Amazon Slaps Orbitz and Avis With Patent Lawsuit

theodp writes "Amazon has sued Cendant for allegedly infringing four patents covering electronic commerce at its Orbitz, Avis and other Web sites. Cendant, the biggest U.S. provider of travel and real-estate services, knew 'or should have known' it infringed when using the tools to secure credit-card transactions, handle customer referrals and manage data, according to the lawsuit filed June 22 in federal court in Seattle. Amazon itself was sued by Cendant last year for patent infringement over its recommendation technology. So much for five years of Amazon patent reform."

Defensive lawsuit

[robla]

My first thought was that this seems like a classic case of defensive patent action, and is fair game in my book. Cendant was the company that fired first when they hauled Amazon into court, so it's only fair that Amazon return the favor.

However, it appears that Cendent withdrew its lawsuit in February [nwsource.com], so I'm not sure what to make of it. I suppose that if someone draws a gun on you, and then says, "heh heh...just kidding", you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to stop reaching for your own gun. So I can't say that I can muster a lot of pity for Cendant.

Cendant essentially forced Amazon to look in their patent portfolio to find what they could nail Cendant to the wall with. After having done all of the expensive homework, it seems that Amazon needed to at least recoup those costs.

Rob

Amazon smacking back

[technos]

That's all. Cendant thought they should try and beat on Amazon. Now Amazon is beating back. Patents are leverage in business these days, novel or not. Cendant will buy a cross license, nuke the earlier suit, and that'll be the end of it.

Playing by non-existant rules

[saterdaies]

While I think the state of our patent system is deplorable, companies can't play by rules that don't exist. We need to sit on our congressmen to get them to pass legislation that will allow businesses to be moral while staying afloat. While Google's "Don't Be Evil" has worked well for them, the same thinking has sent many companies to their graves and it's time for a change in our laws.

Capitalism is amoral which is why our laws can't be.

winners

[Gherald]

I think it is clear there is only one group of winners here, and that is the lawyers.

Re:Thats it!

[ivan256]

They're not IP brokers. They use all the technology in their patents to do business. They don't pimp IP for a living.

Next we know,

[ionicplasma]

Sooner or later there will be a company doing nothing but creating patents and suing other companies that infringe on them.

Actually, I'm sure I've already heard of a company doing that. *cough*SCO*cough*.

Re:winners

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not saying I'm in favor of this sort of patent adventuring, but saying knee-jerk insightful things like "Only the lawyers benefit from legal action" is rather specious IMO."

In stupid patent-everything-and-sue-everyone corporate world, only the lawyers benefit in the long run. As long as you can patent the obvious, everyone will have patents, and so everyone and anyone who can affort lawyers will be able to sue others for stupid reasons. In the long run, this will hurt businesses, consumers, technology, everything but the lawyers.

Re:winners

[Gherald]

> Amazon has sued Cendant .... Amazon itself was sued by Cendant

Yeah, the "competitive advantage" of not allowing their competitors to be competitive! This hurts consumers and hurts all companies in the long run. Only the hired mercenaries truly benefit.

Huh?

[Szaman2]

Let me get this straight? Amazon sues people because they "used tools to provide secure credit card transactions"??? You mean like SSL? They SUED SOMEONE FOR USING FRIKEN SSL?

Ok, we don't know that. I'm sure there has to be something more than using SSL there, but still. If a company can patent something as trivial as "secure credit card transactions" and successfully win a patent infringement case, it will mean that all online stores will be liable. It's a scary thought...

Let the patent wars begin

[UlfGabe]

We are reaching critical mass in the legalistic system, retalitory lawsuits fired off from company to company will destabilize the global economy.

It becomes more efficient to patent obvious buisness methods and steps to solving a problem, and then sue people using those methods to allow them to compete with you, rather than try and innovate.

Innovation costs money, Patent arsenals allow for wasteful practices to continue unabated for the lifetime of the patent.

The patent wars are just starting right now.

