The :CueCat finally received its patent this month, eight years after its abject failure in the marketplace. [more inside]
posted by jamaro on Oct 30, 2008 - 46 comments

“I actually ran it by a number of colleagues who teach administrative law and constitutional law,” Professor Duffy said, recalling his own surprise at finding such a fundamental and important flaw. He thought he must have been missing something. Law prof notices that every US patent approved since 2000 was approved unconstitutionally and thus are all probably invalid. Looks like he may be right. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan on May 7, 2008 - 49 comments

Who really invented the telephone? Was it this guy?, or did he just win a foot race to the patent office with this guy or was it really... [more inside]
posted by Rafaelloello on Apr 18, 2008 - 5 comments

[Patent Lawsuit Filter] On Wednesday Sun Microsystems announced a counter suit against Network Appliance, wherein they will draw on their "defensive portfolio" which is "one of the largest patent arsenals on the internet". They are going to be requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of NetApp's filer products from the marketplace, and also seeking monetary damages (half of which they've pledged to donate to the Software Freedom Law Center and Peer to Patent Project). Last month, NetApp sued Sun for patent infringements in ZFS. Earlier this month in Texas, the first ever patent infringement lawsuit against Linux distributors was filed. [more inside]
posted by finite on Oct 26, 2007 - 36 comments

A games and economic theory argument against intellectual property. Watt's on first in academic paper.
posted by klangklangston on Jun 21, 2007 - 42 comments

Peer to Patent goes live. First mentioned on MetaFilter almost two years ago, this project allows open review of patent applications, so that members of the public can better inform patent examiners of prior art. Discussed more on the project blog. This experimental system is part of efforts to improve patent application review. (thanks to ubiquity)
posted by grouse on Jun 18, 2007 - 10 comments

Google Patent Search can be a gold mine for a historical trivia. See the design for bucket seats patented by Steve McQueen, the secret communication system co-created by Hedy Lamarr that paved the way for the frequency hopping used by modern cell phones, the disposable infant garment made by Jamie Lee Curtis, the interactive music generation system made by Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame, and other unusual celebrity patents made by inventors that range from Abraham Lincoln to Zeppo Marx.
posted by jonp72 on Apr 7, 2007 - 15 comments

David Copperfield is stealing my godly powers. Chris Roller believes himself to have godly powers and is suing Copperfield, and also David Blaine, for using them. What better way to protect godly powers than by filing a patent application? Oh, he's suing the Bush administration too.
posted by caddis on Feb 26, 2007 - 22 comments

Buoying Vessels Over Shoals. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln was awarded Patent No. 6469 (drawing and large TIFF files of pages 1, 2, and 3 of the actual patent) for a device for raising stuck riverboats off sand bars. The model he submitted with the patent application is at the National Museum of American History; who made the model is a bit of a mystery. Lincoln is the only United States President to hold a patent. (Other Lincoln-related patents, including the patent for Lincoln Logs.)
[via History Now's timeline of 19th-century inventions.]
posted by kirkaracha on Jan 5, 2007 - 7 comments

Cancer Cure Patented A group of researchers claim that they are patenting a possible cure for cancer involving nothing more than sugar and short-chain fatty acid combination.
posted by TravisJeffery on Jan 4, 2007 - 26 comments

Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights. A suggestion by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on methods to reduce IP rights market distortions in the field of medical and drugs research.
posted by elpapacito on Dec 26, 2006 - 41 comments

Google Patent Search
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium on Dec 13, 2006 - 49 comments

Ballmer: Linux Users Owe Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle yesterday, that Linux infringes upon his company's intellectual property. Does this signal preparations for all out war against the open source community? Microsoft's recent acquisition of Novell was seen as an ominous sign. Or perhaps it's a sign that user friendly versions of linux such as Ubuntu threaten sales of Microsoft's problematic new VISTA OS, scheduled for release Nov. 30th for businesses and Jan. 30, 2007 for consumers?
posted by Skygazer on Nov 17, 2006 - 79 comments

