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Amazon Slaps Orbitz and Avis With Patent Lawsuit
theodp writes "Amazon has sued Cendant for allegedly infringing four patents covering electronic commerce at its Orbitz, Avis and other Web sites. Cendant, the biggest U.S. provider of travel and real-estate services, knew 'or should have known' it infringed when using the tools to secure credit-card transactions, handle customer referrals and manage data, according to the lawsuit filed June 22 in federal court in Seattle. Amazon itself was sued by Cendant last year for patent infringement over its recommendation technology. So much for five years of Amazon patent reform."
My first thought was that this seems like a classic case of defensive patent action, and is fair game in my book. Cendant was the company that fired first when they hauled Amazon into court, so it's only fair that Amazon return the favor.
However, it appears that Cendent withdrew its lawsuit in February, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I suppose that if someone draws a gun on you, and then says, "heh heh...just kidding", you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to stop reaching for your own gun. So I can't say that I can muster a lot of pity for Cendant.
Cendant essentially forced Amazon to look in their patent portfolio to find what they could nail Cendant to the wall with. After having done all of the expensive homework, it seems that Amazon needed to at least recoup those costs.
Rob
Patent registrants like Amazon's Bezos say things like "we only register these patents to protect our own right to do things this way, not to prevent others from doing so". Then they turn around and, as is their right under the patent, prevent others from doing things that way. There ought to be a "defensive only" form of patent, or a standard, binding statement that a company can assert, which states they will waive the right to become plaintiffs in a lawsuit (or threaten to do so) claiming rights under the patent. Then, when they say they're benign, we will have a reason to believe them. They won't be able to say "we're protecting our ability to work this way by stopping the competition from working this way, and taking our business", which is just weasel words to use their patents like a weapon, not just a shield.
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make install -not war
I'm seeing various posts saying, "boycott Amazon" -- they are evil IP mofos. That is pretty silly! Micro$oft and Apple are doing similarly (or more) reprehensible things, and boycotts of them are not popular enough to make any difference in their behavior.
Amazon is really huge these days -- $600 billion or so a year in sales. That revenue is coming from non-ideologically motivated schmucks, not geeks who think and care about IP issues. A geek boycott will be about as successful as Jesse Jackson's boycott of Nike (he couldn't get blacks to do it).
Try it again, this time with feeling.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
It's not just Amazon. Every large company that does research churns out absurd patents.
I work at a corporate computer science research wing of an extremely large company (which I won't name, but isn't much different from my previous employer, and is probably not much different from any other large company in the same position). At the moment, the work I'm doing is not research, but software development. Our group has a requirement to turn out N invention disclosures a year, even though we aren't doing research. Naturally, this results in plenty of grumbling and people just grabbing something handy to "disclose" as an invention. There are people Googling for random things online, and submitting them as "inventions" to get upstream management off their back. Thus, the poison seed enters the system as a result of a poor goal/reward structure around research.
To keep *their* bosses happy, research management has to convert some number of these into patents.
The USPTO, which does not have the incredible amount of funding that it would require to block all stupid patents (you would literally have to hire the best researchers in every field and give them a long time to mull over each patent), might send these patents back a time or two, but sooner or later they will get through.
This is where stupid patents come from. Sometime down the road, lawyers will use these as clubs.
I am not on the financial side, but as far as I can tell, existing players in a market generally just cross-license. AMD and Intel will never duke it out over patents, because neither one would be able to produce chips.
What happens is that nobody new is able to enter the market, by virtue of a steady stream of patents existing covering all kinds of basic-but-crucial ideas. The idea, from the standpoint of existing players, seems to be to convert a free market into an ogliopoly, in which there is much more profit to be made from consumers, and in which the continuous push to commoditize products can be stopped. And every now and then, existing players merge or go bankrupt, and the market gets ever richer for the existing ones.
The problem (well, the problem that pisses off a lot of open source programmers) comes in in that open source projects generally don't have any money (certainly not enough to take on a large company in patent litigation). So, instead of being able to do what other large companies do (cross-license, just dump a bunch of money on the other company, whatever is necessary to continue doing their work), open source projects simply cannot do things for fear of being sued (or just having all their hard work thrown out). So we have stupid things like lower quality font rendering (because the FreeType people cannot legally support the TrueType hinting data) and so forth.
I have fond memories of one meeting at my previous employer where a bunch of researchers and an extremely key (i.e. essentially nonfireable) software developer was. The meeting was to encourage the project to produce more IP, and was being conducted by one of our in-house corporate lawyers. Halfway through the meeting, the software developer (who felt that the whole thing was a waste of his time in the first place, and clearly disliked software patents) stood up and started railing on software patents. The research folks just stood there. Talking privately after the meeting, I discovered most of the researchers agreed with the guy, but saw any complaints as politically incorrect and simply likely to get them fired or research funding (always a popular target for funding cuts) cut.
The very root issue is twofold: (a) that it's not easy for people to make money on research (in the US, I've been told by people who are more interested in the business side of research that many corporate research labs have gone away or been closed down), and (b) that it is *exceedingly* difficult to effectively judge how well someone is doing research. Everyone will try to present their research as the next gro
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.