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Apple, Starbucks Sued Over Music Gift Cards
Trintech writes "A Utah couple acting as their own attorneys have filed a lawsuit against Apple and Starbucks over the retailers' recent Song of the Day promotion, which offers Starbucks customers an iTunes gift card for a complimentary, pre-selected song download. In a seven-page formal complaint, James and Marguerite Driessen of Lindon, Utah say they developed in 2000, and were granted a patent in February 2006 for, an Internet merchandising utility dubbed RPOS (retail point of sale). The concept, which forms the heart of the infringement lawsuit, would allow gift cards for pre-defined items that can be sold at a brick-and-mortar store but used online; customers could redeem a card for a dining room set or a DVD, for example."
Same old rubbish. Companies have been giving away free gifts and vouchers for free gifts for years, tacking on "on the internet" doesn't make it a new invention in anyway shape or form.
Yet another patent we can all live without.
.. i got an idea .. lest get a patent in for an office that .. see if it passes .. seeing how dumb .. we got a shot at it .. 8)
The patent office is really more of a nuisance than anything nowadays.
Eh
would examine and grant patents
they are
Around 1995 it was possible to buy starter kits for internet service providers. The kit came with a month or so of access and software which would configure your system to dial the ISP. I gave one to my dad for his birthday. For me, this qualifies as prior art.
And what about AOL CD's. You might have been given it with a magazine. Sounds pretty obvious to me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If more than this story is needed to explain the problems with U.S. patent law in particular and the concept of a patent in general, I'd love to see it.
(It isn't that I hate Apple or support patents, it is just that I hate capitalism. Can't you see the connection?)
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DISCLAIMER: Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement of Western industrial civilization.
But apparently you're willing to use this advanced technology even though it is the product of something that goes against your principles. How pragmatic of you. How... dare I say it... capitalist? After all, your actions seem to imply that you value your short term personal gain over your principles, and that furthermore you can absolve your conscience with a disclaimer that says the opposite. If that behavior isn't typical of the large Western corporations you claim to despise, I don't know what is...
Here's the patent:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=HY54AAAAEBAJ&dq=7003500
I think it is more likely that Apple's lawyers pitched some offers to this couple to "make them go away" and couldn't work anything out. Then they just went about their business of setting up the service (this service through Starbucks was probably already well in the works - doubtful the "delay" was some tactic against this couple, though they might perceive it that way and allege it in the complaint). This patent seems silly - and in my mind, the longer it goes the worse the deal gets for the Plaintiff. Apple can counterclaim that it is an obvious "invention" and then not only does the couple have to prove infringement, but defend a valid patent - they might not even get in front of a jury on that one.
I don't know what I hate about capitalism more: patent trolls trying to make a buck off of big companies and raising the cost of products for everyone, or insensitive corporate clods who try to stomp on the little guy to keep the price of their products inflated. Either way, the consumer loses.
MMORPGs have been selling online services via prepaid cards from brick & mortar stores for a long time, e.g. World of Warcraft, Ragnarok and Priston Tale, to name a few. Another numbskull patent (examiner).
Well technically, it isn't exactly media or merchandise that the MMORPGs were selling (as claimed by the patent), but in terms of prior art, uniqueness and obviousness, the patent shouldn't be valid. Heck, USPTO should employ teens as patent examiners.
How is this different from gift vouchers in general? Is it because the internet is involved? So, can I patent gift vouchers if they are to be redeemed only in Polinesian straw huts? I find it truly incredible that someone thinks she has invented the buy-here-redeem-there scheme; even if the "there" in question is the internet. Of course, it's even more incredible that a patent has been granted upon this.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Just because somebody doesn't approve of a political or economic system, it doesn't make them a hypocrite for using something that was created under (although not necessarily as a consequence of) that system. I might disagree with the current patent system, but that shouldn't stop me using something that was developed using it.
Regarding the second part of your comment, I don't think capitalists have the monopoly on being selfish, shortsighted or even pragmatic.
