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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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.
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.