Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number
5,933,841. Here's the abstract:
A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.
Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted by DragonBoy
on Jan 21, 2003 -
47 comments
More Pseudo-Amazon Layout Fun It used to amaze me that people have entire careers based on ripping off others. Now it's just standard (I apologize for the thousandth post of an
amazon.com tabs comment). The site actually looks like the old Amazon interface hooked up with the current
Altavista site, and created some bizarre, overly-influenced mélange.
posted by Hankins
on Dec 3, 2000 -
12 comments
Bing! Bing! Amazon moves to two rows of tabs! Interesting . . . I've been part of dozens of conversations about what they were going to do when it *just got too wide*. The Amazonization Effect principle dictates that it will take 30-60 days before other big etailers follow suit
because now it's OK to do it.
Just in case I'm a test case here, I've posted the gif
here.
posted by sylloge
on Apr 5, 2000 -
20 comments
