It was thrown out, now it’s back in court again.
Simple question: how, exactly, do laws that make this kind of lawsuit even thinkable help the “progress of science and the useful arts”, as the Founding Fathers put it? Given a hypothetical blank check, how would you you reform the system, or if you like it the way it is, could you explain the advantages?
Why don’t you tell us what you think first?
And what’s the debate here? Are you questioning the concept of patents, or only these particular ones? If the latter, you need to flesh out more what these specific patents are before anyone can answer the question.
Lawsuits seldom adress the social benefit of the redress they seek. They are limited to black letter law rights, and the personal ownership of profits at issue. Congress is supposed to address the social benifit of the law.
Good luck waiting for that one.
Tris
Well why doesn’t HTML5 specifiy a universal video format? Answer no one could agree on a format because of patents. Even the Ogg video which intentionally doesn’t have patents was considered a risk because of the potential of unknown “submarine patents” it could violate. Patents the owner lays in wait until everyone is using what they thought was clean then sues like mad.
How is anyone supposed to develop in an a booby trapped environment like that?
Has anyone ever contested a patent in court based on the “progress of science and the useful arts” language in the constitution?
While I don’t have any problem with the concept of patents in general, I agree that they’ve become to long-lived and too general and are now in many cases more of a determent then a asset to their original purpose of spuring innovation and invention.
I’m not in the business of writing code, so what you wrote is pretty meaningless to me. Are you saying that the internet lacks innovation? That’s hard to believe, but maybe it’s so.
Perhaps Paul Allen will think of an important new invention in the swimming pool he purchases with his booty from these nuisance suits?
:smack: What am I saying?
Paul Allen is rich enough to buy a new pool without a lawsuit.
Perhaps he needs to fill his current pool with cash in order to have an idea?
I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s adding unnecessary gambles, and restrictions that discourage innovation. If there’s to be software patents there needs to be true enforcement of nonobviousness, so that current throw a bunch of shit and see what stick strategy doesn’t work. Further there needs to be protection from submarine patent attacks, for starters.
How is “showing related products or stories” a novel idea in the slightest? Haven’t salesmen and newspapers been doing this for centuries?
Because, apparently, adding “… with a computer!” or “… on the internet!” makes it novel enough to patent. Or, even more probable, the US patent office just allows any and all patent applications to go through. It’s become enough of an issue that people are actively discouraged from looking for patents when developing, because
you’re pretty much guaranteed to find multitudes of ridiculously obvious patents
most of those patents will never be enforced
if any of those patents are enforced against you, the penalties are higher if you knowingly infringed.
I guess in the 90s you could add “… with a computer!” to any activity and make it sound innovative. :rolleyes:
ETA: You beat me to it! 
Bingo. The patent office is now self-funding, and the more patents allowed the more money coming in, so examiners don’t even seem to try to find prior art anymore. (At least in the last two patents I got rather as opposed to the ones I and people in my group got 20 years ago.) I think they just figure any invalid patents will get challenged, which is fine if you are Google, not so good if you are a little company.
Any patent system is prone to abuse, of course, but ours needs a lot of reform.
And for the OP, this case says nothing about the utility of patents in general.
Hold on a sec. All I know of this issue is what the OP posted: that Paul Allen is suing everyone because he patented ecommerce. But his first lawsuit on this extremely broad claim was thrown out.
Doesn’t that mean that the system worked?
Now, if his second lawsuit ends up costing Amazon et al millions in lawyer fees and years in court, the OP may have a good point. But just because I sue John Mace for assault because he gave me the stink-eye from across the street seven years ago, doesn’t mean that there is a problem with the law on assault.
If a court awards me millions of dollars because of the stink-eye, then there is a problem with the law.
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. These kind of lawsuits are started all the time. There are companies, like Rambus, that essentially live off patents that have to be fought over in court year after year. Just because a lawsuit is initiated, doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful.
The obvious answer is that companies try to come up with novel new approaches to doing something and invest time and money into producing a useful product with those approaches. Patents reward that, thus giving an encouragement to innovation.
Now if you want to debate on more than a very general broad level I just mentioned, you’ll have to give more info. Is your concern the exact patents Paul Allen is suing over? Is it that it’s a rich bastard doing the suing? Do you think software shouldn’t be able to be patented? Do you think the patent system should be scrapped entirely? What the hell are you asking.
I kinda suspect somewhere in the op there’s a confusion and mixing of recent patent cases and recent copyright issues. But I could be wrong on that.
By maintaining and defending the financial value of patents. The thinking behind the patent system is that providing an artificial financial incentive to inventors – not just the chance to make and sell their inventions, which they could do if there were no patents, but a way to claim a temporary legal monopoly on their inventions – will encourage invention immensely. Which it seems to have done. But that incentive can’t be there, unless there is some procedure to seek legal redress for patent infringement; without it, a patent would be meaningless.
This particular instance might seem to you like an abuse or perversion of the system; but at least one side in practically every lawsuit of any kind could come up with some sort of argument to that effect (an argument which the attorney making it might or might not actually believe, but which his client almost certainly does, and at the top of his lungs).
Not quite. The broader interests of society are not, as such, justiciable in a court of law; the court is there to decide the rights as between the actual litigants before it in an actual matter in controversy. The working class can’t sue the upper class or vice-versa, etc. However, a “public policy argument” will often be included in a legal brief if the attorney can think of one; it’s entirely proper and routine to make such an argument, and for the court to consider it. A public policy argument will not decide the case if the judge is sure the law is on the other side, but it might swing a close one, and judges do have a lot of interpretive leeway.
Uh-oh.
Coming up: Superfluous Parentheses v. DrCube!
yeah.
Lawyers will do anything.
Tris