Which side are you on?

Re:Let the patent wars begin

[Szaman2]

This is so true. We will be seeing more and more of this.

At some point, it will become impossible for a small or middle sized company to break into any market. It will be impossible to innovate in any marked, as all the corporate gigants will be locking out eachother with their patents.

And hopefully at some point someone will figure out what was going wrong and fix the patent system. But not before alot of finger pointing, yelling screaming and generally anti-consumer actions. Because of our patent law, and our messed up views on IP US will loose it's spot among the technology leaders.

Re:Playing by non-existant rules

[spikeless]

I agree whole heartedly.

Morals are self imposed laws drawn from culture, religion, upbringing and life experience. They vary so widely across socio groups and even generations, it would be damn near impossible to write moral law which would be acceptable to all, or even the majority. For example several christian churches define homosexuality as an immoral act. Many others would see the criminalization or persecution of homosexuals as immoral. No law can enforce both moral points of view and law should never attempt it.

The core purpose of law should be (and is supposed to be) to protect the rights and way of life of the people, not to define what is and isn't moral. The protection of every individuals right to define and live by their own morals is an essential part of this.

The beauty of living in a free country is I can have completely opposing moral views to my neighbour but still accept them as my countryman and know (hopefully) they accept me. This open diversity of opinion is what helps us grow and develop as human beings.

Law cannot both protect your right to choose and make your choices for you.

Pointed Patents

[Doc Ruby]

Patent registrants like Amazon's Bezos say things like "we only register these patents to protect our own right to do things this way, not to prevent others from doing so". Then they turn around and, as is their right under the patent, prevent others from doing things that way. There ought to be a "defensive only" form of patent, or a standard, binding statement that a company can assert, which states they will waive the right to become plaintiffs in a lawsuit (or threaten to do so) claiming rights under the patent. Then, when they say they're benign, we will have a reason to believe them. They won't be able to say "we're protecting our ability to work this way by stopping the competition from working this way, and taking our business", which is just weasel words to use their patents like a weapon, not just a shield.

Not enough information

[gunner800]

We don't know which patent is at issue, or what Cendant did that appears to infringe. As of right this second, not even Google News [google.com] can find anything meaningful. Maybe it's an abuse of the system, maybe it's a legitimate case of ripping off an invention.

(Not, it's just simply "using the tools to" blah blah blah, it's got to be some particular tool or particular way of using them to even touch upon patent law)

So, basically, anything anybody says in this thread is speculation and wild-assed guessery. Except that statement and this one justifying it.

What's This Boycott Amazon Stuff?

[putko]

I'm seeing various posts saying, "boycott Amazon" -- they are evil IP mofos. That is pretty silly! Micro$oft and Apple are doing similarly (or more) reprehensible things, and boycotts of them are not popular enough to make any difference in their behavior.

Amazon is really huge these days -- $600 billion or so a year in sales. That revenue is coming from non-ideologically motivated schmucks, not geeks who think and care about IP issues. A geek boycott will be about as successful as Jesse Jackson's boycott of Nike (he couldn't get blacks to do it).

Try it again, this time with feeling.

This is great news!

[zoid.com]

Not for the company's being sued but it's great for the freaking screwed up patent process. Maybe this will be the lawsuit that fixes the patent process. If someone can patent a conference call with visual indicator in this day and age then the process is way passed broken. The patent office is the group that needs to be sued.

Sick of software patents

[MrBlic]

After a project that I worked on for years was cut down before its prime because of a software patent threat (there wasn't even clear infringement!) I am sick of companies that play the game (right or wrong) of software patents.

Even though the patent system follows some honorable principles, the reality is that any patent suit brings down both companies involved.

I for one am going to buy "What the dormouse said." by John Markoff from www.penguinputnam.com/ instead of amazon today. Take that! (I just read a great review by Bill Joy of Markoff's book in Technology Review.)

Are there any sites that track how litigious companies are, so I can give my business to the ones that sling the least mud?

