Tongo's Blog

Winners..almost

The USPTO has revoked MercExchange's patent on the 'Buy it Now' feature. Ebay was sued for infringement by MercExchange and was ordered to pay damages but no mention was made about an injunction as far as Ebay continued use of the feature. The case is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. As in the case of RIM vs NTP, the USPTO has struck down the patent behind the whole case since it is a 'common' feature. Whether that makes any difference in the Ebay case, who knows.

Losers..sort of

Microsoft lost its own patent fight against Eolas a while ago over its use of interactive content with ActiveX. They have now announced that the next updates on April 11 will carry changes to Internet Explorer that might prove a little annoying to a lot of users and a pain to developers. For interactive content, you will now need to click on the content and then click on a popup notification before you can interact with the embedded content. Just one more click for you before you can start playing your flash game. There are work-arounds already posted on Microsoft's website and other sites.
The real losers in this one would be the few(hopefully) developers who have a lot of content that needs to be updated to work under these conditions. I feel your pain my friends.

To the relief of all Blackberry users, RIM agreed to pay NTP about 612 Million dollars to settle the patent infringement lawsuit that threatened to shutoff the Blackberry services. Who cares..

The point to note is that NTP just convinced RIM to pay then $612 million for nothing. Yes, they own the patents even though that is questionable and the Patent Office does not agree. They have nothing to actually show that this was a workable idea that they had patented. The whole patent system has turned into a joke and a haven for people who prey on others' success. I have nothing against people patenting their ideas and inventions but a few minutes of perusing through the various patents on the USPTO site and you'll see how ridiculous the whole system has become.

That said, you have to give credit to NTP for actually sticking this one out even when the patent office was busy invalidating their patents one after the other.

Persistence always pays off.