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Patents The Almighty Buck

X10 Pays $4.3 million In Damages For Pop-Unders 288

Posted by Hemos from the oh-the-wonders-of-patent dept.
Black Perl writes "The Seattle Times is running an article entitled "California brothers win $4.3 million award against X10." Apparently, pop-unders are "proprietary" technology and a "business model" that X10 stole. I have mixed feelings about this. I love to see X10 get its due for the pop-unders, but proprietary technology it is not." Haha. Patents are funny.
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X10 Pays $4.3 million In Damages For Pop-Unders More

X10 Pays $4.3 million In Damages For Pop-Unders

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  • Ummm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bgog ( 564818 ) * on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:34PM (#7282343) Journal
    So if I as a feature to a browser that lets you automatically play a sound file, then someone can patent using that feature to emit an advert? Sounds like the patent should belong to the browsers who added the feature that lets you do a pop up.

    • Re:Ummm (Score:5, Informative)

      by letxa2000 ( 215841 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:37PM (#7282370)
      Pop-Under, you mean.

      I tend to agree with you. But the browser doesn't specifically have a "pop under" feature. It's just a matter of running some JavaScript to send it to the back. Patenting that is rediculous, but no more rediculous than patenting anything else any given software does.

      Which does lead us to the conclusion, of course, that patenting software is silly.

      • Re:Ummm (Score:5, Informative)

        by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@ p h roggy.com> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:45PM (#7282422) Homepage
        But the browser doesn't specifically have a "pop under" feature. It's just a matter of running some JavaScript to send it to the back.

        Precisely. The browser lets you run JavaScript code when a page loads. It lets you open a new window. It lets you move a window behind other windows. Using these features together to create pop-under advertisements isn't entirely obvious - although once you've seen the idea, reproducing it is completely blatently obvious (which is exactly the sort of thing patents are for - protecting the person who originally came up with the idea, because once the idea is out there, anyone can reproduce it).

        But yeah, this is really pretty trivial.
        • What rubbish, of course its obvious.

          What isn't obvious (like Amazon one-stupid-click shopping) is whether or not it would be a good idea.

          Deciding that it is a good idea is NOT patentable.

          I think most people agree pop-unders are a BAD idea which probably explains why most people HAVEN'T used them.

        • No this is not what it's for (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sterno ( 16320 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:19PM (#7282732) Homepage
          This is not what patents are for. Patents, much like copyrights were created to provide a cost justification for innovating. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?

          Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented. If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.

          Patents were created as a way to encourage innovation and that is precisely the opposite of what it is accomplishing in situations like this. Do you think, for one moment, that the pop under ad would never have been invented if it wasn't for patent protection?

          Personally I'd be content to never see another pop-up or pop-under ad ever again, but this is just an abuse of the system.

          • If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?

            Simple: for the publicity, reputation, marketing and/or production advantages of being first to market. Of course, the advantages of being first to market would be worth a lot more in the absence of IP law. Perhaps the "problem" (lack of incentive to innovate) wasn't really a problem in the first place?

            • That doesn't quite cut it. If you're first to market, and someone else can offer the same service for 25% cheaper in two months, in a capitalistic society people will buy from the latter.

              Face it, patents are valid on some things. But they should be limited to things that really DO take a lot of research to invent. And yeah, that even could potentially include software stuff. Much as it sucked, RSA was probably a valid patent. Thank goodness it's expired though. :)
          • It's true that patents should be used for things that require a good deal of work - but how about those things that require a good deal of lucky innovation or genius? and how would you measure that?

            The zipper probably did not require a lot of work to be invented - at least I don't envision a hundred different proto-zippers - but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be allowed to be patented.

            disclaimer: zipper != pop-unders.

            • I guess the question that needs to be answered in my mind is this:

              If it weren't for patents would the zipper have never been invented?

              I tend to think that it would have been invented, or something similar to it, given the need for such a device, regardless of its patentability.

        • I feel the need to disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pr0ntab ( 632466 ) <pr0ntab AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:19PM (#7282743) Journal
          The process of opening a window in javascript gives you two distinct ways to make that window behind everything else, a (large) negative z-index, or by sending it to the back directly.

          These event handlers and interpretations of parameters were programmed in specifically, they are not an artifact of some grander scheme or natural phenomena. Clearly, the designers had the idea of a window opening up behind it in mind at the time the language specification was designed.

          I have a hard time believing you can patent the idea of putting an ad onto an existing media and calling that a business process.

          Could I patent selling and printing ads in the background pattern of dixie cups and disposable paper plates?

