Judge Permits eBay's "Buy It Now" Feature

stalebread points to a Reuters story reporting that a federal judge refused to issue an injunction against eBay's "Buy It Now" feature. Quoting: "Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Federal District Court denied a motion by the Virginia company, MercExchange, for a permanent injunction to stop eBay from using the feature. The Supreme Court ruled last year that, although eBay infringed upon MercExchange's patent for the service, it was up to the lower court to decide whether eBay had to stop using it. 'MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,' he wrote."

Comments

Re:Link

[Stalus]

Google FTW - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/28/business/28ebay. html

Google News has article on injunction ruling

[strredwolf]

Judge Permits eBay's "Buy it Now" feature to continue -- 96+ articles found in Google News.

Re:This is horrible news... seriously

[ozric99]

Secondly, E-Bay has had this feature for years. If MercExchange was really trying to protect something so vital to their business as to require an injunction, they should have filed years ago.
What? This battle has been going on for years. Ebay first approached MercExchange in 2000 offering to purchase the patent(s) they were about to infringe upon. MercExchange refused their offers, Ebay went ahead with their plans anyway. MercExchange filed suit againast Ebay in 2001 and won the lawsuit in 2003.

Re:Obvious?

[kansas1051]

The trouble we have is that the USPTO only considers it "prior art" if it has been previously patented.

MercExchange's patent was found non-obvious by the trial court during the law suit. You are 100% wrong regarding what evidence can be presented to show that an invention is obvious. Both a federal court and the USPTO can consider any evidence available to one skilled in the art, which includes any publicly-accessible information. If you do some searching, you'll discover that its common for patent examiners to use archive.org to reject patent applications.

I'll even provide a link from the MPEP (the manual used by the patent office) for you.

Re:This is horrible news... seriously

[budgenator]

Chemical analysis doesn't always work and when it fails it's frequently in food and perfume analysis. I understand that Cool-Whip is impossible to duplicate without the secret.