The modern rocket was a product of the Nazi regime and was applied for terror bombing. The first man into space was a Soviet. That did not stop Kennedy from starting the Apollo program (headed, by the way, by the same guy who was working for the Nazis and built his rockets with Jewish slaves).
There are lots of useful technologies developed by assholes. For instance, there is a great deal of knowledge about how to deal with modern chemical weapons in Iran, because someone sold their enemies lots of chemical weapons. Going back in time, the Interstate system in the US is inspired by Hitler's Autobahn system that Eisenhower saw during the war; the Fischer-Tropsch process (coal to petrol) was used to drive Germany in its last year of war; and I could go on.
Technologies are things, and as such they cannot have an opinion on politics.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
to whomever tagged this "complementary," that's incorrect-- it's "complimentary," as in the phrase "with our compliments."
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
In 1995, I invented a magstrip card sold at all 700 Shoppers Drug Mart convenience stores in Canada. The card was good for a pair of tickets to either a Toronto Raptors or Vancouver Grizzlies game, the 2 new NBA teams we were hired to help launch. In the SDM store was a kiosk that was a Mac with Netscape on a a private TCP/IP network identical to the Internet, but not connected to it, just to its own hosts around Canada. Some of these hosts had the webservers and DBs running the ticket dealing app. Swiping the card unlocked the kiosk, navigating the websites sold the tickets, which when printed deleted credit from the cards.
That app and those cards were precisely the same as these music gift cards, for a product that happened not to be music, but otherwise identical - a trivial difference. So this post constitutes my notification of prior art. Apple and Starbucks can pay me now to use it invalidate these Utahrds' entire patent.
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make install -not war
Though superficially different, this is just an infringement of the patent under a new name, the lawyers argue.
It's been a while since I had to deal with patent law but what I remember is this.
You just have to be different; even in the smallest way. Get past one of the primary claims, not the dependent ones as they don't count, and the patent doesn't hold.
Also, if this were to hold or if it doesn't and/or the previous product infringes, it shouldn't matter if company XYZ simply pulled a product from the shelves that was infringing.
They really should consult an attorney in patent law. If they are one then well you know what they say about representing yourself.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Somehow, it just feels wrong to hope that a big, faceless, corporation crushes a couple of small inventors into dust with the power of their legal department. But in this case, I have to say "GO GOLIATH! CRUSH THOSE PIPSQUEAKS! WATCH OUT FOR THAT SLING!"
It's not just that patent trolls can now extort exorbitant amounts of money from innocent companies going about what used to be called "doing things" and now is called "violating patents". It has also put a damper on innovation, and we are seeing American industrialists becoming timid and reluctant to market incrementally improved products, just as our Asian competitors are becoming predominant in nearly every sector through incremental improvement to design and function.
At this rate, we're going to become like the Europeans, muddling along and watching the world pass them by technologically while they debate the latest politically correct labor laws such as whether to go to a 34 hour work week.
If this sounds overly negative, try coming up with an original invention and trying to sift through the existing process patents. It's next to impossible to avoid violating some process patent or other, usually something stupid like "A method for pushing a button that causes a light bulb to flash..." To compound the problem we now have companies practicing defensive patenting (I wonder how long it will be before someone patents defensive patenting) simply to keep these trolls off their back.
I wonder that none of the presidential candidates have addressed this issue. Obama's website pays some lip service:
Unfortunately, Obama does not address the real problem, which is that business process and methods have been made too easily patentable. Hillary's website does not even mention patents as far as I can tell, though to her credit she does talk a lot about increasing basic science research. The word "patent" is not found on John McCain's website. As for Ron Paul, apparently he doesn't know about the issue.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
What this article is unaware of is that both James and Marguerite Driessen are attorneys. She is a former Brigham Young University Law School professor and he attended the law school while she was teaching there. With that in mind it is difficult to know precisely what is going on here. She is not licensed to practice law in Utah, although that would have no effect on this pro se case. Either way, it doesn't seem like they know their patent law very well; and she didn't teach patent or intellectual property law at BYU. http://driessenlaw.com/
We willna be fooled again!