Priceline & Expedia Patent Battle Heats Up

swilson writes "Not to be outdone by Amazon, Priceline has sued Microsoft and Expedia for patent infringement of their "name-your-price" business model. You can check out the story on The Standard." To get the facts straight, Priceline sued Expedia in October, and now Expedia/MSFT is filing a motion to dismiss the suit. MSFT is saying that Priceline stole the idea from someone else originally, which is an interesting argument in itself. I think we should make a comic book called "Patent Wars". It'd be like "Secret Wars", except duller.

Comments

Time for anti-patents? (Maybe a bit OT)

[flimflam]

This doesn't really have much to do with this particular case, but with patents in general: especially the fear that they can impinge on the freedom of free software.

Some people have suggested the idea of having an online database of ideas, as a way of providing ammunition to fight patent suits: if you can provide evidence that such-and-such an idea existed prior to such-and-such a date... you get the idea.

I like the idea, but the big problem is that a database in and of itself doesn't really provide much evidence. So I've been trying to think of a practical way of implementing what (for lack of a better term) I call an anti-patent. It would essentially be just like a patent, except that it would be used to prove prior art in patent infringment cases. That way, anything that is covered by an anti-patent you can use with impunity in free software with little fear of litigation (hopefully).

The way it would work is that you would make a submission (like an application) and some research would be done to verify the viability of the submission, then if it "passes", evidence would be collected, dated, notarized (or whatever is legally neccessary), and put into a searchable database.

So far the main problems I've run into revolve around financing the system. How can you make the system cheap enough to be practical, but still provide enough revenue to administer the program? I know that some people would probably volunteer for the project, but in addition to the administration costs, it would be necessary to build up a war chest to fund legal challenges/defenses. How much would people really pay for this (especially since they might already be sacrificing potential income from patenting their idea)? How else can this be funded?