Detecting the erotic (like detecting the humorous) is one of those things that people can do better than any known machine. This new patent seems largely based on "Finding Naked People", a paper in the field of Computer vision.
posted by GeorgeHernandez on Oct 1, 2006 - 12 comments

Injunctions in patent cases not automatic. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision (16 page pdf) on Monday in the dispute between eBay and MercExchange. The Court ruled in favor of eBay finding that the lower Appeals Court erred as a matter of law in creating a general rule that “courts will issue permanent injunctions against patent infringement absent exceptional circumstances.” In the concurring opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Scalia and Ginsberg, Roberts citing Court precedent noted that: “[d]iscretion is not whim, and limiting discretion according to legal standards helps promote the basic principle of justice that like cases should be decided alike.”
posted by three blind mice on May 17, 2006 - 25 comments

Patent squatters Eolas decide to break a significant portion of the websites in the world. (Previously)
posted by Tlogmer on Mar 20, 2006 - 89 comments

Today SCOTUS will hear a case to decide the scope of what can and cannot be patented. At the heart of this case lies the decision about whether a patent can validly include a step of ‘correlating a test result’ that arguably monopolises a basic scientific relationship used in medical treatment ‘such that any doctor necessarily infringes the patent merely by thinking about the relationship after looking at a test result.’ If as expected the court uses this as an opportunity to reign in the scope of what can be patented this will surely be a victory for common sense.
posted by bap98189 on Mar 19, 2006 - 18 comments

"A patent has been granted to a relatively unknown California Web-design firm for an invention its creator says covers the design and creation of most rich-media applications used over the Internet. ... The patent--issued on Valentine's Day--covers all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and video game consoles, says inventor Neil Balthaser, CEO of Balthaser Online, which he owns with his father Ken. 'You can consider it a pioneering or umbrella patent. The broader claim is one that basically says that if you got a rich Internet application, it is covered by this patent.'" (via Jeff Zeldman)
posted by grrarrgh00 on Feb 23, 2006 - 45 comments

Room With A View. Has the view out of your living room window become boring and stale? No problem, build yourself a million dollar Rotating Home. A former office manager, self prclaimed "hobbyist" Al Johnstone has built quite the technological feat [PDF] despite having no engineering background, obtaining around 30 patents in the process.
posted by afx114 on Feb 13, 2006 - 19 comments

Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator which he invented, named 'The N Machine', sitting in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government may confiscate it. This is because the U.S. Patent office automatically denies a patent to any gizmo which purports to produce more energy than it consumes, on the grounds that its personnel are not equipped to evaluate such claims. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Feb 4, 2006 - 138 comments

Cingular applies for patents for emoticons. The cell phone company this week filed a 35-claim application with the U.S. Patent Office for the use of "smilies" in their devices, apparently for some form of key that automatically enters the emoticon. Some experts say this isn't as serious/sincere as it sounds, but you can read the patent application yourself. (via TPM)
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Jan 30, 2006 - 20 comments

Where can a company that owns nothing but legal documents force another company that actually does make products to pay them? In the USA! You too can be a patent troll. Just patent any dumb idea you have -- you'll certainly be awarded the patent -- then sue anyone who makes a product that looks remotely like it could be based on your idea. Congratulations! You made money by punishing people who actually make things! Hooray!
posted by raaka on Jan 23, 2006 - 22 comments

A new meaning for Drug War ? It seems that accepting some Free Trade Agreement conditions may become a life or death decision to some people in Thailand. Some Thai People vehemently disagree with that.
posted by elpapacito on Jan 21, 2006 - 14 comments

The ongoing patent dispute between the patent firm NTP and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) reached a new low today when a U.S. appellate court judge named James Spencer ruled that an earlier settlement of $450M payable to NTP was not valid as it was not finalized properly. Even though the USPO has re-opened the NTP patents and has subsequently rejected most of the patents used in the patent infringement case, RIM was seeking to uphold the earlier settlement in order to avert the possibility of all sales and services from being halted in the United States.
posted by purephase on Nov 30, 2005 - 13 comments

