Comments on: A Patent On…. The SCRIPT tag

By: paulhan

paulhan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:53:12 +0000

This is seriously bad news. we already see some guy in Florida suing people for developing and putting wish lists on their site. He starts off with the little guys in the hope of getting a settlement. No doubt if he gets a judment in his favour, he’ll go after the likes of Amazon using the money from the prior settlements to fund himself.
Am I right in thinking that both plaintiff and defendant have to pay their own costs in America? If so, this has to be changed so that the loser pays. This would stop most of these nuisance claims before they could even start. Another way might be for the defendant to represent him/herself in the hope that if enough people do it, it would bring the court system to its knees and force change that way.
Ajaxian is right, if people have to spend time and resources away from their main job of innovating, it’s going to drive most of the American software industry to India, or some other country that doesn’t allow/respect software patents.

By: someguynameddylan

someguynameddylan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:15:03 +0000

Feat not everyone, we can always go back to the good ‘ol iframe request :)

By: Aimos

Aimos — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:26:15 +0000

I don’t get it why you can (software) patent technology you simply combine. All parts exist on its own, you just use them together and whoops another patent is born. This is a normal Engineer job to do that – that’s what you get paid for.

Companies should try to invent faster and not to patent faster.

By: mhart

mhart — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:36:57 +0000

Just a small correction: this patent dates from 2001, not 2005. Current U.S. patent law provides for 20 years from the date of filing.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:44:37 +0000

@hrinterop,
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I agree, but obviously we are at that point. One of the reasons you get patents (I have a top Menlo Park patent attorney for my start-up, and I’ve recently been through this discussion) is to bargain. Someone comes after you, you go after them, and a settlement is reached.
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If you blow off the patents in a startup, you put your company, employees, and your investors at risk. You may not even get investors without them.
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I don’t think it gets fixed without comprehensive reform. I can personally dislike software patents, but it’s irresponsible of me to not go after them.

By: hrinterop

hrinterop — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:35:54 +0000

Nosredna, If we are at the point where one needs to patent common sense stuff just to be safe, then Ajaxian’s caution about a future “serious meltdown” is dead on. We’re simply adding a layer of cost and bureaucracy that can build up to be a real drag on innovation and hurt all parties in the market. I don’t know what the answer is — may be it comes down to changing the minds of people like AnM8tR’s former boss who seemingly patented something for the sake of it.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:57:11 +0000

Patents are also defensive, so no one else can go after you later for the common sense stuff you do.

By: AnM8tR

AnM8tR — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:47:15 +0000

hrinterop is quite right. BTW, if you raise costs (they’re already pretty high), they’ll just go with Patent Pending.

I wrote two patents at a previous company, one of which I was quite proud. The other, a company officer filed on my behalf on something he almost literally dug out of my garbage. I never thought of it as clever nor unique, much less patentable. And I factored it out of the product because it just wasn’t a good idea. But it was a patent that the company could wave around in investors faces.

I think this is how a vast majority of them work. Rare is the Eolas problem, or the GIF scare. And the GIF LZW patent actually brought about the superior PNG format.

By: hrinterop

hrinterop — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:31:39 +0000

It isn’t a patent on the SCRIPT tag, but it is almost as silly. This is one of those low value/no value patents that they’ll never be able to monetarize — i.e., license — but they’ll hang on to defensively. This type of patent just adds to everyone’s costs in terms of legal review, etc., and will not likely bring any material benefit to the “inventors.” I guess there are organizations in which the shear number of patents filed/held is treated as as a performance metric. Also, the legal department drives this stuff too because they fear if their company doesn’t patent an invention (no matter how thin) someone else will. I’m not sure what the answer is. USPTO and other patent authorities could increase the cost of filing to the point where it no longer made sense to file junk patents — but this would likely hurt those who you wouldn’t want to hurt — your small inventor of things of value.

By: jonsmirl

jonsmirl — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:22:27 +0000

The Zaplets patent on forms HTML email is another one. They seem to think that the people who developed the HTML email standard hadn’t thought of using it for forms, and then they discovered the use.

By: itchyrich

itchyrich — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:45:22 +0000

Assuming the interpretation of the patent is correct, they don’t really have a hope of enforcing it. There’s plenty of prior art.

I started work for Moreover in 2005 and they’d been using Javascript-based RPC for years.

By: TNO

TNO — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:33:41 +0000

I’m pretty certain the W3C patent policy covers that