Southamerica, you were commenting on how the Americans had 100 lawyers to 1 Japanese lawyer. Guess what these American parasites have been up to? They've been busy making it easy for Patent trolls to generate useless and parasitic lawsuits on baseless patents. Americans need to be more scared of their lawyers than the taliban, their lawyers are coming up with increasingly innovative methods to leech off and kill productive manufacturing companies.
http://security.ithub.com/article/I...You+Do+Before+Someone+Else+Does/167480_1.aspx
Intellectual Security: Patent Everything You Do, Before Someone Else Does
REVIEW DATE: 05-DEC-2005
By Rob Garretson
Fortified IP portfolios are the best defense against proliferating "business-method" patents.
Do you ever go online to reorder office supplies from Staples or OfficeMax? Are you a regular customer of the Internet grocery service Peapod.com? Then Kenn Fischburg wants a piece of the action.Last May, Fischburg was awarded U.S. Patent No. 6,895,389 for his "Internet Procurement Method." His patent describes a system that lets customers access an online order form that uses stored records of previous purchases and other data to simplify the buying process. He began developing the idea in 1998, to help his steady customers reorder goods on the Internet. Like Amazon.com's "1-click" purchase and Priceline.com's name-your-own-price reverse auction, Fischburg's is one of hundreds of "business-method" patents awarded each year that give the inventor a 20-year monopoly, not on the design of a machine or a physical product, but on a way of doing business. Fischburg's lawyers have begun contacting companies they believe have been using his innovation without the now-necessary license. "The U.S. Patent and Trade Office is a tremendous reason to love the U.S.," says Fischburg, owner of Consumers Interstate Corp., a $20 million seller of office, packaging and janitorial supplies based in Norwich, Conn. "The fact that you can apply for a patent and get protectionâit's tremendous. It's what makes a person want to invent something."Though it may have been more innovative when he filed his patent application, in September 2000, Fischburg's method for simplifying online orders based on past purchases is fairly common among e-commerce sites today. Still, he and his lawyers hope to assert his new intellectual-property rights broadly across a range of industries, not just with his competitors in the office-supply business. "It appears that [Staples and OfficeMax] are using the method," Fischburg says. "It's a legal exercise as to how close people like Peapod are to the claim. But they come close."Fischburg is not alone in his quest to assert intellectual-property rights over a business method that became commonplace in the time it took the PTO to grant his patent. His was among 7,800 applications in 2000 that fell into the PTO's Class 705, which covers most business methods. Among those applications was another patent, awarded to Amazon.com just last month, for its method of encouraging users to write reviews of products they've bought. On that same day, Amazon was also awarded a patent on its technique for ranking multiple-category search results, and another for its method for creating communities (called "purchase circles"), for which it filed patent applications in March 2003 and August 1999, respectively.
What is a troll?
The term "patent troll" is widely used in IP law circles, but its meaning varies depending on which side of the subpoena you're on.
"Those unsavory characters who buy up obscure patents to extort money from innovative and
law-abiding companies."
âSteven Pearlstein, columnist, The Washington Post
"Someone who takes a single patent or a small number of patents and makes an assertion of clearly dubious merit either because the patent is invalid on its face or does not bear on the product it's being asserted against, typically seeking nuisance value."
âPeter Detkin, managing director, Intellectual Ventures LLC, who while an assistant general counsel at Intel Corp. coined the term "patent troll"
A company that "exists solely to license its patents or sue to enforce its patents, and not to develop or commercialize them."
â Jerome B. Friedman, U.S. District Court Judge, describing MercExchange, the Great Falls, Va., company and its injunction against eBay Inc.'s "Buy It Now" feature, found to infringe on its three patents
Troll (trol) n. In Norse Mythology, repulsive dwarfs who lived in caves or other hidden places. They would steal children and property but hated noise.
âThe New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition.
Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002
