Ben Bradley wrote:
On Fri, 6 May 2011 23:02:41 -0700, "Bill Graham"
wrote:
Frank wrote:
On Fri, 6 May 2011 15:04:45 -0700, in 'rec.audio.pro',
in article Sue you, sue me blues,
"Bill Graham" wrote:
Arny Krueger wrote:
"Bill Graham" wrote in message
Sean Conolly wrote:
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
Peavy and Behringer are at it:
http://www.audioprointernational.com...rs-MUSIC-group
http://www.harmonycentral.com/blogs/...inst-behringer
Eh, just another day in the life of a large corporation.
Thanks to the way the way the US Patent office will
allow patents on broad technical concepts, it's pretty
hard to develop anything without infringing on someone's
patents. As a result, patent suits are more of a poker
game with two sides presenting their vioalted patents on
the other guy, and the result is usually an award for
the guy holding the most patents and a cross licensing
agreement.
I saw that about 15 years ago when I was involved in getting a
couple of patents as an employee of a large company. The more patents
a company has, the greater chance of finding another company
infringing on one when the other company sues the first company for
infringement, then they can sign a cross-license agreement and
everyone's happy. Apparently the most embarrassing thing that could
happen is a company having to pay a license fee to a competitor.
Some years back I worked for a company that had
purchased a patent for (wait for it ) - selecting
mutiple items on a website and paying for them
electronically (aka the ubiquitous 'shopping cart'). The
patent was granted to cover anything which allowed a
terminal on the customer end to purchase more multiple
items through a terminal on the vendor end, if it was
completed with an electronic payment of any kind. When I left
the company they were busily pursuing
lawsuits against pretty much every e-retail company on
the planet. Sean
That's like suing Safeway for providing their customers
with a shopping cart and suggesting to them that they
browse the store and put whatever they want into the cart
for future checkout.... Ridiculous!
Providing a recepticle of some sort for customers to use to
collect their purchases before paying is an idea, which is neither
patentable nor copyrghtable.
It may be patented under a "business method" or whatever it's
called, but those are recent (in the last 20 years or so) and somewhat
controversial patents.
A particular implementation of that concept may be both patentable
and/or copyrightable.
Every time the context changes (as in brick and mortar store to
web store) the same basic idea may need to be re-implemented and
the new implementation might again be patentable.
But your, "basket" on a web page purchase is a virtual one. Can
that be patented? It is actually just a part of your order, and
the word basket is just a convenient way to refer to it. Patenting
it is like patenting the english language. If you patent the words
"buy, checkout add, order, quantity, send and carrier, you will be
guranteeing that nobody can buy anything on the web without paying
you a comission.
Yeah, that looks like a patent a company would love to have, and
spend lots of attorney money if they though they had a reasonable
chance of getting and enforcing it.
A lot of "unreasonable" patents have been passed. Look up broccoli
patent to find one - it took a bunch of broccoli-growing companies
pooling their money together to challenge the one patent one company
had which covered the basics of how to grows broccoli.
I read a lot about the need to clean up the US Patent Office (it
was a year or two between applying for a patent and it being granted,
and a huge number of patents like the broccoli thing were granted) in
recent decades, but I don't know if anything became of that.
But let's not forget Amazon's (in)famous 1-Click patent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click
It seems to me that the extra convenience of doing it with one click
would be the reward in itself. IOW, the extra business they would
get from folks like me who don't mind paying a few bucks more to
escape the hasstle of doing all the peperwork should be reward
enough without getting a patent on the system, but, what do I know?
The idea is to stop OTHER online services from doing the same thing
(or at worst force them to pay Amazon some amount every time a
competitor's customer buys something with it), insuring that those who
like shopping that way can only do it with Amazon.
Sounds like something that might be judged, "In restraint of trade" to me.
Not to change the subject, but I'd sure like to free up some of the music
written before 1950. After all, its over 60 years ole by now, and the
original composers are mostly dead and gone, so who is profiting from
selling this stuff? Someone who'se only claim to fame is they have a faster
lawyer. I used to go down to our local pizza place once a month and listen
to a 5 piece dixieland band while I ate my pizza. Then BMI sued the pizza
place and now the guys can't play there without the owner paying BMI $1000
every year for songs that were written before Louis Armstrong was born.