
Issue: internal spending and internal choices
You figure that can't be true, with all the money they're saving now, I'm not giving the whole detail... You're right - the "new" company gives cell phones to all supervisors and up, 2 way pagers to all supervisors and up - and anyone else that asks, has given their CEO a raise of over 100k a year the last 2 years, spend time and money arguing with outsourcers over pricing (as well as sending employees on sight every other month to supervise operations), upgrade systems that are working perfectly fine to get extra features they don't even use, develop their own in house billing database only to find the original solution worked fine and spend more money to switch back.... I could keep going.
This company is like so many others out there that decided that a few extra things wouldn't hurt, until they had to lay off most of their workforce and it became a perpetual cycle. If you took most of these "cash strapped" companies and put everything they did on paper (like a business plan), no one would invest in them before telling them to change a lot of things they do.
This is how the patent system works and this is why you can apply for a patent for under $2000 - a thorough search for prior art will cost over $100,000 and the USPTO cannot afford to give those out for $2000. And a small company that is allegedly violating patents is supposed to shell out those $100k to do what the PO should have been doing in the fist place? I can see how that suits the big players just well, but it strikes me as a perversion of the system that it is easier and cheaper to patent the obvious than it is to prove that the USPTO should not have granted that patent to begin with.
My apologies to President Lincoln -- though his comments on the topic are quite astute, not to mention prescient: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country ... Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
"When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain
Actually, from a pure R&D perspective, we are the leaders in innovation. We spend a truckload of money on R&D (government, private and institutional) which is why so many foreign scientists and engineers come here to work and learn (and often to take that knowledge back home.) In a way, it's just another example of America's generosity with foreign aid. However, we still have a lot of the world's best and brightest, which means that ideas are not in particularly short supply. No Sirree. However, what we are not, any longer, is a leader in commercialization. And that is the root problem, and this lawsuit-happy atmosphere is doing nothing but reduce our ability to take the fruits of our R&D investment to market. In fact, it is eliminating the very motivation to spend money on R&D.
... it's not only broken but dangerous because Congress wants to export it worldwide. I guess their philosopy is, if we're headed toward third worlddom we might as well take the rest of the industrialized world with us. Not that they'll fall for it, although the EU seems to be right on the edge. China and India seem to be taking the correct screw you approach to "harmonization", although it appears that Australia was just annexed by the USPTO, with the MPAA as a minor partner.
Congress doesn't seem to understand that there were damn good reasons why the original patent system was set up the way it was. I mean, it worked rather well for almost two hundred years, doing precisely what the Founding Father's wanted it to do. Frankly, even after all this time I trust the Founders judgment more than the current crop of Congressional weasels. If you want to get right down to it, much of the industrial productivity and standard of living enjoyed by Americans for most of those two centuries was due to that system, and the flood of creativity and invention that were the hallmark of the United States for so long.
U.S. patent law has been under a continuing process of subversion for some time now (the removal of the "demonstrable prototype" requirement, for one) but it wasn't too badly broken until recently. So far as I'm concerned, software and gene patents are the straws the broke the camel's back. And now
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't need this story to prove patents are worthless. I and many other people already know that, all this does is just bolster our claim. People who dislike that should consider it as a punishment to be suffered for having a poorly thought out belief system.
The fact is, when it is allowed for ANYBODY else to controll how inventions are used, problems like this are going to happen. Problems like corruption in the system, problems like poorly defined boundries when asserting patents, problems like unproductive lawsuits, and most small inventors getting screwed - even though patents were supposed to help them. Heck, even trying to treat patents like a intellectual "Property" is a fraud and a deception.
What if the govt gave me a monopoly on growing fruit and called it fruit "proeprty" because I can buy and lease shares of my monopoly on the open market? Well patents are a fruity idea.
Corporation is a privately held company founded in 1998, and it was issued US Patent No. 5,910,988 and US Patent No. 6,032,137 in 1999 and 2000 for image capture, centralized processing and electronic storage of document and check information.
well, well--- I remember working for a financial institution long before this- they were in the process of installing a new system that scanned, stored, and retrieved information....hm. Maybe ScanOptics might have something to say about this.
" trivial, however undermines the element of FUD which wins the submitter such karm.."
Did you read the claims? The abstract is spot on. If you think the abstract or title is mislead, why are you attacking the submitter and not the abstract or title?
"Further, these patents will come under extreme attack if they are used in court."
Attacked by lawyers and adjudicated by judges. Neither of those has any technical grouding in software. Once these patents are judged in court, its a dice roll.
"When these patents are used against someone, he would be a complete idiot to not first question whether the patents can be invalidated in court."
Again, the court is not technical, it is a dice roll.
Your side does eBanking and could face hefty royalties a catastrophic block on business, plus legal fees. His side faces only legal fees at most.
Now roll the dice, but you'll find its weighted.
"This is how the patent system works"
No the patent office is supposed to filter this crap for obviousness, prior art and technical invention.
"a thorough search for prior art will cost over $100,000 and the USPTO cannot afford to give those out for $2000."
Its the USPTO's job to do that and since when has it cost $100,000? Thats a couple of man years work,a ridiculous figure pulled from the air.
> Thus, the entire IP nonsense was born.
well, um, I think the US patent office got its start in the 1800's, maybe 1837? Other countries had patents before us, I think it evolved from British law.
It started cuz too many engineers were keeping trade secrets and taking them to the grave. For instance, Stradivarius violins.
You're talking about more recent events.
And copyrights and trademarks are not going away anytime soon, or all of industry would vaporize. For instance, you get rid of trademark law and then Microsoft can come out with a version of NT labeled "Red Hat Linux". Oracle comes out with a stripped-down, hideously buggy version of their database and allows free download under the name "MySQL", specifically to trash the MySQL name. Please come to the official MySQL website at mysql.oracle.com! Trademark law is not going away anytime soon.
