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eBay May Lose 'Buy it Now' Button in Patent Case
Spamicles writes "A judge has delayed his ruling on the eBay patent infringement case. eBay has been involved in a legal dispute over the use of its popular "Buy it Now" button, which allows consumers to skip the bidding and purchase items on eBay directly. The patent suit was filed six years ago by MercExchange L.L.C. In May of 2003, a jury ruled in MercExchange's favor finding that eBay did in fact infringe on the patent, but in 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that MercExchange was not automatically entitled to a court order blocking the offending service, essentially handing a victory down to patent reform advocates. However, the ruling by the Supreme Court does not affect the final judgment of the court."
That makes sense. Yay for software patents!
"Buy it later"
What this ruling is, is a concession by the courts for big business interests. The state has no interest in patent reform.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
"Buy it after waiting 1 second" button.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
"Purchase it straight away" button, or something along those lines... We are a community where the mindset of "can't make profit? Litigate !" - and it is only getting worse.
I thought seriously about tagging this story with the tag "bull shit", because that's what this patent is. This should become the new poster child for "patent troll" and "patent office stupidity". This is even a more boneheaded patent than Amazon's non-innovation of one click buying (which always seems to take me two or three clicks anyway).
What's next, they're going so take Walmart to court because Walmart lets me buy something without bidding on it? Are they going to take the owners of the live auction I go to each week to court because after high bid is set on an item, they allow those present to buy multiples of that same item for the same high bid without running another auction process?
I'm all for the rights of a business to prosper and benefit from their original ideas. But this patent is about as far from "original" as you can get, and is as original as my getting up out of bed each morning and taking a piss. This company should be exterminated like the worthless parasite that it is. I said it before about SCO, and it applies here too...those who can innovate, while those who can't litigate.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
According to AP reports, the USPTO has looked at the patents issued to MercExchange, and in early findings, the USPTO said that the patents held by MercExchange should not have been issued.
Aye!! You just sneezed!! I have a patent on this style of sneezing! Pay me $$$$ !!
Aye! You just did a double click using the mouse! I own the patent for double clicking! Pay me now!!
Aye!! You just farted!! It smells crap!! ta-da..patent... I will sue ya!!
I wonder what other patents were granted in the past...
The current patent laws are so stupid that it causes me physical pain to witness the things that actually make it to court. When the people envisaging the patent system designed it, had they recieved applications like the ones routinely honoured today, they would have laughed the applicant out of their office. What they are claiming to have a patent on is the idea, or process, whereby you buy an item for a set price rather than bidding on it... ..... ...... And your court system is happy to deliberate on this. Seriously, how much deliberation do they require?
I bought some sushi today from the local sushi bar, and I didn't have to bid on it... they are obviously in violation of this patent... and I bought some hardware components from an online retailer, didn't have to bid there either.
The idea of patents was to enable people, particularly individuals on limited budgets, to profit from their original inventions. One of the core requirements of a patent is that it not be for something obvious.
Lets be honest. Does it get more obvious than the purchasing of something for a set price? Is there anyone that isn't familiar with that idea?
I think i'm going to burst a blood vessel on this one.
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
Ebay vs MercExchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExch ange%2C_L.L.C.
the patent they are apparently fighting over [US Patent 5845265]
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5845265.PN.&OS=PN/58452 65&RS=PN/5845265
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Buy it immediately?
Purchase now?
Screw the bidding?
Screw the bidders?
Screw Flanders?
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
MercExchange patents 'buy it now' - Thank You!
Ebay negotiates a license - How much you want?
Ebay doesn't get a license - Whoa! That's too much
Ebay intentionally uses it anyway - What are they gonna do, sue us?
MercExchange brings a lawsuit against Ebay - Yes
Judge rules in favor of MercExchange - I can see your name on the patent
Judge misapplies injuction process - this stuff is complicated
Ebay appeals the injuction - HaHa! a technicality
Judges rule that the injunction was done wrong - I can see the process wasn't followed
Judges also comment on current patent law - this shit sucks
MercExchange requests the injunction be applied permanently - we hate Ebay
Ebay requests postponement until patent is reassessed - No rush, we can wait 10 years
Judge must now make a decision - damned if I do, damned if I don't
Could someone please explain to me why certain patent battles, such as this, aren't just investigated for "independent creation" on the part of the accused infringer?
I'm pretty sure that I was taught in college that 2 people can hold the patents to 2 very similar products so long as both came up with their respective products independent of each other. With such a simple idea as "Buy it now", wouldn't a rational judge throw such a case out?
Besides simple corruption of the legal system by big money, what am I missing?
Heh. Given that, say, the in-game auction house on WoW has an instant buy option too, I wonder how long until they'll want their cut there too.
;)
And will they take the license fee in game money, since that's all that changes virtual hands? I can just see a party of lawyers riding to Ironforge and Orgrimmar to demand their license fees.
