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

Re:HAHAHAHA

[emjay88]

Probably hanging out with the ark of the covenant, Joe Smith's golden plates, the city of atlantis, xenu and russel's teapot.

Except that the missing links actually existed at some point.

It still baffles me that people can delude themselves to the point of arguing with evolution and still claiming to know the truth.

Since you clearly believe that everything that has ever lived exists in the ground somewhere, how do you account for the gigantic underestimate of the number of atoms in the universe? Or the way the Earth manages not to collapse into a black hole under the weight of every life form that has existed since the first replicators formed in primordial ooze?

Re:HAHAHAHA

[nicolas.kassis]

You really don't know wtf you are talking about. Here go read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil

Re:HAHAHAHA

[hazah]

Your question presupposes that there's something missing. Thus you force to frame an answer on your terms in a way that forces it to be rather weak and uninformative.

I propose that there are no "missing links". The notion thereof is frivolous.

Understand that finding a complete skeleton is rather rare occurrence as most animals are eaten by scavengers when they die. Only sometimes a body is entombed in a way that prevents complete destruction.

Additionally, you're ignoring DNA evidence that clearly points to common lineage with primates.