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

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

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

Amazon is approved for a patent on the technology behind their affiliate program. Wow, this really has the potential to shake things up a bit. Will software patents like this destroy internet commerce?
posted by webshaping on Feb 27, 2000 - 3 comments