Patent Infringement Suit Includes Linking URLs In an Email

An anonymous reader points out a report at Groklaw about another new lawsuit from patent firm Intellectual Ventures against Motorola Mobility (they have an earlier patent suit against Motorola underway already). The suit seeks damages from alleged infringement of seven patents, most of which involve wireless communications and Motorola's use of Android. One of the patents, US5790793, is "A method and system for sending and receiving Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in electronic mail over the Internet." Intellectual Ventures' complaint (PDF) says Motorola product that implement MMS violate this patent. PJ at Groklaw thinks this is another patent attack on Android: "And guess where IV got these patents? Not directly from the USPTO. I'll give you a big hint. Some of them, from what I'm seeing, are from working companies. Don't they call that privateering, when active companies outsource their patents to trolls to do their dirty work? Why yes. Yes, they do. Can you guess one company in this picture? Someone helping Microsoft in its anti-competitive attack on Android and Linux, you say? Yes, one of the companies that seems to have transferred two patents to IV for its holy quest is Nokia, Microsoft's 'partner in crime', as I like to think of them. I know. You are shocked, shocked to know that patents are being used anti-competitively in a court of law."

Comments

Annoying, but courts have already ruled on this

[Guspaz]

The courts have already ruled that taking something existing and "doing it over the internet" isn't patentable. By extension, taking a URL that could be sent on a printed letter and "doing it over the internet" isn't patentable.

That said, the patent isn't actually about sending URLs in an e-mail, it's about automatically displaying destination content of a URL in the e-mail itself. For example, how gmail has an option to replace any YouTube URLs with the actual YouTube video in the e-mail. While that also doesn't sound patentable to me, I can't point out precedence like I can with the "doing it over the internet" patents.

Nathan Myhrvold and associates, /. celebrities

[arielCo]

Wow, these guys sure are famous here:

Intellectual Ventures Tied To 1,300 Shell Companies
Intellectual Ventures' Patent Protection Racket
Intellectual Ventures Settles Lawsuits With Asian Memory Companies
Does Recent Goodwill Undo Years of Patent Trolling For Intellectual Ventures?
Nathan Myhrvold Live Q&A
Nathan Myhrvold, Do-Gooder
When Patents Attack — the NPR Version

You can probably ask Nathan Mhyrvold (2876713) directly.