          That's what I see in this situation. Maybe you CAN do that, in which case (throws hands up).
        • If you take this logic to its end, then nobody should be able to patent anything run on a computer; they're just using the programmable digital calculation machine to do things. No computer patents are valid!

          At the very least, if you're saying that anything written in Javascript wouldn't be patentable because it's the Javascript that enabled it, then the same could be true of any language.

          If you're just talking about embedding language in an application (like a web browser) then no technology developed o
        • Then shouldn't the coders/organization behind JavaScript (Netscape) get the credit? This feature/ability was specifically coded into the language.

          If I build a widget that does A, B, & C, in any order you want, and someone uses it to do B, and then A, how do they get the credit for something I built?
    • window.opener.focus()

      Holy #$%! Let's get to it!

  • even stranger... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gmkeegan ( 160779 ) <(gmkeegan) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:34PM (#7282344)
    is that when I went to read the article, I got a classmates.com pop-under. Are they being sued, too?

    When the going gets tough, use Johnson's Going Tenderizer
    • Um, I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but Opera has a feature to "Open requested pop-ups only", and I'm pretty sure the latest Mozilla has something similar...

      ...so I can say with confidence: Pop-unders? What are those?
      • I concur, and use that setting myself. When forced to use IE on a lab computer, I'm generally caught off guard.

        And on another note, feel free to sound like a broken record whenever you please. The more we encourage people to switch over to browsers like Mozilla or Opera, the better off everyone is. I got my sister to switch to Opera, and she's the type of person who opens every e-mail attachment, uses Kazaa, and doesn't know what Ad-Aware is.
      • I can't use Opera or Mozilla at work, but I can install the Google Toolbar, which also blocks pop-ups. What's great is with one click, I can allow pop-ups on a given site (like, say, my WebMail, so it still pops-up the notification that I have new spam to delete).
    • Nooooo, Classmates probably pays their bills. X10 wasn't so they were sued.

  • Oh the Irony (Score:3, Funny)

    by tbase ( 666607 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:35PM (#7282353)
    I RTFA, closed the window and found what? A Pop-Under ad!

    • Re:Oh the Irony (Score:3, Informative)

      by jfengel ( 409917 )
      Dude, you have GOT to get a real browser. I'd completely forgotten about the existence X-10 and pop-unders until I saw this Slashdot article.

      Firebird, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, ANYTHING is better than IE or years-old versions of Netscape. Pop-unders are a bug, not a feature.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Perfection... except that most proxies add extra latency which Proxomitron certainly does. And except that it uses regular expressions working on flat text, instead of working on the parse tree directly as something like DOM within a browser can do, so it will make mistakes and there are some things it can't do.

          Mozilla is a lot better solution. 1/3rd of Mozilla is written in Javascript (so it's extremely flexible), and supports DOM manipulations and such, and the javascript can happen while the documen

          • Re:Oh the Irony (Score:3, Insightful)

            by anotherone ( 132088 )
            You complain about the sub-millisecond increase in latency with proxomitron, but not about writing 1/3 of a desktop program in JAVASCRIPT? go figure.
            • Proxomitron definitely has a noticeable increase in latency, it's not sub-millisecond.

              I'm not sure if Mozilla has compiling/caching/whatever strategies to speed it up, but it's considered to be near the speed of MSIE which is mostly C. Most of the javascript is just controlling the C code, there isn't much rapid looping in javascript or whatnot.

      • Oh I know- I don't have that problem at home. But at work, I need to know what the average user is experiencing, and unfortunatley that means IE with no POP blockers. I do, however, keep it pretty locked-down with things like SpyBot S&D to keep my settings from being changed and such.

        Besides, getting a pop-under on an article about the king of pop-unders is so amusing it's almost worth using a crap browser :-)
        • I know a guy who used to have the job of emptying the lavatories from commercial airplanes, and he tells me that certain...accidents get you the rest of the day off work.

          But at least he wasn't forced to use IE. My sympathies.

      • Re:Oh the Irony (Score:2, Informative)

        by jon3k ( 691256 )
        All you really need is the google toolbar ... at least those of you running windows.

        Its free, and actually performs some pretty neat functions.
    • I RTFA

      you're new here, aren't you?
    • Well, I started reading all the /. comments, and I found...a pop-up from a survey/marketing firm which appears every so often as I go through /. Now, I'm guessing that most /.ers have pop-ups disabled, but I'm at work with a tightly controlled desktop environment that includes IE, so have no such luxuries.

      By the way...if you mod this as funny, you've got it wrong. This isn't a joke. Try interesting or something. I can't believe I've not seen this mentioned already.

