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Google and Others Sued For Automating Email

Posted by kdawson on from the promoting-the-progress-of-science-and-the-useful-arts dept.

Dotnaught sends us to InformationWeek for news of the latest lawsuit by Polaris IP, which holds a patent on the idea of responding automatically to emails. The company has no products. It brought suit in the Eastern District in Texas, as many patent trolls do — though the article informs us that that venue has been getting less friendly of late to IP interests, and has actually invalidated some patents. The six companies being sued are AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo. All previous suits based on this patent have been settled.

2 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Procmail by just+someone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html

    This file contains a summary of changes made in various versions of procmail up to and including the current release. It is derived from the HISTORY file that is included in source distributions. For information on downloading the current release please see the Procmail homepage.
    Only the last entry is complete, the others might have been condensed.

    1990/12/07: v1.00
    1990/12/12: v1.01
    1991/02/04: v1.02
    1991/02/13: v1.10
    1991/02/21: v1.20
    1991/02/22: v1.21
    1991/03/01: v1.30
    1991/03/15: v1.35

  2. Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 by darnok · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Absolutely - Procmail covers so many bases in terms of "automated stuff that can be done with email" that it's hard to see how it wouldn't be prior art for just about any patent issues in this area.

    On a broader topic, I can see the day when law firms engaged to provide legal defences against software patent claims start to employ older geeks specifically to identify prior art solutions. It's gotta be cheaper to keep a bunch of us around on some sort of "professional retainer" basis than to engage paralegals to trawl through old patent documents (and I'd "Procmail" probably wouldn't come up in a patent document search anyway) - many of us who've been around for a while would've thought "Procmail" before we'd finished reading this summary.