Well, the dwarves might even pay up, but I'd worry about trying to collect from the Orcs. I doubt anyone explained to Thrall yet how the license system works. And troll tribes tend to kill each other on sight, so I'd advise the patent trolls to stay clear of the Darkspear trolls
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Evidently the people who use these programs want the items you are bidding on more than you do, or it would not matter that they are entering last-minute bids. Enter as your maximum bid the highest possible price you would want to buy the item for, and it won't matter if somebody enters a bid at the last possible moment because you will automatically outbid them.
If you are not willing to do this, chances are the other person wants the item more than you do (i.e. is willing to pay more for it, no matter when they entered their bid) and thus you don't deserve to win it. The system is not broken.
audioLibre - freedom of music
Oh, I dunno. Is it because people have lives and aren't interested in listings on the glorified yardsale that is eBay being extended indefinitely with nickle-and-dime bids? Or perhaps it's the potential for abuse as shills hammer open-ended closings to maximize gain at the expense of others? Then again, it could just be that eBay doesn't think it worth the effort to rewrite the codebase so an item can climb from $1.00 to $2.00 over the course of another hour?
Compared to real-world auctions, the vast majority of items on eBay aren't worth much and the potential number of bidders is far, far larger. Both these factor into why open-ended closure isn't as cut-and-dried a process as you lay out. It just doesn't make sense, especially to eBay, a company that wants quick sell-through (look at their fee structuring) rather than lingering listings. That was the motivation to the introduction of Buy It Now in the first place, and your proposal runs counter to that.
There's no magic to beating last-minute dropped connections or competing automated bids: just bid what you're willing to pay up front, and if you don't win, wait for the item to turn up again (and again) from another seller. Even under your plan, those two self-indentified evils would still exist, only moreso, as the timeframe for each would be extended. I don't see how sliding auction closure does anything to address either in the least.
Is it any surprise the courts make these sort of decisions?
c le/2007/06/12/AR2007061201667.html?hpid=moreheadli nes
s prigman.html , in exchange for campaign donations http://consumerist.com/xml/comments/264638 . And lets not forget about hot cups of coffee. The entire legal system is a joke. The problem is people like Judge Pearson, Magistrate Chooljian and Attorney General Gonzales don't know it. They think they're important public officials part of a proud tradition who are loved and admired by the population they rule^H^H^H^Hserve. Suspect many people think otherwise.
A few days ago we had an idiot judge (yes, a *judge*) suing cleaners $54M for the emotional stress of losing is pants http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
and hot on the heals of that we had an idiotic ruling by a U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian decreeing that RAM shall be archived. And we've got an Attorney General, the #1 lawyer in the country, who smirks "I don't recall" for hours of testimony, then goes back to work and it's business as usual.
The entire judicial legal system is an anachronism. As we've seen, it contains some very clueless (and sometimes downright stupid) people making important decisions. We've got patent law which is way out of control and anti-trust law which might as well not exist at all. The law is written for and sometimes even by corporations like the RIAA and Disney http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_
Time to turf the whole thing out and start again. I mean, how much worse is this going to get?
At least Americans are lucky they don't like in the former British Empire where you get some senile git wearing a black cape and a powdered wig banging a hammer and glaring at you, and expecting to be taken seriously. "This is my court!" they thunder. If any other public servant did that in their workplace, they'd be taken away for psychiatric assessment.
seriously, there's no point getting into a bidding war on any item on ebay and this is the approach i take.
I actually think that ebay (or $NewCompetitor) would do well to change the whole system over to blind bidding. That is you put in the max you're willing to pay at the start and have to wait until the auction is over to see who won and at what price and the auto-bid history behind that. Throughout the duration of the auction there would be no "current bid" on display, just the start price and the number of bidders. If person A bids $10 max and person B bids $15 max person B will still win with $10.01 but they'd both have to wait and see.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Thank you for explaining this.
The problem with eBay is stupid bidders. If everyone would figure out how much they were willing to pay, then bid that much and be done with it, we'd all be happier buyers.
The problem is the bidders who either (1) have no idea how much they are willing to pay but, by God, they're gonna win this auction, or (2) they don't understand the way the bidding process works. Some people belong in both groups.
The people in group 1 somewhat artificially drive up the price. They increase their bid a couple of bucks a dozen times in the last few minutes because, rather than simply bidding the maximum they are actually willing to pay, they keep on jacking up the price until they've either got the high bid or time runs out.
People in group 2 don't seem to understand that they could bid $1,000,000,000.00 on a piece of $5 costume jewelry and they'll only have to pay a few bucks more than the 2nd highest bid. That's right folks: the *second* highest bidder sets the selling price that the highest bidder pays. The people who don't get this concept may have actually come up with a maximum they are willing to pay, but they ease up to it in the last few minutes instead of bidding their maximum and walking away. This group only encourages group 1's behavior.
Because of these groups who don't know how to play the auction game, the only way to win many auctions is to decide how much you are willing to pay and snipe at the last moment (unless it's already bid up higher than your personal maximum). Otherwise someone will decide "I guess I could bid a couple more bucks" in the last minutes of the auction. It's no wonder than people have developed sniping software to do this automatically for buyers who are busy sleeping, working, or enjoying life.