In a landmark decision that is believed to have wide-ranging implications for trademark law, the Supreme Court of Canada today dismissed Lego's claim against Montreal-based rival Mega Bloks.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium on Nov 17, 2005 - 43 comments

Peer to Patent (PtoP): A Modest Proposal This modest proposal harnesses social reputation and collaborative filtering technology to create a peer review system of scientific experts ruling on innovation. [via beSpacific]
posted by MLIS on Jul 16, 2005 - 11 comments

Farmer Homer McFarland is being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Monsanto corporation. His crime? Replanting his crops' own seed, as farmers have done for millennia, which violates the biotech giant's intellectual property rights, the company claims. Quietly, Monsanto's aggressive "seed police" have been suing farmers in 25 states for years, often settling out of court for huge sums, according to the Center for Food Safety's new report, Monsanto vs. US farmers [PDF link]. For more information, also see a new documentary called The Future of Food.
posted by digaman on Jan 15, 2005 - 55 comments

Patentlysilly.com - a semi-regular rundown of strange, cool, scary, and silly patents. For the last 2 sets of entries, the authors have decided to become poetic...
posted by pitchblende on Dec 10, 2004 - 10 comments

Microsoft granted patent for technology that will allow human skin to conduct power and transmit data. Let the jokes begin.(funny drawing here)
posted by anathema on Jun 23, 2004 - 25 comments

Microsoft patents the double-click. Microsoft has been granted a patent on the double-click. The Public Patent Foundation is protesting this as they did Microsoft's patent on the FAT File System. Double-click today, tomorrow... typing. Bwahaha!
posted by josephtate on Jun 2, 2004 - 24 comments

JPEG: worth a 1000 words $1M? "Our patent [for JPEG technology] was on the public record," says Compression Labs. "News: Made a JPEG Image? You're getting Sued!" Is parent company Forgent sue-happy? Did it perhaps not disclose its patent properly? (-via GyrlFilter)
posted by Shane on Apr 26, 2004 - 18 comments

Which abuse of the patent system are you? Take this test to find out. Now that they got it, they're beating distance learning colleges over the head with it, for money. Another obvious bit of programming turns lucrative for one company.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2004 - 12 comments

Eolas® Technologies Inc. owns the plugin concept. Meet US Patent 5,838,906: "The patent claims to cover mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object." Eolas sued Microsoft, was awarded $521 million, Microsoft is appealing, and the W3C held (Macromedia hosted) an ad hoc meeting on the recent court decision and launched a discussion list. Microsoft plans to promptly make changes to Internet Explorer. If this follows through, what are the negative and positive implications?
posted by aaronshaf on Sep 2, 2003 - 29 comments

You Can Patent That? (including Wrigley Chews Over Idea of Viagra Gum)
more: Online Newspapers; Online Auctions; Method of Exercising a Cat; 2 PCs in one; GIF is dead.
posted by MzB on Jun 19, 2003 - 3 comments

Heritage of humanity This month's Monde Diplomatique features an essay by one of the 2002 Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine, John Sulston. Sulston "writes about his battle to make the entire sequence of the genome public despite all the commercial attempts to patent it". His basic point is that: "If we wish to move forward with [Human Genome Sequencing], which will undoubtedly translate into medical advances, the basic data must be freely available for everyone to interpret, change and share, as in the open-source software movement." The public human genome database Sulston refers to, can be found on the Sanger Institute's website.
posted by talos on Dec 13, 2002 - 2 comments

Harvard Mouse Not Patentable In Canada The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a 5-4 judgement Thursday that the so-called Harvard mouse cannot be patented in Canada. The decision here.
posted by drew_alley on Dec 5, 2002 - 6 comments

Left Gets Nod from Right on Copyright Law - A darling of the conservative movement, federal Judge Richard Posner criticizes the Sonny Bono Act and attacks the Patent and Trademark Office for granting "very questionable" business method patents at a lecture organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. (via How Appealing)
posted by ajr on Nov 21, 2002 - 11 comments