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
>> Have any of you even been in a court of law, let alone a patent case?
;)
You'll find that people feel pretty confident in expressing their ideas even though many are completly ignorant about the issues they are discussing.
I'm willing to bet that the ratio of people that actually understand a thing about IP law on Slashdot is quite below the ratio of people who understand a thing about computer systems and programming. And as we all know, that rate is already low enough, hence the term "troll" was introduced.
But hei, people don't really have to understand a thing about what they're saying to criticize or to pass judgment - which is why I'm not surprised at the patent office reviewers' work - they're just being human and judging things they are actually ignorant about.
To be honest, the patent system would be perfect if proving a patent invalid in court was a straightforward and inexpensive process. Patents should be automatically approved after a fee (2K is ok), but disproving the patent shouldn't be an expensive legal process. You would have no patents, just "patent claims". That way you'd spare on the work of the patent reviewers (whou wouldn't have to run a thorough search) and let those interested in the outcome disprove the patent. People wouldn't spend money on stupid patents if they knew they could be easily invalidated.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
Yes, but in terms of the damage such a patent can cause, it doesn't matter whether it is a good patent or not ... it was issued, given the USPTO's stamp of approval, so it is presumed valid (that's the problem with not having proper evaluation of patent applications up front.) So now, the issue becomes whether someone else can invalidate the patent, and that requires one hell of a lot of court time and expense. And the scary part of all this is that a court may very well uphold a completely brain-dead, overbroad patent. Wouldn't be the first time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Unfettering those companies from the legal blackmail being visited upon them by the leaches would probably help the economy, not hurt it.
Man I couldn't have said it any better.
I'm an old fart, and I can remember when we were doing innovative things at breakneck speeds.
Circa 1960 or so I was in So Cal, an ex Iowa farm boy who knew a bit about electronics and wanted a piece of the action. At one point I found myself working as a bench tech at Oceanographic Engineering in Sandy Eggo.
We were building a tv camera designed to be towed through sewers and such to check the condition of the plumbing. Targeted for about 3.5" in diameter and about 14" long in a case suitable for such duty, we were still at the breadboard stage, fine tuning the circuitry, and the only model we had was a rather large mass of parts sticking out of it here and there, so effectively it was about 5" in diameter at the time.
Late one morning the top engineers came out of the corner office and said to police the place a bit, we were gonna have company in about 15 minutes. Everybody grabbed a broom or a mop.
True to the clock, about 15 minutes later a lot of navy gold came thru the door and shook hands all around, then asked to see this little wonder toy work. So while they watched the monitor, we gently picked it up and set it back down in a bench drawer faceing the rear of the drawer after twisting the focus ring around for near focus, then closed the drawer on the piece of coax that was bringing out the picture, and sending in the 12 volts that ran it.
The automatic target system worked well enough that 2 seconds after the drawer was closed, the monitor had an excellent picture of the wood grain of the back drawer panel on it, all from the light leaking in around the cables slightly holding the drawer from closing tightly.
They talked amoung themselves for a minute or so, then asked if they could find a seat in the office & talk business. Our brass was more than helpfull, rounding up sufficient chairs and stools for everyone to sit on. Half an hour later they all left and I figured that was the end of that little dog & pony show.
Not quite, before the week was out, we had a contract to make 2 of them along with the cases & pan/tilts to the Navys specs. Looking at the case specs, our guys had to ask where these cameras were going as that was an unreal strong case they were spec'ing.
To make a long story a little shorter, they went on the Trieste, and were on it when it went down in the mohole, bringing back the first pictures ever from over 37,000 feet down in the pacific ocean.
Could that happen again today? No way Jose'! Before we ordered the parts, some fscking scumbag would have us up on patent violations for half the circuits in that camera, which at that time were 100% discrete parts, not an integrated curcuit in the whole thing. Not to mention the designs of the seals that surrounded the navy supplied quartz window in the front of the camera cases that didn't leak at an ambient pressure of something in excess of 18,000 psia. They worked, nuff said.
The patent system is broken by 2 things. One being that 99% of whats really patentable had been invented by 1965, and nearly everything since then is not much if nothing but a word re-arrangement to make it look new, or so damndably vague as to be un-enforceable in any court in the land where the judge has smarts enough to actually turn his own judicial bench lights on and off.
The other is the sheer mass of submissions being done today by everybody and all his con man kin, trying to get in on the perceived gold rush.
Between those two effects, I don't frankly care how much money you throw at the patent office trying to fix it, its not going to get fixed.
In the meantime we spend all our resources sueing some unlucky person who has a competing idea, and the only winner is the lawyers at the end of the day. He wins that is, IF he gets paid.
While all patents are presumed valid until proven otherwise, only they who are fools believe that a perfect prior art search can be conducted for under $2k in 10 hours on application after application after application. There are about 30 patents cited as related art on the front of the patent. The internet text version doesn't show whether that was art submitted under 37 CFR 1.56 or cited by the examiner, but it does suggest that a sizable search was done and prosecution wasn't a straight-forward rubber stamp.
What's more, I wouldn't be at ALL surprised if the limitations recited by the claims were not commonly disclosed in 1997, when the patent was filed. It's certainly not my field of expertise, but online banking with an automated paper check scanning system might have existed before 1997, but I would be surprised if anybody had published the details of their system in an accessible medium and with enough detail to prove, before a judge, that the claimed invention already existed or would have been an obvious modification.
And do note that "obvious" has nothing to do with the dictionary definition, but rather the case law establishing that word under 35 USC 103
Forget actually making anything anymore, the patent-sue method has become a full business model on it's own...
wait... can't business models be patented now?! I gotta get me down to the USPTO!!!