EFF To Fight Dubious Patents

theodp writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a campaign on Monday to overturn patents that it says are having a chilling effect on public and consumer interests. The ten patents initially cited as problematic by the EFF Patent Busting Project are: one-click online shopping, online shopping carts, hyperlinking, video streaming, internationalizing domain names, pop-up windows, targeted banner ads, paying with a credit card online, framed browsing, and affiliate linking. Maybe this will prompt former EFF Board Member Tim O'Reilly to share that killer piece of 1-click prior art that's sitting on his bookshelf!"

one is missing

[nickname_unique]

i'm missing the patent on a "progress bar" which is pending in europe.

Belew

[neurosis101]

Belew is a professor of CS/Cog Sci at the University of California, San Diego. He has a lot of research and expertise in interface and its design. You can look up his faculty profile at UCSD's CS dept page [ucsd.edu][cs.ucsd.edu].

Just a little background so you know who's talking to who and why he knows what's going on =)

Re:Too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much everything that can be invented has been either invented or patented already

I was going to post that the commissioner of the USA Patent Office said that too. In 1899.

However, a quick Googling later, I have found that this quote is a myth [orbit.com].

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned..

[the_rajah]

http://www.pubpat.org/ Public Patent Foundation and their work against the same sort of thing.

Re:Scary

[redhog]

You might be partly right, but at least, you are not correct about all of his books:

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook

Re:Patents

[ckathens]

I know this is merely flamebait, but its so idiotic that i had to respond. As a law student interested in IP, I normally do not have the best impression of patents -- but mainly because of their recent use in software and method patenting. But there ARE good patents. Perhaps the best examples are pharmaceuticals. The drug companies put millions of dollars into R&D EVERY DAY to develop drugs that really help people. Without the protection of a patent system which guarantees they can profit from it either by direct sales or by licensing, NO drug company is going to make these products.

On the other hand many types of patents and individual patent applications are clearly not even worth the paper they are printed on and the USPTO has some major issues. But don't blast the entire system for the faults of only a niche part of the overall system.

Re:Scary

[wtansill]

Perhaps you were not aware of the fact that O'Reilly no longer requires perpetual copyright. Rather, after a set period of time, copyright reverts to the author(s) for their benefit? Maybe he's not a Saint (tm), but he's a damn sight better than most out there, and seems to genuinely care about sharing, the commons, and the public domain.

Here's another one which is a joke

[dsk]

Patent 6678697 [uspto.gov], storing data in the lower bits of a pointer. It was filed in 2002, BDDs (Binary Decision Diagrams) having been doing this since the 1970s.

About EFF-ing time

[FightThePatent]

So glad to read that EFF is now looking into patent abuse cases.... including one (Acacia) of three that I am tracking at my website [fightthepatent.com]

There does need to be an (grassroots) effort to get that dusty prior art sitting on the shelf and presented to the USPTO for so many technology related patents that shouldn't have been granted. -brandon http://www.FightThePatent.com