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Selling Stuff On The Internet? Why, That Infringes On A Patent!
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| Erich Spangenberg was mentioned here earlier this week for having to pay $4
| million for shuffling some patents around to shell companies and suing a
| company he had already agreed not to sue over those patents. Of course,
| that's not slowing him down apparently. Not only has he asked for a new trial
| on that ruling, he's continuing to file new patent lawsuits -- with the
| latest one apparently being for a patent on selling stuff on the internet.
| Yes, the patent may say it's about selling vehicles, but of the 47 new
| companies being sued over this patent, it looks like they're all selling
| other stuff, not cars. Basically, it looks like he's trying to sue every
| internet retailer there is -- because, of course, none of them ever would
| have come up with the concept of selling stuff online if this patent didn't
| exist.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080624/0125561485.shtml
Wanted: Prior Art to Bust Seer Patent
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| A company called Seer Systems has a patent on a system for joining different
| musical data types together in a file, distributing them over the internet,
| and then playing that file.
|
| We are especially interested in prior art (before 1997) relating to
| downloading and playing parts of 'musical work files' in real time. One such
| example might be a system for streaming media files by taking the file one
| piece at a time and downloading the necessary sound files and musical data
| for that part before playing it and moving on to another section.
`----
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/wanted-prior-art-bust-seer-patent
When will clicking a mouse be a violation of the law? How about the 'JPEG on a
page' patent?
The USPTO earns itself the reputation of a cheap brothel.
Recent:
Patent trolls are getting smarter
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| When you're driving down the highway and you see a spotless white tanker
| truck with a big green tree painted on the side, you can be pretty sure that
| it's full of hazardous waste.
|
| Likewise, companies with "innovation" in their names are generally
| innovation-hostile patent trolls. The problem isn't just that they file for
| obvious patents, or patents on things that someone else already invented, but
| that they drag the enormous transaction costs of the patent system into the
| flexible world of software, where transaction costs are low.
|
| [...]
|
| By now, even the Mainstream Media is safely aware of the need to get rid of
| software patents. When a Cato Institute scholar is writing an
| anti-software-patent op-ed for the New York Times, you can't get much more
| Mainstream than that.
`----
http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=node/16789
Astronomy Domine
,----[ Quote ]
| What innovations are we stifling right now with patents that lock out the
| scientists, amateur and professional, from research ? What new software can't
| be created due to these restrictions. We may never know what we didn't
| discover or create due to their chilling effects.
|
| It's like people claiming ownership on particular areas of the sky, and just
| as absurd. “You can't look at that star, it's mine, I patented looking there.
| Here's a coin-operated telescope if you want to peek”. Good luck making
| scientific progress in astronomy with these restrictions.
`----
http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/283
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