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Candidates Sued By Patent Troll For Using Facebook
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars is reporting that the 'inventor' of the concept of 'providing individual online presences for each of a plurality of members of a group of members,' claims that four million Facebook business account holders, including at least three major presidential candidates, are guilty of infringing his patent. He's suing Facebook for infringing on his patent as well as the three candidates. A Patent Office examiner rejected the patent claims, but the rejections have been appealed."
Now that East Texas has finally started rejecting patent troll claims, maybe Texas justice will take hold and they'll clean the gene pool a little by just SHOOTING idiots like this on their way out of court.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
My royalty payment is in an envelope, just behind my SUV.
Have gnu, will travel.
Except it's not really a software patent, is it? It's really just an idiotic patent, and looks like our system actually managed to catch it this time. So the summary really should read: "Idiot who filed idiotic patent can't handle rejection."
I tried that with the girls in high school -- it never worked.
Suing without a patent in hand has got to be a pretty risky business model.
Rejected is rejected till its accepted. And its not going to be accepted. Prior art goes way back to CompuServe days, well before his 1995 filing.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
From the summary:
... claims that four million Facebook business account holders, including at least three major presidential candidates, are guilty of infringing his patent. He's suing Facebook for infringing on his patent as well as the three candidates.
This particular usage is simply saying that they are referring to the same three candidates that were mentioned in the previous sentence, not that they're necessarily more legit than any other candidates or anything like that.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Everybody calm down. Even if this is appealed it will be struck down for the useless crap it is. The appeals process is normal, and the "inventor" has a very real financial incentive to appeal. But keep in mind the patent examiner has lready struck it down, so it's not an actionable patent yet, and will definitely never be.
Political Candidates Sued for Patent Infringement
Complaint
P.S. And no it's not in East Texas; it's Central District California.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
We need MORE patent trolls to beat up on the presidential candidates with completely bogus nonsense to help bring attention to the brokenness of the current system. Set up a WikiTrolls organization to sue every major politician.
SCO sued with a bunch of printouts and a complete inability to point out the offending code.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, this fellow seems interesting. Having read into a few articles, I saw this interesting snippet:
Prior to law school, Weyer was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho and now works as a volunteer engineer in Antarctic expeditions.
and this:
In an earlier case Weyer sued Network Solutions and Register.com for violating his patent on the selection of an e-mail address based on a domain name. He has also sued Harley Davidson, Bosch, and MySpace. Those cases have all settled.
It seems more like this guy is fraking the system over to allow him the freedom to go out and make a difference. You know, if I had a way to pick the pockets of fat cats while giving me the time to spend volunteering in third world countries or doing explorative expeditions - I just might.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
As long as WE are claiming SOFTWARE as the reason patents should be invalid, then we will NOT be stopping the REAL reason MOST patents should be invalid, which is that they are STUPID ... lacking any genuine INNOVATION.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And this is a good way to get it fixed. Contact the candidates involved in the lawsuit. Encourage them to take the matter seriously and to look into the abuses of the patent system. Use Righthaven as an example of a Patent Troll.
We all know that a vast majority of our representation in the government is technologically ignorant. They probably don't know that this kind of stuff is a real and serious problem; they likely see this lawsuit as some crazy on-off event.
It's not. Contact these people. Make sure they understand.
Love sees no species.
It seems more like this guy is fraking the system over to allow him the freedom to go out and make a difference. You know, if I had a way to pick the pockets of fat cats while giving me the time to spend volunteering in third world countries or doing explorative expeditions - I just might.
That's a rather ugly parasite, if true. I see it as doing a lot of harm in order to practice token charity. Isn't the eighth circle of Hell reserved for that crap?
I for one hope this rejection is overturned. This patent is no less valid than countless other business method patents or software patents, such as the one-click patent, and prior art is irrelevant, as again, countless other patents have prior art yet are approved by the USPTO. This patent needs to be approved so this guy can get busy suing the Presidential candidates and lots of other politicians, and maybe then we'll finally have some real reform of the patent system.
