Judge Permits eBay's "Buy It Now" Feature 139
stalebread points to a Reuters story reporting that a federal judge refused to issue an injunction against eBay's "Buy It Now" feature. Quoting: "Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Federal District Court denied a motion by the Virginia company, MercExchange, for a permanent injunction to stop eBay from using the feature. The Supreme Court ruled last year that, although eBay infringed upon MercExchange's patent for the service, it was up to the lower court to decide whether eBay had to stop using it. 'MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,' he wrote."
Re:Link (Score:4, Informative)
Google News has article on injunction ruling (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is horrible news... seriously (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
MercExchange's patent was found non-obvious by the trial court during the law suit. You are 100% wrong regarding what evidence can be presented to show that an invention is obvious. Both a federal court and the USPTO can consider any evidence available to one skilled in the art, which includes any publicly-accessible information. If you do some searching, you'll discover that its common for patent examiners to use archive.org to reject patent applications.
I'll even provide a link [uspto.gov] from the MPEP (the manual used by the patent office) for you.
Re:This is horrible news... seriously (Score:3, Informative)