PanIP May Be Standing On Shaky Ground

GoatEnigma writes "You may remember the name PanIP, the company trying to hold e-commerce hostage with their patents. Well, according to this update on the PanIP Defendants site, it might not be as easy as they thought. Apparently a little bit of successful legal opposition has slowed down their nefarious scheme. Tim claims to have found evidence to undermine their patents, although the article is very short on details as to what this evidence might be..."

if you can have a generic e-commerce patent

[SHEENmaster]

then why not a generic commerce patent? Should the person that first started selling water be able to patent that? Should I be able to patent overclocking graphing calculators as a business?

Whatever happened to the 20% different dealy, whereby eBay isn't affected because its code (the way it works) is 20%(100%?) different from the subject of the patent? This is why software patents are so moronic, any re-implimentation works differently, or falls under the original copyright.

SCO's gone, let's all DoS the patent office next!

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Meat Blaster]

Yes, most of us think the economy needs a good kick while its down. Particularly our hardest hit segment of it, which has a greater reliance on intellectual property than any other field.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Gherald]

> I just want the abolishment of all "intellectual property" laws.

Do you have any idea how much money is invested in intellectual property? Either you have been living under a rock since about age five, or you are completely delusional.

Excesses like the DMCA may be corrected with future laws, but there is zero chance of ALL intellectual property laws being abolished.

Re:Patents are wrong

[winkydink]

So tell me? What did Stallman do to pay the rent and eat before he became a MacArthur fellow?

If somebody wants to give me $50k/yr for the next 10 years, I'll be happy to expound upon how wonderful it would be to not have to earn a living

until year 11 that is...

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Chess_the_cat]

I'm sure most slashdotters want all "intellectual property" laws abolished.

I'm sure they don't. Seems to me that the people who want all intellectual property laws abolished are the ones who have no intellectual property of their own. Why should authors, programmers, musicians, architects, graphic designers, inventors have to give up their creations into the public domain without any compensation? I agree that sometimes these lawsuits go too far and I'd also like to see copyright terms shortened instead of extended but advocating "the abolishment of all intellectual property laws" is just silly, childish, and nonsensical. That wouldn't even work in a Communist country. What is the incentive for people to create if they can't expect compensation?

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one would rather have no IP laws than the current IP laws. And my career depends on IP. You can always just keep stuff secret. Computer systems would likely be far more secure in an IP-less world, because proprietary software companies would have driven the widespread use of encryption and authentication.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[fireboy1919]

Me and my friend are both posting this, so I'll give you both.

Me: What has intellectual property law ever done for us?

Friend: Well, there is the GPL. That's from intellectual property law.

Me: Well, obviously that. But BESIDES the GPL, what has it done?

Friend: Given artists a way to survive off of their art. I doubt we'd have as much if they had to work day jobs.

Me, Okay, well, besides GPL, and protection of artists, what has intellectual property ever done for us?

Friend: There's protection of useful inventions. Edison's lab pumped out tons of them that we still use today. That lab wouldn't have lasted if other people could have copied their ideas.

Me: Besides GPL, protection of artists, protection of useful inventions, what has IP law ever done?

Friend: Don't forget about the public access to patents that we use to make new innovations.

Me: So besides GPL, protection of artists, protection of useful inventions and public access to patents, what has IP law ever done for us?

Friend: ...I can't think of anything else.

Me: IP LAW GO HOME!
IP LAW GO HOME!
IP LAW GO HOME!
(And on, and on, a few hundred times. Hopefully I got the conjugation right)

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Forgotten]

Maybe that's because cleverness is highly overrated. You're not paid for it because it's not worth anything, and only the legal bubble created by centuries of lobbying makes anyone think otherwise.

It's been said over and over that good ideas are a dime a dozen (a fair wage, btw) - it's implementation that's hard. Without IP laws, companies would compete based on their ability to produce and serve. Doing that better naturally incorporates the development of new ideas. Frankly we're the sort of clever monkeys that can't *not* churn out ideas, so I have little fear that less IP law would stifle innovation. It might instead create a renewed interest in quality, which would be welcome.

Even the most breathtaking new idea isn't really new. Everything is based on the environment of ideas built from what came before. If even Isaac Newton (the egotistical snot) could admit that, surely the rest of us can take a step back from our hubris.

Re:Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems every new overused slashdot joke gets old faster than the last.

Re:Patents are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideas dont have rights. Ideas themselves are useless, they need to have some sort of implementation. Anyone can come up with an idea, its getting the idea to work that is the difficult part.

Because it is so difficult, and so much time needs to be spent in getting the idea to work, the person developing it needs to be able to make money off it once it finally does work.