  • I would like to have seen... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nijika ( 525558 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:35PM (#7282359) Homepage Journal
    X10(DOT COM) get dinged by customers not buying their cams, rather than this odd legal slight.

    PS, just for those of you who aren't familiar; X10.com is not really related in any way to the x10 protocol or x10 devices, don't let x10.com sour you to this awesome technology. x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera.

    • Say you're playing along with a normal device, and it's at x10, and where do you go from there? Nowhere. But these go to X11!

    • x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera.

      and there's a problem with that???

    • you are way off.

      their anaconda cameras are pretty good for the money. you can't touch a weatherproof outdoor color or B&W camera for 3 times the price fo their camera.

      Granted all they are doing is remarking and selling someone else's product. but I have bought at least 20 of their "anaconda" cameras for customers as they are super small, weatherproof as long as they dont get frozen inside an icecicle or submerged.

      until you can find me a source of dirt-cheap outdoor cameras I'll continue to buy them
    • Sadly, you are wrong; I, too, have X10 home control technology purchased from X10.com. They send me spam emails something like every day, but my Apple junk mail filter deep-sixes them.

      The technology actually is pretty neat, but it's sadly built down to a price. I'd like to see higher quality alternatives which would dim lights more smoothly.

      Fry's sells the X10 security camera line. Their advertising is horribly deceptive, since it implies that the cameras take high-quality pictures. This, of course, i
    • AFAIK, X10 (whose site IS x10.com) INVENTED the fscking X10 spec! I don't think the cams are X10 compliant, but they do sell the x10 gear. Here's their page for the home automation equipment: http://www.x10.com/automation/homeautomation.htm (be warned, it's just as spammy as everything else)
    • X10.com is not really related in any way to the x10 protocol or x10 devices

      Well, other than they're the X10 that INVENTED the X10 protocol and MAKES the X10 devices.

      x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera

      I'm thinking about suing them; I bought a camera and I haven't cap'd a single bikini chick smiling into it yet! Their ad practically guarantees hot candid action!

  • Blech (Score:5, Informative)

    by bperkins ( 12056 ) * on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:35PM (#7282361) Homepage Journal
    This story has nothing to do with patents,(as far as I can tell anyway). The word patent isn't even mentioned in the story, and proprietary != patented.

    It would appear that this is about X10 hiring these people to do pop unders, and then not paying them. Unfortunately it's impossible to say what the real
    story is from this very short article.

    • Re:Blech (Score:4, Informative)

      by mavenguy ( 126559 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:52PM (#7282483)
      Agreed. A further clue is the fact that this was decided in a state court. Had it been a patent infringement case it would have come out of a Federal District court ( 35 USC 281 )

    • Re:Blech (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Overly Critical Guy ( 663429 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:02PM (#7282583)
      Well, Slashdot needed Yet Another Patent Story. It doesn't matter if the editor never even dreamed of actually reading the link, and instead inserted such witty banter as "Haha. Patents are funny."

      Slashdot is corporate-owned and is all about page hits these days, I'm afraid.

  • Patents? (Score:5, Informative)

    by kevin42 ( 161303 ) * on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:35PM (#7282362)
    What does this have to do with patents? I don't think patents were involved here at all. X10 was a customer of the company who sued them.

    From what I've read in other articles about this suit, they were sued because they refused to pay the commission for all those pop-under ads. Imagine if you started a company and designed a banner ad for a company. Your contract said you get a certain amount for each time it is used. Then after the company owes you half a million dollars, they decide not to pay. That is what this is about, not patents. Read here for more information [newsobserver.com]

    *sigh* ... Typical...

  • Now How Are They Going To Pay For All Of Those... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Swimsuit models? You know, the ones sitting around my pool that I have to monitor 24/7?

  • Gotta love Firebird (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pyite ( 140350 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:43PM (#7282400)
    I have all but forgotten about Pop Under/Over/In the Middle/Whatever ads since using Mozilla Firebird. The builtin pop-up blocker is truly lovely.
    • Amen to that. The only reminder of pop ups is that little "boom" in the moz status bar. Other than that, I have not seen pop ups for quite some time. However, all my buddies here at work use IE. Hehehe. Some of them have spyware installed that pops up windows for no reason at all. Even when they aren't there. Hehehe.
      Back on topic, I think 10,000,000 is a bit much. Have they even sold that much in those cameras? They have probably spent more in hiring those models.
    • Firebird + Proxomitron is even lovlier. :D I rarely see ads at all now.
    • Firebird? What does a database have to do with pop-up adverts?

