his is an odd topic to need an article page about, and it's an even odder topic to have as a pet peeve.  But here I am with both of those states applying.

I have no idea why this is a pet peeve of mine; perhaps it's tied into my dislike of corporations throwing their weight around and screwing individuals, or my hatred of the institutional idiocy and US legal system that allows that sort of thing to happen.  But whatever the reason, a news item about a ridiculous patent is almost sure to draw my wrath, in the form of a mention on my blog.

Newer additions are added on top of this page.

February 9, 2003

Frequently, I have bitched about the ridiculous patents that are being issued these days, for things that simply should not be patentable.  And here we go again, thanks to two articles in the LA Times.

Most patents filed today are purely for business purposes, to protect something your company might develop at some point, and/or to prevent other companies from making something with the same idea.  You can end up getting a patent on something and just sitting on it, creating nothing yourself but collecting heavy licensing fees from other companies who want to make something similar, and can't due to your roadblock.

The system was never supposed to be so combative. Patents, which last for 20 years, are enshrined in the Constitution as a means of promoting creativity and encouraging progress by rewarding inventors.

For a long time, the scope of patents was sharply limited and easily understood. Ideas and natural phenomena were not patentable. Machines and industrial processes were — provided they were both new and useful.

In 1880, Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne added a third requirement: A patentable invention, he wrote, should be inspired by "a flash of genius."

This put a high bar on patentability, and through the decades the courts raised it. In 1950, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end — the advancement of science."

There's an article in the LA Times today that talks about this issue, (which is where the above quote came from) and the steady downward slide of quality control for patents.  It's not really a very interesting article, mostly talking about two companies battling for the right to sell crustless PB&J sammiches.  However part two of the article is what I wanna read.

Next: Patent holders battle for control of the Internet.

And since I wrote this Friday but didn't post it, I might as well just add to it, since part two of the article went up Saturday.

Part two is largely about Lawrence Lockwood, a businessman who operates essentially as a mafia goomba, only he uses lawyers and a patent rather than a baseball bat and arson to shake down small business owners for protection money.  The man does no computer work of his own, has no business of his own, publishes and creates nothing of his own.  He just happens to have a very dubious patent for something sort of like an online buying/selling system, the time to send off countless "licensing" mails, and the patience and lack of morals or ethics to back it up with lawyers and law suits.

He is a parasite and a scumbag, and a living personification of all that is wrong with the current patent office and legal system in America.  And he's certainly not the only one.

A former CIA technology officer is bringing EBay Inc. to trial this spring, claiming that the hugely successful trading site is infringing an online auction patent he applied for in 1995 -- six months before EBay began.

Charles E. Hill & Associates, a software firm, is suing 18 e-commerce companies, including EBay, alleging that they violated its patents on an "electronic-catalog system" and a "method of updating a remote computer."

Acacia Research Corp. in Newport Beach has filed legal complaints against 27 adult entertainment Web sites, alleging that they violated its patents on "the transmission and receipt of digital audio and/or video content." The company is demanding licenses from mainstream music and movie companies too.

All these lawsuits were predictable, said Jonathan Hangartner, a patent lawyer with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in San Diego who represents a group of PanIP defendants.

"Anytime there's a major technological breakthrough, there's a spike in patent litigation," Hangartner said. "It happened with automobiles, telephones, trains. Now it's the Internet's turn."

My opinion on all of this is that it's the fault of the patent office, for vastly extending the concept of patents by issuing them for virtually anything to do with connecting computers.  How many ridiculous patents are there?

"If you're selling online, at the most recent count there are 4,319 patents you could be violating," said David E. Martin, chief executive of M-Cam Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based risk-management firm specializing in patents. "If you also planned to advertise, receive payments for or plan shipments of your goods, you would need to be concerned about approximately 11,000."

The worst part is that most of these spurious lawsuit filing weasels have never won a case or fought in court. The muscle to back up their extortion is purely the legal costs it would take a business to fight them.  Lockwood demands around $5000 for a "lifetime licensing fee", which most companies end up paying just because the legal expenses of battling his patent claims in court would be upwards of $1-2m, and if they win they get nothing.  No punitive damages, no legal fees; they just don't have to pay him his $5k.

And obviously, spending years in court and maybe $2m fighting off a parasite who just wants $5k is not a viable option for most businesses, no matter how annoying or spurious the patent and legal claim behind it are.  Lockwood has a past history as an attempted chiseler and rip off artist. There's very little known about him.  Much of what is known comes from one of his earlier, clumsier attempts to rip off a business with a bullshit patent.

...from depositions in a lawsuit Lockwood filed in the early 1990s against AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, claiming its Sabre reservation system was infringing three patents he had been granted in the early 1980s.

Asked by American's lawyers what he did for a living, Lockwood replied, "I'm currently litigating my patents." For money to eat every day, he added, "I assist my family in leasing office space." He said he had "never, for any length of time, used a personal computer."

The case was dismissed, and significant parts of the patents invalidated. Lockwood called it "a very expensive learning process."

Basically what he learned is to go after small companies for small amounts of money, so it's not worth it to them to fight back.  You take on American Airlines, they bring out the legal muscle and hand you your parent-suing ass. The little guy doesn't usually fight back, since the money makes it insane.  No matter how much you may be annoyed by the bullshit of it all. One guy is trying though.

