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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!
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.
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.
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)