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AT&T Sues PayPal and eBay for Patent Infringement 355

Posted by CowboyNeal from the we-got-patent-pending-on-that dept.
theodp writes "AT&T on Thursday fired the latest shot in the escalating Web patent wars, filing suit against PayPal and eBay. AT&T issued a press release alleging that the PayPal and BillPoint payment systems infringe on AT&T's 1994 patent for the mediation of transactions by a communications system. Besides e-Payments, the AT&T patent purports to cover e-Voting, e-Auctions, e-Gifts, e-Donations, e-Wishlists and e-Referrals. e-Gad! e-Yikes!"
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AT&T Sues PayPal and eBay for Patent Infringement More

AT&T Sues PayPal and eBay for Patent Infringement

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  • This is the second time... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:09PM (#7524899) Journal
    This has erupted. First USA Bank sued PayPal [com.com] in September 2002. A year later PayPal countersued the company (now known as Bank One) and Bank One Delaware, also on patent infringement grounds. The companies settled those suits last month without disclosing the terms.

    Apparently this would also cover 2checkout and other paying services as well. The question is, can Microsoft and other browser makers be sued for being able to submit credit card info through their browsers? It seems overly broad but then again aren't all tech patents?

  • What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mandalayx ( 674042 ) * on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:11PM (#7524910) Journal
    Read the patent.

    There are 28 different claims as to what the system patented by ATT is. A cursory layman's look gives the impression that it covers all kinds of commerce done over telcommunications networks.

    I am seeing a situation where ATT would require licensing for every credit-card accepter on the Internet. That's not so fun.

    • Re:What's next? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unless you go out an buy some ATT stock, then its friken great.
    • From the page:
      Methods and apparatus for employing a communications system with actively connects communicating entities to mediate transactions.
      So, anything where some device and/or method allows two people to communicate in order to get something accomplished, AT&T gets a say-so. That's not over-broad, is it?

      That just leaves pointless communications. I'll be patenting that next. ("You mean you haven't already?", shouts the peanut gallery.)

    • Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:16PM (#7524947)
      the internet isn't a telcom is it? the breakdown of the word is telephone communications. so shouldn't this be relevant to dialup account users and not broadband... right?

      AT&T has tried to screw the american public since it's inception and the usual /. rant of "clinging to an old business model"

      Most of these companies had better shapeshift some of their mindsets and reasoning or they'll just die, and take out the rest of the interconnected world as they go.

      just my 2 bits.

      • Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)

        by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:11PM (#7525181) Journal
        Bzzt. Wrong. Telecommunications comes from the greek "tele-" which means far off, distant, remote. Television - seeing stuff that is potentially far away. Telephone (-phone = sound, as in gramophone) hearing sounds, in particular voices that are supposedly distant from you.
        "Telecommunications" are thus non-medium-specific. They can be wired or wireless, and consist of sounds, images or data in general.

      • Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by steve_l ( 109732 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:09AM (#7526422) Homepage
        the patent doesnt start of with telecoms.
        Claim 1 says 'a communications routing system of a type which functions generally to establish connections with arbitrary ones of a plurality of entities'. That could cover yodelling credit card info over the alps as much as anything else.

        Later on it gets into 'special phone numbers' -the core of the patent is really about humans-on-phones, but unless those primary claims are junked then we are in trouble.

        Claim 5 says "the communications routing system is a switching portion of a telephone system;"; the internet may or may not be this, depending upon implementation details. If you disprove this and the previous claim 'any routing system' then ebay have a problem.

        On the bright side, I think claim 1 is way too broad. There are lots of places -like many italian shops- where the payment person is split from the billing person, so the mechanism claimed for has existed in the physical world for ages.

    • Re:What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by u-235-sentinel ( 594077 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:36PM (#7525033) Homepage Journal
      "I am seeing a situation where ATT would require licensing for every credit-card accepter on the Internet. That's not so fun."

      That's a scary thought. Sounds alot like what SCO is doing (I know but I had to say it). IANAL however I have spent some free time reading through the laws regarding this sorta junk. I'm getting the impression that suing a 'user' of a product for use of a product isn't legal.

      For example, if I read the New York Times and come across material I have no right to read am I liable? From what I've gathered it's not my fault nor my problem. The New York Times will be liable for their product not me the consumer.

