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U.S. Supreme Court Hears eBay Case Wednesday
siddesu wrote to mention an article on CNN Money about the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court patent suit involving eBay. We've previously mentioned the case. The SCOTUS will hear opening arguments on Wednesday, March 29th. From the article: "Lawyers for eBay and small e-commerce company MercExchange will square off over whether eBay should be barred from using its popular 'Buy it Now' feature, which infringes on two MercExchange patents. The case is being closely watched to see if the high court will scale back the right of patent holders to get an injunction barring infringers from using their technologies. Software companies complain they can be held for ransom by owners of questionable patents while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines."
Lobbying efforts center on legislation being drafted by Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who chairs a key House subcommittee.
Ironically, Lamar Smith is available on ebay with "Buy It Now" options. I'm surprised Abramoff hasn't bought out the whole lot.--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Here is a patent that doesn't require an EE degree to see that it is
ridiculous. I hope these cases keep coming and coming so political
pressure mounts to reform a backwards intellectual property system.
It should not be forgotten when convenient that the Supreme Court's role is limited to combing through the constitutionality of a past ruling. Roe v Wade being the "Law of the Land" is a misnomer. In this case, it seems that one part of the government established by the legislature made a ridiculous choice that doesn't pass the laugh test, but that's the legislature's job to fix, not the Court's.
Blackberry, Microsoft, Ebay, Tivo, Google... so when does it stop encouraging innovation, and start stifling it? Is anybody in the US government, or the patent office actually paying attention to these suits, or do they see this as everything working fine? I now that in the past, patents were not considered quite so important, just need to look at the big patent sharing agreements between the large computer companies like IBM, AMD, Intel. Maybe the view has shifted, and it has become acceptable to shut a business down over patents? (or at least try to)
There HAS to be a way for the courts to define and address the difference between WELL DUH! lawsuits (like "patenting" an immediate purchase button, or cross-category searches) and important lawsuits that protect folks that have invested years and years of work and research (and perhaps tons of money) in creating a complex drug or product.
THERE HAS to be a way to define this and adjudicate accordingly. I'm fully aware that there are gray-area patents, but some things just shouldn't be patented.
A Passionate Independent Musician
"Software companies complain they can be held for ransom by owners of questionable patents while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines."
Perhaps that's because, as we have been saying for years, patents on software impede innovation whereas patents increase (or so I am imformed - I don't work in the industry) innovation in the drugs industry.
Patents on software make as much sense as patents on books or music. Get rid of them now before they give patents in general a bad name.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Now, I'm the last guy that thinks drug companies are "nice guys" in the prices they charge, but in patent cases, I have to side with them.
They spend MILLIONS of dollars developing drugs. At least they have some right to patent what they created, because they actually created something. I'm not going into whether they SHOULD or not. That's what the law is right now, and it should probably be changed. I'm getting off track here.
Software companies with "patents" like these have spent little or no time "developing" anything. I mean..."One click"? "Buy It Now"? That's what you get when you have marketing people patenting things.
Geesh.
From the article:
Software companies complain they can be held for ransom by owners of questionable patents while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines.
I understand how drugmakers feel, but why should those rules affect the patents of software. Software is as it says "soft", drugs is "hard". A different set of patent rules should be applied in my opinion.
infringed on two e-commerce patents that MercExchange said were key to eBay's "Buy it Now" feature
How about striking down this lower court ruling
# 1998 The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial.[46] holds that there is no prohibition in U.S. law on patents for business methods as long as they are new, useful and non-obvious.
Considering that business methods are NOT new, useful and non-obvious its time to reverse this error in one judge's career sign-off opinion.
Just as ridiculous as patenting an Apple. It's not like they grow on trees or anything..err..I mean they actually grow on trees!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Really? Obvious? Smirk... How many auctions have you been to? Was that idea *ever* relevent before internet auctions? Nope...
Most good ideas are obvious in retrospect. The invention must only be non-obvious when it was filed.
The only way for the proles to fight patents and copyrights is to ignore them. This is, of course, impossible if there are only a few printing presses or factories that exist. But now there are more than a billion printing presses (everyone can publish and discuss ideas on the web); there are a probably 500 million CD burners in the world (wild guess) to pass around music and video, and we can even do better than that just by sharing data directly over the net.
The Internet is like the next evolution of the printing press. Gutenberg's machine took away the power of the learned few to disseminate information. The Internet represents the natural evolution of that capability, and more.
The next step will be the dissemination of the ability to manufacture at the molecular level in your house, and then on your desktop. If you don't believe that's going to happen, consider the fact that anyone in the world with a net connection can read this posting seconds after I submit it, and how wildly that would blow your mind if you lived at the time of the invention of the printing press.
This temporary nonsense with patents and copyrights will be just that, temporary.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I was under the impression that patents were only supposed to be issued to innovative and original developments in technology. "Buy It Now" is not technology. It's a sales gimmick. Gimmicks should not be patentable. The patent system in the US is seriously broken. It seems that the patent office isn't even bothering to review patents anymore. They're just handing them out like tissues.
They really need to tighten the rules over what is patentable. Sales gimmicks, business plans, mother nature, etc. should not even be considered. There should also be a rule similar to trademark law for termination of patent rights for non-enforcement to prevent crap similar to the JPEG nonsense from popping up out of nowhere.
When all else fails, run.