If I spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to market only to have someone rip the idea and implementation off, then where is the incentive for me to try to create a new invention? Or for anyone to invest their time innovating?

However, software patents are incredibly over used. The PTO should have denied 90% of them because they don't represent true innovation.

Prior art?

[woodsnick]

I'm guessing that someone out there might know. Were there any BBS's in the late 80's early 90's that were conducting some sort of business through their systems that might invalidate some of these remote electronic commerce claims? I'll admit to not reading the patent claims, but I'd guess someone must have conducted some remote electronic business transactions before these guys came along. Anyone have any more info?

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[tmark]

You can always just keep stuff secret.

Right, until one of your employees sells your secret code to your competitors. In a world without IP, it'd probably be pretty hard to even call this a crime.

Excuse me while I hurl

[DaveAtFraud]

The concept of intellectual property was created so that people and companies who invest in the creation of new "things" could re-coup their development investment. This is true for writers, artists, inventors, R&D departments, etc. Some, such as trademark laws, were created to protect consumers from unscupulous people providing fraudulent imitations of recognized products (i.e., they are *VERY GOOD* for consumers).

Patents and copyrights were intended to provide an incentive for people to create new things. As an example, if I am an author, what is my incentive to continue to write if my works can be freely copied? Likewise, why should a pharmaceutical comapany work to discover, refine and test a new medecine if the moment it comes out anyone else can make their own copy of it without incurring the development costs?

Intellectual property laws are a necessity for modern society. Sadly, some people like SCO and PanIP have subverted those laws to try to gain from works they had nothing to do with. Luckily for the open source community, the ambulance chasers at SCO were stupid enough to go after somebody big instead of being bottom feeders like PanIP and just hitting little guys for licensing fees.

What the patents are for

[OneIsNotPrime]

The patents, No. 5,576,951 and No. 6,289,319, cover, respectively, an "automated sales and services system," and an "automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."

So next they'll be suing ATM's and cash registers.

Wonder if this covers a toaster.

Defense fund donations?

[m0rphm0nkey]

I noticed on their page that they...

a.)Had gotten a judgement for 19000 against PanIP.

b.)Wanted donations to cover their expenses.

So these some 15 or 20 companies didn't feel like they benifited sufficiently from their investment? Granted a judgement does not a payment make and I'd be interested in donating (in spite of my poverty) but...... I think they'd see a lot of nickels and dimes (mine included )if there was more detailed info on whats been done (the court action and created jurisprudence if any) and whats going to be done (are they going to pursue the judgement and if so how?) with the PanIP defense fund.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[homer_ca]

Patents are only supposed to be issued for inventions NOT OBVIOUS to a skilled practitioner in the arts. When this principle is as widely abused as it is today, patents become a disincentive for creating new intellectual property. The obvious building blocks of invention become a minefield of patents.

Someone patented Bartering?

[Bruha]

"No. 5,794,207, for Priceline.com's buyer-driven, name-your-price E-commerce system"

Now IANAL but how do you patent the bartering system. Are you saying that the consumer has to pay royalties for neogeoating a better price with a company?

Someone needs to reign in the USPTO very quickly before this all begins to get out of hand. What are we to do when your legal system is overwhelmed with lawsuits that real crimes such as theft and murder begin to take a back seat to big business lawsuits making the lawyers millions of dollars.

Or what if it becomes so lucrative (Probably has already happened) that lawyers wont represent the defendants and instead concentrate on convincing companies with patents that other companies are violating their IP and that sueing is something they should do.

This all falls back to SCO (Just an Example) instead of producing a workable product they've relied on litigation to sustain the company. It's beyond me why any worker at SCO (Other than our current economic situation) would stay with a company that could find itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. It's like the Enron situation has not driven it home to them yet.

But again I ask people to write their congressmen and women and all their other elected officials and point out the problems inherent with patenting many things the way it goes on.

Business is just that business. I can understand patenting a process to make a 5 dollar diamond processor and a special chemical forumlae that cures cancer it's in their interest to make money after investing millions in developing these products. But patenting things such as door to door salesmanship or basic E Commerce systems is just damaging to the E-Economy.

If anyone deserved any patents it's the designers of the coding systems such as Basic, C, C++, C#, PHP and myraid of other languages. Of which none were expressly written with 2 billion ways to write code that would say yes or no. If we continue this madness then someone might as well patent the 0 and the 1 while they're at it.