      On topic now... most of these patents look rather vague. I've looked over a couple of them already and it's about as undefined as you can get. What is the patent office doing? Accepting money and issuing a patent without looking at what they did?
      • What is the patent office doing? Accepting money and issuing a patent without looking at what they did?

        This is news to you?

      • the first claim is way too broad and vague; the later ones focus too far on voicemail systems.

        And: the best bit, the sequence is too tight. It says

        1. get id known to the approving entity (like a visa card) from the customer

        2. get a debit value from the vendor

        3. send (id,debit) to the auth system

        4. get approval from the auth system

        5. forward that to the vendor.

        Here are some easy workarounds

        a) get a range like (4.00 and 4.03) from the vendor; pick one.

        b) get a limit from the auth system, then OK it w

    • What about banks? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:58PM (#7525387) Homepage Journal
      All bank transactions are conducted over telecom lines of some sort, not to the Internet mind you be directly to their parent branch or HQ. They still are making a financial transaction via telephone communications.
    • From what I can read, they seem to be talking about any sort of anonymizer. The original application talks about phone systems. It's very specific, including saying that the intermediary would get the phone number of the caller from the phone system. This pretty much rules out things like The Internet where the calling system identifies itself in the TCP/IP Headers.

      If you broaden this to include any sort of anonymizer, including the 'Net, then I'd say that anonymous remailers would also classify as prio

    • Needs to satisfy all claims, not any (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @10:03AM (#7527704) Homepage
      Of particular interest are claims 5 and six, which sets forth

      5. The method set forth in claim 1 wherein:

      the communications routing system is a switching portion of a telephone system; and

      the step of receiving a transaction specifier includes the steps of:

      receiving a special telephone number in the switching portion; and

      using the special telephone number to derive the transaction specifier.

      6. The method set forth in claim 5 wherein:

      the step of receiving a transaction specifier further includes the step of using the special telephone number to derive a telephone number of the vendor and

      the step of responding to the transaction specifier includes the step of using the telephone number to obtain transaction information concerning the transaction from or provide transaction information to the vendor.

      Claim 7 is similar.

      In other words, to be a valid patent violation, the parties must use a telephone number to identify eachother. I don't know about you, but I've never given nor received anyone's telephone telephone numbers on paypal.

      Now, AT&T may argue that IP addresses are a "special" telephone number... Which is utter bunk, as VoIP is after 30 years of IP just starting to exist. But even then, Paypal does not connect independent parties with eachother via IP address, but rather e-mail address. Any respectable judge would throw out of his or her courtroom a lawyer that attempted to argue that "telephone number" meant any system that involved routing, including IP, E-mail, Telegraph, AIM, Kazaa, and Shared Printers.

      Overall it looks like the original patent wasn't quite that bad... A shared telephone authentication system based upon the telephone company's then-new caller ID system as an identifier. As AT&T noted in their patent application, this is a way to mediate a transaction over the telephone while shielding the buyer's information from the seller. What's bad is then taking this and attempting to apply it to all internet transactions.

      You filed your patent application. It was accepted because it was sufficiently narrow. Don't go whining now because it wasn't as broad as you would like.

  • In one word: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:11PM (#7524911)
    e-vil.
  • Tell the Indians they can deal with this bullshit. I'm going to grow Alpalcas or something.

  • e-Sex??? (Score:3, Funny)

    by attobyte ( 20206 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:12PM (#7524917)
    Please tell me they didn't patent e-sex....

    PLEEEEEEEASE Please please NOOOOOOooooooo..... :)

  • Since he invented the damn Internet to begin with, why don't all these lawsuits and settlements just get redirected to award Al Gore??? Seems like that would save us all a lot of time...
    • Lovely. Yet another attempt to bash Gore over a statement he never made. Gore said that he is the father of the Internet, from the perspective that it was his bills that gave DARPA the funding it needed to create the Internet. Whether or not this meant he was the Father of the Internet is highly debateable, but at the very least, he did not say that he invented the Internet, despite what the O'Riley's of the world would have you believe.

      • Re:(OT.) Re: Get done with it, already! (Score:5, Informative)

        by GreyPoopon ( 411036 ) <gpoopon@gmaOOOil.com minus threevowels> on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:11PM (#7525180)
        Lovely. Yet another attempt to bash Gore over a statement he never made. Gore said that he is the father of the Internet, from the perspective that it was his bills that gave DARPA the funding it needed to create the Internet.