    • Re:Gotta love Firebird (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rzei ( 622725 )
      I think that it should be "Gotta love <anything else than internet explorer>". Konqueror has a blocker, Mozilla and it's relatives have it too, Opera AFAIR has it.. Plus all the ones I don't know about have it too.

      It seems again that everyone else than Microsoft care about their users.

      -rzei

  • Can someone tell me... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NewWaveNet ( 584716 ) <me@austinheap.com> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:44PM (#7282411) Homepage Journal
    ...if there are any movements underway to end this bullshit? There are always loads of stories on slashdot about patents gone awry, but I never hear of any groups working to destroy the current setup.

    Suggestions?

  • proprietary? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erikdotla ( 609033 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:45PM (#7282417)
    I really can't understand this. Anyone who toyed with javascript and the DOMs years ago noticed that you could effectively do pop-unders with two lines of code:

    window.open('ad.htm','myAdWindowTitle');
    window .focus();

    Or something like that. Is "pop-under technology" really more complicated than that?

    • Re:proprietary? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:58PM (#7282542) Journal
      No, it's not much more complicated. It was, however AdvertizingBanners.com's business model when X10 hired them. X10 subsequently copied the code and stopped paying AdvertizingBanners.com. If X10.com had implemented pop-unders without a contract with AdvertizingBanners.com, or let the contract expire first, there probably wouldn't have been a lawsuit. (IANAL)

  • Stop the knee-jerking towards..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:45PM (#7282420) Homepage Journal
    ....the brothers...X10 was one of their first clients and they tried to screw them out of money. Reading more than one source for news sometimes helps see the story a little better..

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/20/tech/mai n578996.shtml [cbsnews.com]

    *snip* One of their first big clients was X10, whose security-camera ads soon began appearing all over the Internet.

    "When we found out they weren't paying that bill, we were beyond distraught," recalled Chris Vanderhook. *snip*

  • Actually... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FireBird615 ( 524539 ) <nlbowers@bellso u t h.net> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:45PM (#7282421) Homepage
    Actually, according to the CNN article, it wasn't a patent issue... The brothers in question were running an advertising company from their home, with whom X-10 contracted to do their advertising, and then X-10 refused to pay their bill. So, no patent issue involved, only a customer's failure to pay their bill for a service.
  • If you own and operate a website that has banner advertisements, and the ad system uses pop unders. Who is liable? The Website provider, or the advertisement provider?

  • The most annoying thing about pop-unders . . . (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scarolan ( 644274 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:47PM (#7282440) Homepage
    is that they take the focus off your current browser window. You'll be trying to type something into a form and halfway through what you're typing you lose focus and get cut off.

    Thank god for netscape/mozilla and now the Google Toolbar. I haven't seen a popup or popunder in months.

  • Hmm.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by DrMorris ( 156226 )
    I just upgraded to X11 and all thos pop-unders are finally gone!
  • I made pop-unders all the time when application programming. We called it a bug. Is that prior art?

  • WTF (Score:2, Insightful)

    by caffeineHacker ( 689198 )
    2 Lines of JavaScript isn't a business model. Although I hate X10 I hope they get this idiocy appealed. If the brothers do win, I'm patenting displaying message boxes to notify users of stuff, and then suing everyone for 3 billion each. Except MS, whom I'd sue for 1 trillion dollars, since their software displays error message boxes every few seconds.

    • WTF do you mean WTF? (Score:3, Informative)

      by curtisk ( 191737 )
      X10 is all hot and bothered for Advertisement Banners.com's ad delivery product, goes into contract with Advertisement Banners.com...uses their product to death and then refuses to pay near $500,000 in bills.

      I don't see how the ruling in the brothers favor is idiocy. The only idiocy is in X10's IT staff who couldn't hack up their own.

  • The more bad patent laws negatively affect business, the more likely patent law reform is to happen. Microsoft is already out $500 million because they wanted to use plugins, and now these guys are paying $4.3 million for this "innovation". Eventually, so many businesses are going to be screwed out of so many dollars, they will start to seek reform, and we'll all be better off.

    OK. I'm being just a tad optimistic, aren't I?

  • I replied to that X10 ad... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:54PM (#7282508)
    ...and actually got a good deal. Lot's of stuff, neat, for a fair price.

    It is my secret shame - responding to a pop under (it was a popup at the time I seem to remember).

  • mind-bending (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:58PM (#7282543)

    Patents bad...popunders bad...patent stops pop..unders...ehhhhhhhhH!

    [Head-explodes]

    • I just have my browser ignore the "popunder bit" transmitted with the ad.

