PanIP Drops E-commerce Patent Lawsuits

Darlok writes "Back in October 2002, PanIP sued 50 small businesses, claiming patents over basic E-commerce functions. One of the defendents set up a group defense fund, and in the last week, contributors to that fund have been notified by e-mail and this notice on the fund's homepage that PanIP has agreed to drop its lawsuits without any licenses being issued. The U.S. Patent Office is currently reviewing the patents in question. Hopefully this will set some sort of precedent ..."

Re:Precedents

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the next ridiculous patent lawsuit will be for?

Method for remotely overloading and causing service interruption of Internet servers through the use of multiple HTTP requests ("Slashdotting")

Re: Precedents

[inphinity]

What's next? I'll tell you what's next!

A domain-squatter lawsuit over http://www.youmaybenext.com just because it happens to be some pro-wrestlers's death mantra.

Re:Probably not...

[Gizzmonic]

It's so neglicent, it could end up landing the company in a negligee!

I wonder if your comment is what Darl McBride says 6,000 times every night before he does to sleep. And not just because it's boring, but because it formally codifies the self-serving "fuck everything but 5 minutes from now" attitude that so permeates the American business world of today.

Stunning not only in its retreat from personal responsibility from reprehensible acts (aka Enron) but in its complete indifference to the big picture with regards to business! I'm just glad Hal Jordan isn't alive to see this type of attitude portrayed as acceptable for anyone, let alone captains of industry.

Re:Precedents

[Deraj DeZine]

That uses far too much regular English and not enough of the word "said." My take:

Method for organizing users ("slashdotters") in the creation of a cascade of TCP/IP ("Telecommunications/Internet Protocol") traffic in the form of page requests ("hits") to an unequipped personal web server in order to remotely overload said server ports or network throughput ("bandwidth") limitations causing service interruption ("slashdotting") in distribution of said pages resulting in the return of multiple HTTP ("hyper text transfer protocol") errors including, but not limited to HTTP errors 404 and 501 as identified in RFC 12345 Section 6: "HTTP Error Codes," produced and disseminated from said server to said page requests from said cascade using said technology.

Re:Precedents

[Liselle]

A PhD in /. law? How was /. law school? :)

How was it? I'd rather not talk too much about it. Suffice it to say that my peers had hygiene issues, there was always a rush to be the first one in class, professors constantly duplicated their own lectures, and my diploma was created with outdated HTML and an eye-gouging color scheme. I won't even get into the thing with the "crackhead" TA's that graded papers.

Oh, and we had a knock-down drag-out fight every other day about the difference between copyrights, trademarks, and patents. That was pretty annoying. Otherwise though... good times, good times.

Perhaps..

[Cyberglich]

Perhaps the head of PanIP found a dead fish in his bed :)