Re:Excuse me while I hurl

[Rasta Prefect]

The concept of intellectual property was created so that people and companies who invest in the creation of new "things" could re-coup their development investment. This is true for writers, artists, inventors, R&D departments, etc. Some, such as trademark laws, were created to protect consumers from unscupulous people providing fraudulent imitations of recognized products (i.e., they are *VERY GOOD* for consumers).

Close, but not quite. These laws were created so that people would create new things - and that after they'ed recouped cost + some profit, those things would flow into the public domain.

No patents can be good

[Sycraft-fu]

They are just over applied. They are good because they enable the inventor of a revolutonary idea to make money, even if he doens't have the means himself to exploit it.

Like say you invent a process for making a room temperature superconductor. This is an idea worth a lot to a lot of people. You deserve to make money off of it, given that you did something truly innovative to come up with it (it isn't like people haven't been trying). But suppose to mass produce these thigns it will take a $4 billion fabrication plant. You can't afford this, you need backing. Well, if oyu don't have a patent, what is to stop a company from simply ripping you off?

Or how about if something is really cheap and easy to do? Say you doa whole bunch of research and figure out how to make a revolutionary new RF system that can broadcast 100s of miles off of just milliwatts of power. Better yet it uses cheap, normal components. Again, you deserve compensation, I mean this is a truly unique and revolutionary idea. So you make a little startup company selling these things. Motorola is of course intrested and threatened. So they buy a couple and take them apart. They see how easy it is and start selling their own. Given that they have a mroe efficient and larger system than you, and better distribution chains, they'll drive you out of bussiness.

See inventors do need an incentive to invent. We thrive off of these novel inventions and if they are just going to be taken away, there is no incentinve (we are a capatilism remember). Even big companies need it to a degree, like drug companies. It is NOT easy to find new drugs. It takes year of research, years more of testing and billions of dollars. There needs to be a way to make those billions back, and make a profit, or they just won't do it. If they made a druge and suddenly everyone else could make it for cheap, they wouldn't do it because they'd never make back that huge research cost. Everyone else could sell it for little profit since they had no up front cost, they couldn't.

Now granted, many companies abuse the patent system, however that shows flaws with the implementation, not the idea behind it.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Anonymous Coward]

right!

So here I go, I'm doing a shitload of work building my ecommerce site, and these clowns come along.. all they have is an idea! And they sue me, all my hard work down the toilet.

I don't support abolishing all so-called intellectual property laws, but if someone came along and offered to severely limit copyright laws, and completely ban software and business method patents, I would vote for it in an instant.

I don't want my hard work undermined by someone who has nothing but an idea (and lawyers).

Funny, isn't it, that the biggest opposition to software patents is from the IT industry?

PS: You can take someone else's hard work and add your own hard work to it, and solve your own problem for less cost than starting from scratch. The first guy solved his problem, now you solved your problem, and nobody had to work more than necessary. That sounds like a free market to me!

Really not surprising that their claims are shaky

[hey!]

After all, they're shaking down the small fry who can't afford a lawsuit. If they had an iron clad claim they'd go after Amazon and other big fish; or at least mid sized companies instead of mom and pops. It's the lawyer equivalent of muggers preying on the elderly: not much money, but not much risk either.

Well then boot out "process" patents

[TheConfusedOne]

It used to be that you had to submit a working model in order to get a patent for something. Now you have companies that don't produce anything trying to "think up the next big idea" simply so they can patent it. Not develop it. Just patent it and then start suing^Wlicensing.

The patent system has been broken for a long time. Patents stagnated the development of US airplanes until the government stepped in to break the log jam.

Most of your examples were copyrights and not patents. This is important as you can copyright your implementation of a software idea. The problem is when you patent the very concept of the implementation so it doesn't matter if someone else comes to the same solution independently.

Corn farmers...

[sleepingsquirrel]

Intellectual property laws are a necessity for modern society. Take corn farmers for example. What incentive would farmers have to plant corn and sell it without IP laws? How would they recoup their initial R&D? Surely, there would be only one customer ever and that customer would buy just one solitary kernel. The buyer could merely throw the seed into the ground and with no work of his own (effortless copying), he would have access to a 100 copies of unlicensed derivative corn kernel IP in the matter of a few short months. In fact, the buyer now has complete access to the very same self-replicating nanotechnlogy that the farmer had. The buyer could then give away the corn IP to a friend or neighbor or (gasp!) even try to sell it for a profit. The ease of copying is the major problem with corn and encryption methods haven't been sucessful so far. Agriculture is one of the major industry in this country and we'd all hate to see it destroyed because of a handful of out-of-control corn pirates. So surely you can see there is no way farmers would even consider growing corn until we have strong government enforced monolopolies in corn.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the incentive for people to create if they can't expect compensation?

