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CueCat Patent Granted, Finally
RobertB-DC writes "Who could forget the :CueCat, the amazing device that would bring 'convergence' between the real world and the online marketing Utopia of the late '90s? Belo, the Dallas-based newspaper and TV conglomerate, spent millions of dollars on the project, only to be ridiculed from the start and eventually becoming a sort of poster kitty for the Dot-Com Bust. Well, the device's inventor and chief cheerleader, J. Jovan Philyaw, didn't forget. His patent application, in progress since 1998, has finally been granted. The story comes from a Dallas alternative weekly, since the local Belo paper is still smarting from its $40-million-dollar black eye."
Clearly, this one got approved via the Patent Office's rule that "If you can't decipher the run-on sentence, approve the patent".
Yeah, I know the patent rules pretty much require run on sentences, but Claim 1 here is ridiculous even given that.
Best I can tell, Claim 1 covers doing a lookup of a code at a remote site and receiving something like a URL back, then following that URL. The code has to have been received before the user connected to the network.
That is, if I set up a server which returns a redirect for "8972" of http://www.cat.example.com/ and "1513" to http://www.dog.example.com/ and I send you (via US mail) "8972", which you then enter at my site and get redirected to the cat site, the patented method has been used.