"It was like a bully promising a little kid, 'I'll protect you if you give me your lunch money,' " he said. "These patents don't apply to our Web site. No person I've talked to seems to even think it's a possibility."

The Beeres set up a Web site, first called PANIPdefendants.net and then Youmaybenext.com, which offered information about PanIP's lawsuit and solicited donations. Lockwood's response was to sue the Beeres again, this time for trademark infringement and defamation.

My suggestion would be to invalidate about a million existing internet patents, or possibly to create a new interpretation of the laws, so that the patents only granted the right to sue or demand licensing fees if the patent infringer was using it as the key element of their business, or has stolen the technology from your product. Of course how that would be determined would still require all the same lawyers, etc.

The initial idea for patents, as part one said, was to protect a major breakthrough, an entire new device, a stroke of genius.  Something that business competitors would rip off and use against you, if they could.   These various internet business patents are nothing of the kind, and are mostly for vague ideas and concepts that pretty much anyone setting up any sort of online sales site will have to use.  It's like patenting the idea of storing all the frozen food in the same area of the supermarket, instead of having a display of pizzas in one corner, ice cream in another, frozen peas in a third.  Putting them all together is just common sense in organization, but imagine some prick had a patent on it, and wrote every small grocery in the country demanding $10k in licensing fees, or else they'd have to rip apart their store and put it back together in an insane design.

I doubt anything major is going to happen, though there are some reformers working in the patent offices now.  The only way momentum will come to have a review of patents and how they are offered is when enough major companies get sick of the gnats with lawsuits buzzing around them, and put some heavy pressure on their congressmen and senators to look into the process.  All the small businesses in the world don't have the same clout that a few biggies do, with their millions in campaign contributions.

Which would be another system most of us would love to see dismantled. But that's a topic for another day.

January 24, 2003

In another idiotic case of some company trying to claim they own some key aspect of the Internet, SBC is trying to shakedown smaller companies everywhere for having frames on their websites.  This one is really ridiculous since they got the patent in 1999.  About 20 years after frames were first used in some early Apple products, and at least five years after every crappy Geocities site about someone's cat had them as a base template design.

Web application developer DJ Walker-Morgan said: "What they are patenting is the entire process of structuring documents for the web, something that has been done since the advent of the web in the early nineties. They must know that they have a vague and challengeable patent; what other reason would they go after small companies like museumtours, and not after Amazon, AOL or Microsoft?"

The US patent in question, number 5,933,841 titled "Structured Document Browser", was issued in 1999 and hasn't been tested in court. It is part of patent law that 'prior art', where the patented idea was previously published, can invalidate a patent. However, ascertaining the validity of a patent is a costly and lengthy affair, and if it holds then SBC stands to claim licence fees from virtually every company in the US that puts links in frames on their websites.

As always when I hear of such a thing I wonder what the hell the patent office is doing.  I mean why don't I go get a patent for, oh... how about hamburgers? I invented them, you see. Then I can have lawyers write letters to every restaurant in America, demanding two cents for every burger they've ever sold. I'll cleverly target the smaller restaurants first, since they won't have the money to hire lawyers and get my frivolous bullshit thrown out of court, and might even cave in to my ridiculous attempts at extortion.

December 20, 2002

A rather absurd news item reports that AOL has quietly patented the entire instant messaging concept and technology.  Yes, things like ICQ or MSN or any of a dozen other versions of the same thing, most of which have been around for years and years.

The breadth of this definition could create controversy in the industry. AOL’s primary competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo, have their own instant messaging services, each with millions of users. With the patent, AOL could technically sue rival instant messaging services for infringement backed by the argument spelled out in the patent.

The article talks about why they might have done it and their other patents, but never gets into what I was wondering about, which is how you can patent something that's essentially an industry standard at this point.  It's like someone suddenly claiming to have obtained a patent on the concept of showing sports scores in a little box on the corner of the screen during the game.  Since everyone does it, and has been doing it for years, how do you suddenly get a patent for it now?

Does someone hold a patent on HTML, or the presentation of text mixed with images to form a webpage?  Or on how email works?

There seems to be a disconnect between the patent office and reality, when it comes to modern technology over the internet.  There was news some months ago about a company getting a patent on how online purchase sites work.  I.E. the way you click on an item and add it to your virtual cart, and then pay for them all at once when you're done shopping.  I forget who claimed to have invented and patented that technology, but they were skulking around and using it as a shake down, sending C&D letters to all sorts of small companies that were using online order forms and demanding thousands of dollars for a "license" to keep using their website as they'd been using it all along.  Basically enough money to get rich off of, but not so much that the companies they picked on had to fight in court or go bankrupt if they paid it.  Basically nuisance lawsuits, ones that are bullshit, but would cost so much more to defend against than to pay off.

The alleged patent holders weren't trying that against any major retailers like Amazon.com or EBWorld, since that would invariably turn into a prolonged legal battle, and be very expensive.  It was really a form of legal extortion, like the mafia beating up small business owners for protection money, but not daring to try it on the big business on the corner.

The whole concept of their click and buy patent seems absurd as well; it's like patenting intelligent store design. Like a grocery store saying only they could have check out registers by the entrance/exit, and that since they were doing it first every other store had to put theirs in the middle of the frozen foods section.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.