Oprah Sued For Infringing "Touch and Feel" Patent

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Oprah Winfrey, or to be more precise, Oprah's Book Club, is being sued by the inventor/patent attorney Scott C. Harris for infringing upon his patent for 'Enhancing Touch and Feel on the Internet.' So Oprah's Book Club is now one of many people and entities being sued over this patent because they allow people to view part, but not all, of a book online before purchasing it. Mr. Harris also sued Google Books for infringing upon this patent. He actually was fired from his position as partner at Fish & Richardson for that, because Google is a client of that law firm and they had conflict of interest rules to uphold." It would be entertaining to see Oprah give very wide and mainstream publicity to the abuses enabled by our current patent system.

Update: 01/07 22:03 GMT by KD : The blog author Joe Mullin wrote to point out that the lawsuit was not filed by the inventor, Scott C. Harris, but rather by the shell company Illinois Computer Research, which seems to exist for the purpose of filing lawsuits based on this particular patent.

Comments

Summary of the patent

[Michael Woodhams]

I've just skimmed the patent. The basic situation is they have the entire book on computer, you can choose any pages to view, but once you've viewed a certain number, it won't let you view any more. There was also a bit of stuff about supplying image and text in different formats/resolutions, and (I think) using keys to scroll around the image of one page.

How do they know that it is you, not someone else asking for more pages? They specifically include the use of cookies, but allow for other methods. There is no mention of (e.g.) using IP addresses, but I expect this would be covered. The interesting problems (How do you know the user isn't deleting the cookies? How do you know whether there are 200 people behind that single IP address?) are not addressed.

IANAL, and I didn't read it carefully, so I might be wrong about some details.

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be careful with regard to "loose" and "tight" w.r.t. the patent system. Patent lawyers tend to view a "loose" patent system as one which allows patents on everything and a "tight" one as one that's very restrictive about what can be patented. People who oppose patents (i.e. any sane programmer or engineer) tend to view a "loose" patent system as one that allows a lot of actual progress to be made - i.e. strongly limits what can be patented, and a "tight" patent system as one that is very restrictive to people who want to just get things done - i.e. allows patents (monopoly grants on doing stuff by definition) on everything.

Thus, both sides were initially calling for a "less restrictive" patent system in the european software patent debate, thoroughly confusing politicians - the pro-software-patent patent lawyers and corporate types were talking about a patent system that allowed them to patent more stuff i.e. was less restrictive about what can be patented, and the anti-software-patent software writers and such were talking about a patent system that was less restrictive to people who write software due to not allowing software patents.

Re:HAHAHAHA

[Gerzel]

He may actually have a case.

It is theoretically possible that it is a good case even outside his own head.

It is possible still that he may win and status-quo be affirmed.

Oprah, Sony and Google are all powerful but they also all depend on IP laws themselves.