I dunno; is it bad to steal money from evil people who've gotten that money in unethical ways (like by stealing it from other people)? That list of companies he's sued isn't exactly a list of fine, upstanding companies that make the world a better place, with the possible exception of Bosch. In fact, if he managed to squeeze any money out of MySpace he should get an award.
is it bad to steal money from evil people who've gotten that money in unethical ways (like by stealing it from other people)?
I think so actually. But let's take this a step further. How do you know that the money was obtained unethically? What process do you use to make sure that theft only occurs from people who have obtained such money unethically?
Humans, especially the kind who steal, often have all sorts of rationalizations for why they do things. And a primary one is to rationalize after the fact that the victim didn't deserve the money or property of value.
This guy is potentially even worse. He's doing good. So it doesn't matter if the business came by their wealth unethically or not. It'd be easy for him to rationalize that he'll do better things with it than they could.
Since we're talking about hypothetical situations now rather than a real person, here's my take what's wrong with the Robin Hood fantasy. First, what attempt is made to figure out whether something is unethical or not? There's no way this guy has researched all of his targets.
Similarly, just because something is unethical doesn't mean it's grounds for theft. As I imply, I don't think there ever are legitimate grounds for theft. For example, I advocated allowing the Russian oligarches (of the 90s) to keep their ill-gotten oil properties with the provision that they pay protection money to the Russian government for a period of time. Continuing to flip oil properties on to the next set of cronies doesn't help make anything right.
Third, the moral calculus is very ugly. To Godwin this thread a little, it's worth noting that Nazi Germany rationalized the deaths of millions on the grounds it make Nazi society stronger. A vast amount of harm was justified by a little gain. You're in "break a ton of eggs to make an small omelet" territory with only your personal sense of morality (often confused with your personal sense of gain) as a compass. People who can justify big harms on the grounds of small benefits are some of the most dangerous people out there.
much of that money he is stealing is everyday tax payers that have to fund the court system, patent office etc etc etc. So damn right it is evil and makes him one of the worst sorts of parasites. Not to mention the companies he sues just pass on the costs to everyone else anyway.
Well in the case of Facebook at least, we don't have to worry about that as it's free for users.
As for funding the courts and patent office, first I thought the USPTO was self-funded by its fees, and second he's no more a parasite than all the other patent trolls out there, including all kinds of big companies like MS, Amazon, Apple, etc.
Prior art goes way back to CompuServe days, well before his 1995 filing.
Unlikely, considering his claims require URLs, and they were only invented in 1994.
How about "small company temporarily patents the obvious and loses a lot of money to lawyers" instead then? That's where this is going; the fact that they do have a product just means they can be counter-sued to death, a problem true patent trolls are immune to.
Can't be sympathetic for the small company when it's yet another variation on the " but on the web now!" patent nonsense. The idea that this was novel is 2007 makes the one-click ordering patent look like genius innovation; at least that hadn't been going on for a decade, all over the world, by the time of filing. I had a database-backed web site communicating among groups of people (the various divisions of my employer being one set) with an e-mail to FAX gateway in 1995. It was new then, but even at that point I considered it an obvious step, once the infrastructure was available.
But Santorum is a lunatic and a corporate whore. I could show you a Venn diagram with lunatic and shill circles in it that all the candidates fit into, makes it easy to visualize. And since it's displaying a Venn diagram on the web, that is of course a patentable advance.
They "existed" well beforehand, the RFC 1738 was written to get things standardized, actually like most internet technology...
As more candidates get burned by IP issues, they ARE going to wake up to how bad the system has become. Since it affects them individually, you know they're going to want to fix the system. Mostly so they can use whatever they want royalty-free. Romney and Newt both have been burned by copyright issues in this season. If a multi-million-dollar presidential candidate can't get this shit right, you think an average Joe has any chance? So yeah, keep picking on the candidates. We'll see how long those pesky laws remain on the books...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
no, actually the eighth circle of hell is reserved for facebook
WE SOFTWARE NOT REAL MOST STUPID INNOVATION
A-ha! I found your secret code. I think you're trying to say we are some sort of software simulation...
Isn't the eighth circle of Hell reserved for that crap?
No, that would be for the dev teams of Windows ME and Vista.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Hold on a tick - the Patent Office rejected a claim? The United States Patent Office? Are you sure about that?
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