Patent 7,620,565 is a good example of everything that's wrong with the patent system; it's vague and generic, nothing novel, and seemingly far reaching.<p>They are using claim 15 to sue over interactive chat:
"A method, comprising: monitoring a product for an occurrence in the product of a trigger event of a predefined plurality of trigger events; incrementing a counter corresponding to the trigger event upon detection of the occurrence of the trigger event in the product; displaying a user interface, configured to probe for information regarding a use of the product, if the counter exceeds a threshold; storing an input received from the user interface on a device; and transmitting the input to a server. "
The cold and harsh truth nobody is willing to put out there: if Apple and Microsoft may abuse vague software patents, why shouldn't Lodsys?<p>Monkey see, monkey do. You are either against software patents, or you're not. You can't cherry-pick the companies you like and excuse them for abusing software patents. Lodsys is nothing but an exponent of a broken system large companies themselves created and are now sustaining.
Here's a basic solution to this general problem:<p>To succeed on a patent infringement claim, the plaintiff must prove a causal link between his patent and the defendant's technology. That is, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant either (1) reverse engineered technology covered by the patent or (2) directly relied on the patent itself in creating the infringing technology.<p>In other words, <i>independent invention should be protected</i>. If I get a vague patent that could arguably be construed as covering in-app purchasing, and ten years later you, in no way directly or indirectly relying on my patent, implement an in-app purchasing system, I should not be able to recover any money from you, since I in no way assisted your technology. I just happened to have gotten lucky in that I secured a patent with vague language that could be construed to cover a basic piece of tech that 10 years later became popular.
Asses who run companies like Lodsys who survive upon the blood of hard working developers sucking them like a leech should be humiliated in public and sent to prison for the rest of their lives. I really feel sorry for these developers..First, they owe the government their blood (taxes) and now these bastards. God saveth this country!
Patenting inevitable software functionality is just soo odd to me. It's awful that companies like Soverain software who obtained shopping cart patents were able to go after companies such as Amazon and settle because the cost of battling simply wasn't worth it. To say one cannot have an online shopping cart is as crazy as saying "You can't have a cash register in your brick and mortar store."
Theres a new post about patent trolls every other day. This makes me so fucking mad, can't they do anything about this??<p>Couldn't they pass some kind of legislation that says you can't have a shit shell company thats 40 companies deep or.. <i>anything</i>...