        Well, the transcript doesn't lie...

        CNN "Late Edition" Transcript [cnn.com]:

        BLITZER: ...Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What have you to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

        GORE: ...During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
        Now granted, he doesn't claim to have INVENTED the internet. Instead, he claims to have CREATED it. What he REALLY did in 1986 was articulate somebody elses vision of widespread connected computing, and he introduced a follow-up bill to facilitate more widespread access to the network. I don't want to take away from his accomplishments because they ARE significant, but claiming to have created the internet alludes to illusions of grandeur. So yes, Al deserves to pretty much be mocked for the rest of his career over that statement.

        I think most people agree that, historically speaking, the Internet evolved as a result of the work done during the early 1970's on the ARPANET project, where TCP/IP was developed. The WWW concept, which makes the Internet much more useful, was developed primarily by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:30PM (#7525239)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • No, he doesn't claim to have created it.

            The way he worded his response can easily be misconstrued to mean that he thinks he created it. A very poor choice of words.

            But it's absurd to suggest that he was trying to make people think that he, a politician, created the world's most significant network. That was clearly not his intention.

            To be honest with you, I wouldn't put anything past a politician. While it's most likely that his wording was just poor, it's not entirely impossible that he had some ho


        • Come on, this is just how language is used. Like when someone says "I built a house". Chances are, they mean they paid for someone to build it - but you never hear it spoken that way.

          • Come on, this is just how language is used. Like when someone says "I built a house". Chances are, they mean they paid for someone to build it - but you never hear it spoken that way.

            I think the semantics are secondary here. Even claiming that one pushed for increased funding to "create the internet" is a foolish misstatement, as the internet was already there in 1986. His exact words of "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" are a bizarre deviation from reality, when all he really did was succe

        • Now granted, he doesn't claim to have INVENTED the internet. Instead, he claims to have CREATED it. What he REALLY did in 1986 was articulate somebody elses vision of widespread connected computing, and he introduced a follow-up bill to facilitate more widespread access to the network.

          No, he claimed to have taken the initiative to get the funding for us. In that he was entirely correct.

          If there is anyone who has a right to get upset about the issue it would be Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and fifty to a h

  • I wonder when someone will patent thinking and breathing. Geez. When will the madness end?
    • I wonder when someone will patent thinking and breathing.
      In today's society, finding a prior art for thinking would be tough, so I'd say that's a safe patent... breathing, now that's a different matter...

  • Thanks! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DraKKon ( 7117 ) *
    I would like to take this opportunity to say "Thank You" to the USPTO, for fscking up just about everything. Last I heard they revoked the Patent on Swinging Sideways, but crap like this still stands.

    I thank you from the core of my anus.

  • semantics to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)

    by vena ( 318873 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:13PM (#7524932)
    the patent office should just change every instance of "a system" to "this system"

    problem solved!

  • e-Bullsh!t.... Did that on Usenet back in 1990.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thewiz ( 24994 ) * on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:14PM (#7524933)
    I've bought and sold items on Usenet as early as 1990 using a go between to make sure the sale completed properly (and I'm sure other people did that even before I did). AT&T is trying to patent a method that has been used since the creation of telephones, credit cards, and credit card processors. Just because it's over the Internet doesn't make it patentable; you are STILL using the TELEPHONE.
    • Basically you were a broker, that job has been around for LONG time before AT&T claimed it. All they may have done was add the ability to do it via phone. I wonder if this means all the 1-800 (and 1-900) numbers that accept a credit card as payment for something owe AT&T royalties? After all, they used "telecommunications" to buy something. This one should (I hope) get tossed out as a waste of the court's time.

  • USPTO in complete and utter chaos (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeDawg ( 721537 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:15PM (#7524943) Homepage Journal

    If we haven't posted it once, we've posted it a million times; the USPTO is in complete and utter chaos with these tech patents. I don't the USPTO is equipped, or ever has been equipped to handle these technological patents (at least in regards to say computers and/or the internet technologies).

    They need to set up a separate repository of information to store for computers, computer programs, and internet technologies that are looking for patents. They need to hire a staff that can handle the various searching for prior technology (prior art) for this very advanced stage of patent registrations. They probably also need to setup a complete different sort of organization of information to do/handle this.

    Until the USPTO gets straightened up, I see a never-ending line of lawsuits for copyright and patent infringement with regards to computer technologies and internet technologies!

