Holy Crap! Stupid Patent Laws again! IBM suing Amazon.com!

Published 24 October 06 11:50 AM | dwalker

I just have to say this is just another example of how screwed up the American government is. No politician will touch it either. They're just too lame.

IBM said that Amazon.com has willfully infringed and continues to infringe on a number of key IBM patents, including:

US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.
US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive Network.
US 7,072,849 - Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service.
US 5,446,891 - Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities.
US 5,319,542 - Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue.

This is ridiculous. IBM if successful could then go out and sue every person who's every developed a web application!!

This is just one example of many I am sure!

Sponsor

Filed under: ibm, patent law, amazon.com, government

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS

Comments

# Brendan said on October 24, 2006 1:38 PM:: I agree it is kind of crazy, but I agree with being able to do this. What i disagree with is that people sometimes win these. I think it is important, because sometimes the infringement is legitimate. I disagree with the outlandish claims that win. Some of those claims are crazy. I disagree with a lot of the stuff people patent. Lets hope the courts agree with you and throw this out.
# G. Alan Hofmann said on October 31, 2006 10:47 AM:: There are many stupid software patents (SSP's) but these are not SSPs. Consider the state of computing WHEN THESE WERE ISSUED. No web. Modems at 300 baud (thats 300 bits per sec); mostly terminal mode access; some X-windows. Online access were things like text based compuserve. These are good. Prescient. Wish I had 'em. BUT the problem is that they have not been applied generally. It would be interesting to see how IBM has applied them over the years.

Name (required)
Your URL (optional)
Comments (required)
Remember Me?
Enter the code you see below

About dwalker

David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.

His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.

After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.

Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.

He is the current President of the Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.