-Jim

It's not just Amazon.

[typical]

It's not just Amazon. Every large company that does research churns out absurd patents.

I work at a corporate computer science research wing of an extremely large company (which I won't name, but isn't much different from my previous employer, and is probably not much different from any other large company in the same position). At the moment, the work I'm doing is not research, but software development. Our group has a requirement to turn out N invention disclosures a year, even though we aren't doing research. Naturally, this results in plenty of grumbling and people just grabbing something handy to "disclose" as an invention. There are people Googling for random things online, and submitting them as "inventions" to get upstream management off their back. Thus, the poison seed enters the system as a result of a poor goal/reward structure around research.

To keep *their* bosses happy, research management has to convert some number of these into patents.

The USPTO, which does not have the incredible amount of funding that it would require to block all stupid patents (you would literally have to hire the best researchers in every field and give them a long time to mull over each patent), might send these patents back a time or two, but sooner or later they will get through.

This is where stupid patents come from. Sometime down the road, lawyers will use these as clubs.

I am not on the financial side, but as far as I can tell, existing players in a market generally just cross-license. AMD and Intel will never duke it out over patents, because neither one would be able to produce chips.

What happens is that nobody new is able to enter the market, by virtue of a steady stream of patents existing covering all kinds of basic-but-crucial ideas. The idea, from the standpoint of existing players, seems to be to convert a free market into an ogliopoly, in which there is much more profit to be made from consumers, and in which the continuous push to commoditize products can be stopped. And every now and then, existing players merge or go bankrupt, and the market gets ever richer for the existing ones.

The problem (well, the problem that pisses off a lot of open source programmers) comes in in that open source projects generally don't have any money (certainly not enough to take on a large company in patent litigation). So, instead of being able to do what other large companies do (cross-license, just dump a bunch of money on the other company, whatever is necessary to continue doing their work), open source projects simply cannot do things for fear of being sued (or just having all their hard work thrown out). So we have stupid things like lower quality font rendering (because the FreeType people cannot legally support the TrueType hinting data) and so forth.

I have fond memories of one meeting at my previous employer where a bunch of researchers and an extremely key (i.e. essentially nonfireable) software developer was. The meeting was to encourage the project to produce more IP, and was being conducted by one of our in-house corporate lawyers. Halfway through the meeting, the software developer (who felt that the whole thing was a waste of his time in the first place, and clearly disliked software patents) stood up and started railing on software patents. The research folks just stood there. Talking privately after the meeting, I discovered most of the researchers agreed with the guy, but saw any complaints as politically incorrect and simply likely to get them fired or research funding (always a popular target for funding cuts) cut.

The very root issue is twofold: (a) that it's not easy for people to make money on research (in the US, I've been told by people who are more interested in the business side of research that many corporate research labs have gone away or been closed down), and (b) that it is *exceedingly* difficult to effectively judge how well someone is doing research. Everyone will try to present their research as the next gro

Re:This isn't exactly news...

[AstroDrabb]

It is news because you didn't take the time to read the second (and subsequent) line(s).

But he called for lawmakers and industry leaders to examine the issue of software and business-method patents and to work toward limiting the number issued and their duration.

...

"But I do think we can help. As a company with some high-profile software patents, we're in a credible position to call for meaningful (perhaps even radical) patent reform,"

...

In his letter, Bezos called for software and business-method patents to be limited from the current 17 years to three to five years. He also called for the limitation to be retroactive so that current patents would be enforceable for only three to five years. In addition to the time limit on patents, Bezos proposed a public comment period before a patent is issued to allow Net users the chance to show previous examples of the potential patent.

This coming from a big CEO is pretty amazing to me. I say three cheers for Bezos! I think software patents suck, however they would be _much_, _much_ more agreeable if they were limited as Bezos suggests.

Re:get Book Burro (Greasemonkey script)

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people spend money, some people spend time, and there will always be ways for people to spend either to get what they want.