  • e-patents (Score:2, Funny)

    by cheebie ( 459397 )
    From the headline, it appears that AT&T has patented the letter 'e'.

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hogwash McFly ( 678207 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:20PM (#7524962)
    Amazon sues AT&T for suing PayPal and eBay with Amazon's 'One-Click-Sueing' technology. Full story at 11.
  • Well, wouldn't that solve all the problems America have with their E-voting systems? Goodbye Diebold and others...

    Patent system saving the free world who could have thought....
    • Either that, or AT&T gets all your votes. Good huh?

      If I lived in the states, and used AT&T for anything (Mobile, telephone, i-net access), I'd dump their sorry ass and tell all my family and friends to do likewise...
  • People should not be allowed to patent vague information information and product design/architecture concepts that anyone riding the short bus could come up with.

    I swear, people patent BS and think they are f'n Thomas Edison.

  • Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:24PM (#7524981)
    As soon as some of the more minor silly patents were allowed, it was only a matter of time before broad sweeping patents were inforced. However think of it this way. When someone tries to enforce a patent this outrageous it is only a matter of time before the government steps in and rethinks things.

    Patent reform is long overdue. There was an article on Slashdot a couple of weeks ago from a few government agencies suggesting reforms. But until we get our representatives to pay attention not much will happen. This isn't a democrat or republican thing. There are "bad guys" on both sides. However this really does that the potential to slow the growth of innovation especially in the tech sector.

  • Scope of patent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by watchful.babbler ( 621535 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:27PM (#7524997) Homepage Journal
    The patent (USPTO link here [uspto.gov]) covers any system in which a purchaser provides credit information to a mediating party, who then approves the payment and provides authorization and an identifying value to the seller. IANAIPL, but this patent covers a whole lot of ground. Obviously, if you as an e-vendor are processing credit card claims yourself, the patent doesn't apply. But the patent pretends to apply to a whole set of services, an argument that doesn't to my untrained eyes seem to follow from the claims:
    Another use for such a system is a gift or donation registration service. An entity seeking gifts or donations would provide a list of what it needed to the registration service. Entities wishing to make gifts or donations would call the registration service and the service would mediate a transaction between the donor and the source of the item to be given or donated.

    Still other uses involve assigning available resources of a given type to clients who call for assistance. One example of such a system is a lawyer referral service. The referral service would maintain a database of lawyers and would assign lawyers to clients on a basis which assured that each lawyer would get a fair share of the referrals. The system would determine from the database which lawyer was to get the referral and would connect the lawyer with the calling client.

    Additionally, a communications system may be advantageously used to mediate a transaction such as an auction. Customers could make bids. The communications system would validate the bids and provide them to the auctioneer, who would know only the mounts, and not the identities of the bidders. The communications system could then indicate to each participant the current highest bid and solicit new bids until a single highest bid remained. In some embodiments, the communications system itself might play the role of auctioneer. In such an embodiment, the transaction manager would keep track of the current highest bid, would inform the participants of that bid, and when bidding had ceased, would complete the transaction with the highest bidder.

    eBay itself seems to be safe as (from what I understand of the auction site) it doesn't handle any payments directly, PayPal excepted. The claim over a lawyer referral service doesn't make much sense to me, since it doesn't suggest that the mediating service handle billing and payment, while the gift service ... well, it seems a stretch to call a recipient of a gift a "vendor" (as in claim 1).

    I remember a book from several years ago in in which a cyberpunk lawyer (it was a very strange piece of fiction, yes) used the theory of adverse possession (What's that? [lawyerviews.com]) to claim title to a piece of intellectual property left unimproved by its owner. I'm starting to think that implementing such a theory in IP law, as insane as that is, would be an improvement over the current situation ....

    • Re:Scope of patent (Score:3, Interesting)

      by justMichael ( 606509 )

      ...covers any system in which a purchaser provides credit information to a mediating party, who then approves the payment and provides authorization and an identifying value to the seller.

      This could possibly be the saftey net for most e-commerce sites.

      Most sites collect the card info and pass it off to the processor (mediating party) and get an approval (authorization) so this "should" not be covered under this patent as the customer does not directly provide information to the mediating party.

      Of course

    • eBay itself seems to be safe as (from what I understand of the auction site) it doesn't handle any payments directly, PayPal excepted.