      Heck, I went the step further and denied unrequested windows. Getting half a million dollors taken from you under threat of retaliation of the US government urban military forces (the people with guns who write parking tickets for a living) is much harder to simply ignore.

  • Definitely Bad (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by jetkust ( 596906 )
    All this will do is send a message that worthless patents are both acceptable and profitable.

  • Umm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheSpoom ( 715771 ) <{ten.00mrebu} {ta} {todhsals}> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:12PM (#7282672) Homepage Journal
    As mentioned above, this story isn't about patents. According to the story, X10 was previously paying commissions to the brothers, and stopped.

    Exactly why isn't it reasonable for them to sue for the money that their contract says they should receive? And where in the article does it mention patents at all?

    If there are patents involved here somewhere, then fine, but if there aren't, I wonder whether the Slashdot editors actually took the time to do some research on this matter before making some off the cuff remark about patents simply because it makes more people want to reply angrily.

    It doesn't help much if we start calling EVERYTHING a patent issue.

  • Note: This WAS a patent issue! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:17PM (#7282710) Journal
    There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.

    a) x10 reneged on their contract, and owed $564,000. That's pretty clear, and should be remedied.

    b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.
    • b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.

      And how is this a patent issue?

      Tell you what: why don't you go ahead reference the patent in question at the USPTO site...oh, you can't you say? Is it perhaps because there is no patent in question?

      Granted, there is a valid debate on the merits of this so-called "proprietary" technology, but this has nothing to do with patents.
    • There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.


      Patents? Patents? They got no stinkin' patents...they don't have to show you no stinkin' patents!


      Nobody had patents on anything. Those "many people" are exactly right. A business model does not a patent make.


      -h-

  • this was not a patent issue. This was a contract dispute. Period.

    X10 paid them to do some work. They did the work - regardless of how easy the work was, they had a contract to do it...

    The problem was, X-10 signed a contract before they researched what they were buying. When they found out "doh, this is easy" they reniged on the contract and started doing it themselves.

    This is no different than signing a contract for some MSCE loser to admin your windows servers for a year to find out that if you inst
  • A father that likes to be on the bottom?
    An Australian soft drink consortium?
    Oh. I love Mozilla..... of course keeping coding ahead of the junk adds on the internet, requires all of us. What we need to do is dump MS VB and C# inet script coding and widgets once and for all. Afterall they are responsible for atleast 90% of the security and junk mail problems.
  • You guys owe me a LOT of cash.
  • From the brief article, it sounds like this lawsuit was about business practices and unfair competition, not patents. Does anybody have more information?

  • Me to Slashdot: Join Reality (Score:3, Interesting)

    by the_mad_poster ( 640772 ) <shattoc@adelphia.com> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @02:29PM (#7282847) Homepage Journal

    Funny how the rotation of the spin on a story reverses depending on where it's posted...

    I read about this about a week ago on Yahoo.com's WML news site on my cell phone. It was an AP story, I believe, and they presented it basically as these 3 brothers battling out the big evil X10 corp that didn't pay its bills and tried to take advantage of these poor, young kids. Yay for the brothers!

    You hit Slashdot and just because it involves "patents" (a 4 letter word as far as many here are concerned, no matter what the context) the spin is that it's this big evil patent abuse and oooohhh run and hide and put your tail between your legs and oh-no-tinfoil-hat-syndrome all over. Oh no! The brothers are evil! Boo!

    Give it a rest, already... technology that's only "obvious" after you've already seen it once isn't really "obvious". I hate stupid patents too, but if you look at the facts of the case instead of just saying "oh no - patents - automatic sheep mode on!" you'll realize it was a fair and square fight and a good decision by the court. Get a grip, already.


  • Everytime patents come up here, I wonder why the EFF or similar doesn't start patenting things. It would be nice if a public service organization could patent something like "selling stuff" and then license the technology to anyone who agrees to let others use derivative works stemming from that tech. You know, like GPL but for patent licenses.
  • ...and it's auto-popup blocking is destroying the brothers' business model. Destroying it! I haven't seen a pop-under ad in almost a year!

    I feel for their case, and dislike X10's business ethics, but let's face it: we all hate internet advertising and anyone who profits from it. The pot's calling the kettle black as far as I'm concerned.
  • the headline says "X10 pays..."

    the story says "brothers were awarded damages of.."

    a subtle yet important semantic difference... nobody's cashing any checks just yet.

  • and now x10 filed bankruptcy! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @06:24PM (#7285215) Homepage Journal
    http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html?tag=n efd_top

    The company that only last year billed itself as the world's largest online advertiser has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

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