... I went into a shop for a paper and some smokes, but the guy would not sell them to me cos he was scared of being sued for using "buy it now". I was a bit miffed at not getting a smoke and the news but its not all bad as the guy had a half smoked cigar and a paper from 3rd March 2003 going for one buck with only 2 days left, just hope I have some change left from my 5 bucks max bid.
Outside the context of an auction, immediate purchase is unremarkable. If the genus is unpatentable, the species ought to be.
Don't wanna risk those karma point huh? That's fine. I can say over the last few years after I have read a number of these business patents, Yes indeed they are not novel. Patents were originally meant for those things that were unique and innovative not knock-offs of things that occurred in the real world. One-click purchases, "Buy It Now", these things that lived in the real world for 100s of years do not classify as being novel. On the whole, I would rather see business patents struck down (like it had been for 100 years prior to 1998) then continue to clog up our court system. If the USPTO was better at interpreting the "novel" test I wouldn't have a problem with it but quite frankly they do and therefore I am against it.
The double-entry accounting system developed in the 1300s and put into book form in 1494 - Novel and I would say very patentable
Amazon's One-click purchase - Not Novel
MercExchange - Not Novel
NetFlix - Rentals through the mail - Not Novel
The difference is that one is entirely new way of doing business and the other is just an extrapolated real world idea grafted on this thing called the Internet.
At least thats what I got from this article which is an interview with the guy who owns MercExchange
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m09/i30/s0 1
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
all three were done by porn shops on the internet.. remember where amazon went to learn how to sell on the internet. the porn industry, they had already been doing it for years
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
...while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines
So, limiting Pfizer's ability to just sit on what it's already made, and profit for doing nothing further, is somehow supposed to _chill_ investment in new medicines? I would think that if you were no longer able to just sit on your patents, it would *enhance* competition and *increase* the need to innovate in order to stay profitable.
OK Ayn Randian Bushites, let me make your argument for you so you dont need to: "But no one is going to want to innovate anything unless they can get patents".
I'm not saying throw out the patent system, just fix it. Even if we cut the lifespan of drug company patents by something _dramatic_, you honestly think Pfizer is just gonna say, "OK, nevermind, we aren't gonna do this anymore." Give me a break.
Why stick up for big business?
This is no news to anyone I guess, so maybe I'll just get modded as redundant.
I think one critical issue of patent reform should involve removing any patents whose novelty is linked to the media is uses. Consider "Buy it now." In the world of plastic money and paper receipts, this patent would be laughed out of the office. In a word, it's OBVIOUS. The fact that an item on an internet based sales site to me is irrelevant because the novelty lies in the medium being used. The medium is patentable, but should the WAY media is used really be patentable? If it should, then I'd like to patent driving down the road sideways. Heaven forbid someone create some form of cell-phone oriented sales/auction service and "Buy It Now" gets patented again because the medium is "wireless."
I'd really like to just be able to change the world, but I'd be more than satisfied if I could just change the ridiculous things going on with the patent world.
MercExchange(0): Seller will n0t respekt my intellectually property so I will sue! BUYER BEWARE! FFFFFFFFF---------!!!1!111! Do n0t buy from thiz seller!!!
The only issue before the Supreme Court is when should a patent holder be entitled to an injunction against an infringer. Courts have already determined (several times) that MercExchange's patent is valid and that eBay infringed the patent. Validity (i.e. is MercExchange's "invention" actually an invention?) will not and cannot be considered by the Supreme Court because it is not the issue being appealed.
Instead, the Court will determine if an injunction should automatically issue once infringement is found. Injunctions have been the standard remedy for patent infringement in the US since before the ratification of the Constitution, but to due patent trolling some (eBay) have suggested that injunctions should not be so easy to get, particularly in the software arts.
I predict they'll do the same thing they did with copyright extention. They'll admit that it might be a bad law, but they'll uphold the law and tell us to go to Congress if we want it changed. I don't think they'll find the injunctions unconstitutional.
Which I can respect, but is really a shame, as congress is so in-the-pocket they're just about useless in promoting anything that's for the common good over the corporate good.
Hope I'm wrong!
This is because patents work for drugs, but not for software.
For a Drug manufacturer who spends 5 years and $10Million to bring a single drug to market (not to mention the millions more spent on dead ends), spending 250K on a patent dispute is just an annoying part of business... And by the time the patent dispute winds it's way through court, you're only gonna be halfway through the regulatory process.
With software where time to market can sometimes be measured in weeks, and development costs can be as little as free beer and pizza, spending $50K just to say "Hey! This Patent Sucks -- not to mention the cost of a full defense, and spending 2 years with a preliminary injunction before the court is finally convinced that the patent should never have been issued is enough to trash many small companies.
Bullies (and patent trolls) like small, easy victims... The cost of 'developing' a software patent is mostly in the filing. The cost of defending against a software patent is often orders of magnitude larger than the cost of the filing, so the opportunity to profit from a bogus patent is really high if you can force your victims to settle.
Patent trolls aren't much of an issue for drug companies because the cost of developing something nominally patentable is so high, and a drug company will have enough time and money invested in a drug that the probability of them fighting a bogus patent is really high. This seriously cuts into the viability of a troll business in that sector.
The rule that is being questioned here) -- that a court must issue an injunction in a patent dispute (despite legislative language that seems to say otherwise) -- simply exacerbates the problems for software companies because, essentially, the fact that the patent is bogus doesn't count as a defense until years later when you finally get to court and (hopefully) prove, to a jury, that the patent really is bogus. By that time, the opportunity to go to market with your idea is long dead.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.