      IIRC, eBay purchased PayPal some time ago, making it liable for PayPal's legal infringements.

  • ATT patent is without merrit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you read the patent, it talks about using telephone numbers, etc.

    PayPal does not use telephone numbers as part of their security mechanism.

  • Well, at least they started by attacking the large targets, the ones who have the ability to defend themselves and enough at stake they probably won't just pay the wargeld-- i mean settlement-- to buy AT&T off. You know, as opposed to picking off defneseless small businesses, as is the normal tactic.
  • C'mon AT&T, get your act together!

    First you're the bad guys for going against the DNC list ...

    Then you're the good guys for having a patent against specific spam-filter-circumvention techniques ...

    Now you're the bad guys again for having a ridiculous patent and going after eBay, PayPal, et. al. ...

    C'mon, just make up your minds already! The karma whores here at /. can't keep up with all this flip-flopping!

  • Innovation Will Move Offshore (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This insane contention over software and business process patents has created an extremely hostile environment for innovation. The inevitable result is that new business and innovation will move to some other nation.

    Let this be a lesson to anyone in Europe. Keep killing those software and business patent 'harmonization' attempts. This has simply become a big government shakedown racket.

    The more I think about it, the more this looks like the way the Roman Catholic church used to sell indulgences. Basi

  • Eminent Domain? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by braddock ( 78796 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:42PM (#7525057)
    Shouldn't there be a concept of eminent domain that applies to patents? I mean, this patent seems broad enough to severely criple the internet economy. If my house was in the way of an information super highway on-ramp, it would be knocked down before I could say "private property".

    -braddock gaskill

  • Joy... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thenextpresident ( 559469 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:54PM (#7525112) Homepage Journal
    As someone in the ewallet industry developing a new product that is different from other ewallet solutions, this is slightly disturbing. To think that a common concept such as accepting a credit card is patented. Of course, AT&T will have to go after all those credit card terminals now, because they all do the same thing. A consumer and a merchant processing a credit card through a trusted third party (the one leasing the terminal to the merchant).

    However, seeing as my company is small, I have no real worries. Oh, sure, they may sue once they have something big to sue for, buy by then, I can afford to fight back. Hopefully, PayPal will fight for me. By fighting AT&T's patent, they could make it difficult for AT&T to sue for it in the future.

    Of course, PayPal could also just make a deal, and this won't get taken care of in court.

    Oh, the fun of e-commerce. You know, makes me want to patent some of my ideas, not to sue people, but just to make sure people don't sue me or my company. Patenting to defend yourself...hrm, maybe I could patent that? Of course, that is probably been said on /. before.
    • > You know, makes me want to patent some of my ideas, not to sue people, but just
      > to make sure people don't sue me or my company. Patenting to defend
      > yourself...hrm, maybe I could patent that?

      heh thats an interesting way to look at it.

      Buying protection from the government, to protect you aginst the laws -by- that government.
      Unfortunatly yes, racketering is a very old idea indeed.

    • "defensive" patents are common. Lots of big companies invent processes/technology and go ahead and patent them just in case they think of something useful to do wiht the process/technology. This sounds like what AT&T did, they said "Gee what if someone did this with our stuff" and patented it.

  • It's an Obvious patent (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vistic ( 556838 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:57PM (#7525127)
    I don't sincerely think that any of these websites were even aware of AT&T's work as they developed online payment systems, etc. - much less copied the idea from AT&T.

    I think the key is that it was obvious at the time that payments would be accepted online. The same goes for a lot of the technologies they claim are covered by this patent. So a bunch of people found a means to accomplish this obvious goal that was almost *expected* at the time simultaneously.

    I don't know much about patents but might this fall under the category of "obvious" which I think is supposed to be unpantentable?

  • Western Union should sue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SparklesMalone ( 623241 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:00PM (#7525139)
    It seems someone writing a check to Western Union back in 1880 to wire money across the continent on a telegraph line was "process(ing) payments over a communications system"

    The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
    Ecclesiastes 1:9

  • I think I'll patent applying for silly patents.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by venom600 ( 527627 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:00PM (#7525141) Homepage Journal
    ...that ought to put an end to this kinda crap.

  • Where's the surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:03PM (#7525149)
    AT&T has the bridge...why is everyone surprised they're trying to control the toll fees?
    • Because the patent is as broad as saying:

      System for paying people for stuff, just like you do in real life, but with computers....