And by the way, if you're bidding on any of *my* auctions, forget all this. Bid early! Bid often!
Before someone in say, the Trade Department, realises that every stupid patent awarded, every 10 year old summonsed by the RIAA and every stupid copyright restriction imposed or self-imposed on websites is adversely affecting the trading position of the USA in the world? It's not to say that real world issues should be ignored by the Internet but there has to be some common sense applied and less of this blind gold rush. Ebay's response could be as simple as lifting their servers and moving them somewhere where software patents don't exist, which would probably be cheaper than paying whatever stupid licencing price these parasites want to impose. It's a shame that Neal Stephenson's Kinakuta doesn't yet exist, as every big US online company that has been screwed over by the cretinous US patenting system, and every company that has fallen foul of the ridiculous protectionist policies of the current government would be falling over themselves to set up there. Anyone got a spare island?
Do they WANT to piss everyone off?
Yes. I think this is their entire business strategy.
mod parent informative
g =facts
I asked Google about the McCoffee. And it told me 300 contradictory things, including that McCoffee was drunk by whoever was on the grassy knoll and if you look closely at footage of the moonlanding, you can see a McCoffee next to a "moonrock." Then Google showed me crotch shots of celebrities getting out of limmos holding McCoffee. In the corner, an Google ad appeared saying "Buy Hot McCoffee Lap from eBay!"
So I gave up on Google and asked Snopes.com. Snopes is the original urban legends guy from the days when Internet was e-mail and news groups. Think of him as Mythbusters long before beries became unfashionable again. Snopes pointed me at this, which he claims is an accurate summary of the incident:
http://www.caoc.com/CA/index.cfm?event=showPage&p
As Snopes says, the details of that case were exaggerated, but there's still a strong case for tort reform. I suspect Judge "No Pants" Pearson will be on poster. For an encore Pearson should sue himself for emotional distress for making an ass (no pun intended) out of himself.
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp
Actually there was a bug in Ebay that allowed you to place a bid up to 8 seconds after close if you used one of the European servers to place your bid. Lots of people used it for a while to snag a item after bidding closed until the hole was closed (It was a time slip). The other problem with bidding what you are willing to pay is that ebay is full of incredibly stupid people bidding. I have seen used items go for more money than what you could have bought it new for on Amazon or other online store. People get sucked into the bidding and "It's mine! I'm gonna outbid everyone" mentality, and many items get out of control fast. As a seller, I use tricks to incite the bidding stupidity (list everything starting at %0.99 no reserve) As a buyer, I snipe by hand in the last 10 seconds as most of the sniping software has not worked right for over a year now, nor can it get a feel in the last 30 seconds as to if you will even want to snipe.
Bidding what you think it's worth to you usually does not work. Sniping at the last second is what get's you a lightly used Canon rebel XT digital camera body for $145.00, Or a Toughbook CF-30 for a $450.00 price. Nither of those would have been won at those really low prices if I sat there bidding like everyone else. Coming in at the last second with less reaction time than the other guys have snaggs it, you get a good deal instead of a Ok deal. That is what Ebay has been all about from day 1.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I, for one, welcome our patent-enforcing Flanders-screwing overlords.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
OK, granted, the article wasn't specific on what the patent was based on, but it seems to me that if you've got a website that intends to SELL something, that somewhere on that page, there should be a button to allow a potential customer to BUY the item. I am going to assume for a moment that the act of BUYING an item is not a patentable concept (I hope this assumption is correct).. If so, what is patented? The color of the button? The exact wording? What the heck? The Patent office is truly out of control.
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com
Apart from the usage of words how is 'Buy it now' any different from 'Add to Cart'? The process seems exactly the same to me. Maybe this is why I don't have any patents to my name.
Buy from CowboyNeal
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
> eBay has claimed that they have changed the code in order to prevent any patent violations claimed in the suit, but
> MercExchange lawyers say that they are still entitled to a hearing in order to force eBay to license the patents.
But that's not good enough for MercExchange because they're entitled to a few bucks, no?? I'm surprised Ford hasn't sued GM for making a car that looks similar to theirs. A LAW SUIT OVER A F**KING BUTTON!!! Give me a break!! This is exactly why countries like China, India, Israel and Japan are kicking our ass!! American companies don't innovate anymore, they sue!! Lawyers are destroying this country one suit at a time.
I'm getting sick of these. You think if there's a million monkeys who bid on a random service no one would come up with proxy bidding (the site will bid for you up to a certain amount) or buy it now buttons, yet there's patents on both of them.
I get really sick when simplistic business practices are considered treated the same as "trade secrets" even when they are publicly released. I get the feeling that America has become less of a free economy and more of a "patent hell". You certainly can build a better mouse trap, until the first company says they thought up the idea of a mouse trap and then your screwed.
... the USPTO 'Patent It Now' button's use continues unabated.
Have gnu, will travel.