An important breast cancer test is now unavailable in British Columbia because of the American company which holds the relevant patent. The B.C. Cancer Agency has been forced to stop the tests after legal threats by Utah-based Myriad Genetics Inc., which has a patent on two genes that can signal whether a woman may develop hereditary breast cancer. I think this is a perfect example of why patenting genes is a terrible idea. Via Slashdot.
posted by homunculus on Oct 21, 2002 - 39 comments

British Telecom patent does not cover the Internet. Yea, another overreaching patent holder has gone down in defeat. BT has a patent for a remote terminal/mainframe/modem combination which they asserted covered linking over the Internet. In a recent opinion the US District Court for the Southern District of New York held that BT's patent was not so broad as to cover the Internet. Thank God. Are some people just too greedy?
posted by caddis on Aug 23, 2002 - 5 comments

Behind The Typeface Presents: Cooper Black. The gripping saga of one typeface's trials and tribulations, following its path from the dizzying heights of stardom to the brink of self-destruction and back again. (Flash 5, approx. 3MB.)
posted by youhas on Jul 26, 2002 - 31 comments

Adobe has won 2.8 million from Macromedia for "patent infringements." Apparently Macromedia may be forced to pull Flash MX from their product line. As an avid Flash-developer I am personally affected. Is there something that we can do about this?
posted by banished on May 3, 2002 - 24 comments

A five-year-old kid from Minnesota has patented a way of swinging on a child's swing. More proof, if anyone needs it, that the government is veering from an institution of reason to an institution of control. At what point is a sufficient degree of absurdity reached that legitimacy is widely recognized to have been abandoned?
posted by rushmc on Apr 19, 2002 - 21 comments

Macromedia claims it owns Adobe patent "Software-maker Macromedia Inc. is claiming it owns the patent to Adobe Systems Inc.'s popular Photoshop program, according to a suit filed in federal court Friday." Macromedia is alleging that in 1998 it patented technology used by Photoshop. Couldn't this only be web-based technology, since Photoshop was around long before 1998?
posted by kirkaracha on Oct 19, 2001 - 8 comments

U.S. Patent 6,304,886, from the fine folks at IBM. "The tool comprises a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text, fields and formulas." (Via Scripting News.)
posted by mrbula on Oct 17, 2001 - 6 comments

The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted by cCranium on Oct 2, 2001 - 8 comments

Australian Man Patents The Wheel This story reads as if it was meant to be in The Onion instead. Freelance patent lawyer John Keogh was issued with an Innovation Patent for a "circular transportation facilitation device" ... in May. But he has no immediate plans to patent fire, crop rotation or other fundamental advances in civilisation.
posted by wackybrit on Jul 2, 2001 - 9 comments

You thought Amazon's One-Click patent and following legal battle was bad... Have you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich lately? You did not cut off the crusts and crimp the edges together, now did you? If so, you just have infringed on U.S. Patent 6,004,596 (currently owned by 'surprise' Smucker). From the patent: "The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter. " Michigan's Albie Foods just sued to have the patent removed. Let's hope they win, or pbjs soon may become an act of civil disobedience...
posted by noom on Mar 3, 2001 - 7 comments

Kill a patent, make a bundle. This is one of the more creative uses of the web to date. A new kind of matchmaker, actually. Patents are a common source of litigation and often a company accused of violating a patent wants to prove that the patent is invalid. The easiest way to do that is to find "prior art", to prove that the invention described by the patent actually existed elsewhere before the owner of the patent filed for it. So this web site offers prizes ($10,000!) for leads to prior art in specific cases. Those offering the prizes are anonymous, though it's often possible to figure out who they are just by the questions they ask if you have a knowledge of disputes in the industry.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Feb 3, 2001 - 3 comments

Altavista to become only search engine
Not really, but they do plan on enforcing several search-related patents that they have, hoping to increase revenue by extorting other search companies. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.... If you index a distributed set of databases - what the Internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents," says CMGI CEO David Wetherell.
posted by daveadams on Jan 18, 2001 - 25 comments

BT sues Prodigy over hyperlink patent another glorious example of "we have nothing better to offer than a really big lawsuit"
posted by bliss322 on Dec 16, 2000 - 5 comments