      It's not "invention", just the evolution of technology. Financial transactions are a common, existing activity, and replacing paper and pen with machine does not seem like reasonable grounds for a patent.

      Sure - license the software, but the idea is free.

  • Compare these patents with drug company patents (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darnok ( 650458 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:16PM (#7525195)
    If drug companies could patent their products with the ease that the USPTO seems to allow IT patents, then the first company to apply for a patent covering "something that makes sick people better" would pretty much have the market cornered.

  • a better IP system (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nick haflinger ( 693368 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:20PM (#7525205)
    What we ought to do is have a property tax copyrights and patents. The owners of intellectual property could set the price of their inventions then anybody that ponies up the scratch can take it from them unless the inventor ups the price and pays a huge penalty and some back taxes. If the tax is to onerous one can always lower the cost or even release the IP to public domain. You could also get rid of time limits with this since the cost of protecting IP indefinately would be general prohibative. The increased revenue could fund an effective and staffed USPTO.

  • Bad trend (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lurker412 ( 706164 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:21PM (#7525216)
    We need to think hard about the consequences of becoming a litigation based society. One can imagine a day in which the US does not produce anything at all but merely sues the shit out of everyone who does. I guess there will be a few techies left--only those with 15 years experience supporting law firms need apply. Everything else will be outsourced off-shore. The only jobs left will be for lawyers, para-legals and judges. If we get lucky, we might be called upon to serve on juries once in a while.

    I used to be cynical, but reality has overtaken me.

  • I didn't check my email, so I guess I missed the memo announcing that Darl McBride got recruited by AT&T.

    That'll teach me to spend all day reading Slashdot.

  • USPTO - my corrective actions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by paiute ( 550198 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:38PM (#7525287)
    Some time ago I was looking into the USPTO job openings. (Aside - They are always complaining that they can't get enough examiners, that they don't have enough money, they can't retain employees, etc.) It occurred to me that one of their main problems is that they require everyone they want to hire to be in the DC area and drive to work every day in that traffic.

    Why not distribute the examination positions around the country? Submissions are mostly electronic now, at least at my company. I'd take some training - even if I had to travel to DC for it - to look over patents and applications in my specialty and be paid per piece. Maybe with thousands of part-time examiners to complement the regular staff, more specialists would be available to point out prior art way before it gets to the lawsuit stage.

    Oh yeah - remember, this is my IP. It has no Unix code in it.
  • I believe 1994 was about the time when AT&T came out with it's "You will" commercials.

    Coincidence? I think not!

    Press release: HTML [att.com]
    Sample commercial (nostalgia altert!): QuickTime [ad-rag.com]

    "You will, and the company that will bring it to you is AT&T." ... becasue we're going to patent stuff now before we build it and then sue the pants off of everyone ten years from now.

    -ez

    "Reach out and sue someone."
  • Once the big boys are finished this one, the next match in the War of the One Patent will be midget wrestling:

    Patent could be worth billions [canada.com] Legal fight ahead. Tiny Longueuil firm sparks firestorm in New Zealand with warnings to pay up faces stiff resistance.

    After years of struggles, Edward Pool's tiny, little-known Longueuil firm is hoping to finally start cashing in on controversial patents he says should give it royalties on every international e-commerce transaction.

  • What about Western Union? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @11:17PM (#7525481)
    Surely they were "electronicly" transfering funds long before 1994?

  • zerg (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @11:17PM (#7525483) Homepage
    Read the letters section [economist.com] of this week's Economist, the USPTO claims "Patent reform pending".
  • Besides e-Payments, the AT&T patent purports to cover e-Voting, e-Auctions, e-Gifts, e-Donations, e-Wishlists and e-Referrals. e-Gad! e-Yikes!

    This is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in years. Come to think of it, it's the only funny thing I've read on Slashdot in years!

    Just kidding!!
  • I hope this goes way further than it should.

    The minute people find their beloved eBay in trouble, the backlash will be massive.

    Nothing will help put this patent issue in the critical spotlight than stuff like this.

  • Good grief (Score:4, Funny)

    by emarkp ( 67813 ) <slashdot@@@roadq...com> on Thursday November 20, 2003 @11:28PM (#7525535) Journal
    I e-think I'm going to be e-sick.... (apologies to Foxtrot)
  • Captain Obvious.

    His second choice is Joe Theisman but what's the difference.

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