Ok, if you argument is that without intellectual property laws there would be no creation, explain the following:

1. The works of Mozart
2. The works of Bach
3. The works of Beethoven
4. The works of every other composer before the 19th century
5. The works of Shakespeare
6. The works of Aristotle
7. The works of Plato
8. The works of Cicero
9. The works of every other author before the 19th century
10. The theory of relativity
11. The theory of gravity
12. Quantum mechanics
13. The rest of physics
14. Calculus
15. Complex Numbers
16. Topology
17. The rest of mathematics
18. Linux
19. BSD
20. Mozilla
21. The rest of the software released under the GPL (look up the motivation for the GPL before putting foot in mouth)

Well...

Did anyone ever patent the mail-order catalog

[geekee]

Patenting the idea of selling stuff over the internet seems like the modern version of patenting the idea of a mail order catalog. I wonder if anyone ever patented this idea, and if so, was able to make money off of the patent. It seems like an absurd thing to be able to patent, but who knows..

Re:Excuse me while I hurl

[donnz]

Again the "drugs need patents" theory might be ok, but the practice is abused (actually I don't think the theory stands up, but that is a much longer, more convoluted debate!)

By creating false monopolies in certain markets we allow monopolistic practices and huge economic waste.

Let's say you are Monsanto, you have a patent on drug Z for 14 years. You have no competition and so you get to set the price. Now, your instinct will not be to recoup the research plus 12% profit over 14 years, it will be to set the proce as high as possible, recoup the research as fast as possible and make super-normal profits for 13 years. That is the logical behaviour of a monopolist.

Re:Patents are wrong

[Nucleon500]

There's nothing wrong with controlling your expression of an idea (copyright). Just not the idea itself.

Patents hurting the ecconomy

[Felinoid]

Patents were the idea of protecting a persons inventon so they could shop it around and sell it to a company for mass production.

Here is the problem. Software is already protected by copyrights the "inventions" of software are mearly an elegent solution to a problem and not the byproduct of research or hard work as much as the byproduct of a good nights sleep and waking up with a "Hay I got an idea"

Most inventions start with an idea but they end with labor and resorces. Software starts with an idea and ends with an idea only temporarly taking the form of 4 lines of code.

Then you have business method patents. The only thing more pathetic than a business protecting it's method of business as it's own intelectual property is a kid who identifys himself by a catch phrase and gets pissed when someone else uses the same combonation of words.

Back to classic inventions. The hard, fast and real devices. The lightbulb is an invention. It took research to figure out how to do it. The DC power plant is an invention. The AC power plant is annother invention. The AC power grid. Etc.

The reason for submitting a working device to the patent office is becouse the inventer had done real science. A practical aplication form of science but science never the less.

Todays true inventions are protected by trade secrets and non-discolsure agreements. Thies are far more powerful than patents.

Todays patents are much thess than great inventions but random trinketts. The patent system needs more than just an overhall. It needs a vacation.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Doomdark]

And you imply that abolishing "intellectual property" laws would be a significant kick? That suddenly no company would design new products, no singer would write (much less record) new songs, authors would never write another book?

With all the doomsday projectors and scaremongerers claiming Armageddong, if IP laws are loosened or even just gotten rid of, I just think of chicken little and sky falling story. I really, really, have hard time believing individuals and companies would somehow just stop innovating, inventing and creating. There would no doubt be increase in things that are now labelled as copyright (and patent) violations, but that does not automatically equate to huge harm. It would be bad for some; even cases where things would be unfair. But as likely there would be more progress, as biggest of corporations would have less weaponry against their smaller nimbler competitors.

I wonder how come Taiwan's economy has been doing fairly well, what with that country's apparent disregard of many international IP laws? And before answering that question, keep in mind that nowadays taiwan-based companies are major innovatros in all kinds of electronics, not just copycats some people still label them.

Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce.

[Anonymous Coward]

Circular logic. You don't actually know Thor used the wheel to compete - s/he may have immediately shared it. Given that stone age society would have had to be a lot more communitarian for the people to even survive, that's far more likely.

Competition as a social good is a very recent invention. If you're going to imagine how things may have been in the past, start by temporarily throwing out that assumption.

Re:Patents are wrong

[Znork]

"If I spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to market only to have someone rip the idea and implementation off, then where is the incentive for me to try to create a new invention?"

That's a nice theory.

It's not, however, how the patent system appears to be working anymore.

These days you spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to the market only to get sued for any profit you'll ever make from it by a company that's never had either any intention of making it work or spent any time trying to get it to work at all but that owns the patent for the idea you had and worked to implement.