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Judge: eBay Can't Be Sued Over Seller Accused of Patent Infringement (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's game over for an Alabama man who claims his patent on "Carpenter Bee Traps" is being infringed by competing products on eBay. Robert Blazer filed his lawsuit in 2015, saying that his U.S. Patent No. 8,375,624 was being infringed by a variety of products being sold on eBay. Blazer believed the online sales platform should have to pay him damages for infringing his patent. A patent can be infringed when someone sells or "offers to sell" a patented invention. At first, Blazer went through eBay's official channels for reporting infringement, filing a "Notice of Claimed Infringement," or NOCI. At that point, his patent hadn't even been issued yet and was still a pending application, so eBay told him to get back in touch if his patent was granted. On February 19, 2013, Blazer got his patent and ultimately sent multiple NOCI forms to eBay. However, eBay wouldn't take down any items, in keeping with its policy of responding to court orders of infringement and not mere allegations of infringement. In 2015, Blazer sued, saying that eBay had directly infringed his patent and also "induced" others to infringe. That lawsuit can't move forward, following an opinion (PDF) published this week by U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre. The judge found that eBay lacked any knowledge of actual infringement and rejected Blazer's argument that eBay was "willfully blind" to infringement of Blazer's patent. The opinion was first reported yesterday by The Recorder (registration required).
I quit using almost two decades ago.
Unlike copyrights, which have the DMCA to help them force companies like eBay to take down materials that allegedly violate copyright, there's no such protection for patents. Instead, patent owners need to directly take the issue up with the actual person violating their patent. ...which is how it should be. ...which is how copyrights should be too, but that's another topic.
Must have been a REAL original idea seeing as it was being sold by others before he got his patent.
So a commonly used "trap" he labels "for carpenter bees," and he then thinks that gives him rights to shut down all the prior art traps out there. The patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place. These are the types of patents that are just fucking stupid.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
His big mistake is neither incorporating nor filing suit in West Texas, where I'm sure his claims would have been upheld. On the one hand, this shows what a judge who isn't trying to lure patent cases will decide. On the other hand, what a sadly missed opportunity!
Carpenter bees are very good pollinators. Keep a raw plank out for them. Seal and paint the rest of the house. If we lose honeybees were going to need all the pollinators we can find! Proof: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcor...
Did we really need a proof that patent suits were for big companies with deep pockets?
Most of the time they do not even sue, but just threat to sue, and the would-be infringer just surrender, because of fears about lengthy battle in court, where only the wealthier will survive.
There is no dangerous decline in the global honeybee population – in fact, bee populations are rising in North America and globally.
"In 2015, there were 2.66 million commercial honey-producing bee colonies in the United States. That's down slightly from the 2.74 million colonies in 2014, which represented a two-decade high. The number of commercial bee colonies is still significantly higher than it was in 2006, when colony collapse disorder — the mass die-offs that began afflicting U.S. honeybee colonies — was first documented.
Those 2.66 million colonies represent a greater number than just about any year since the late 1990s."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/10/believe-it-or-not-the-bees-are-doing-just-fine/
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/07/28/beepocalypse-myth-handbook-dissecting-claims-of-pollinator-collapse/
My father-in-law has been making (and selling) those things for over a decade...
and the lawyers eat all the honey.
See how much "better" the Copyright Industry has taken care of itself? First the term of copyright protection is many, many times that of the duration of a patent. For some unknown reason (which may include that there is none) the becoming freely available of an invention to benefit society as a whole after 2 decades of artificial monopoly is "good" but the becoming freely available of a creation is not. But this again, if you link to a page where there is a link to an unauthorized download of a copyrighted work, you YOURSELF are infringing (at least in the EU). Crazy isn't it? Wonder how all that came about... but yeah, if you ever have the chance to talk to a politician that is involved in these things, ask him/her to explain why it's great a brand-new invention becomes freely available after 2 decades, but a brand-new book, article, song, recording, movie, etc. will not in your entire lifetime and most of that of your kids. Any "argument" they use on behalf of the creator, ask why that doesn't equally apply to an inventor.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.