Google and Others Sued For Automating Email 273
Dotnaught sends us to InformationWeek for news of the latest lawsuit by Polaris IP, which holds a patent on the idea of responding automatically to emails. The company has no products. It brought suit in the Eastern District in Texas, as many patent trolls do — though the article informs us that that venue has been getting less friendly of late to IP interests, and has actually invalidated some patents. The six companies being sued are AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo. All previous suits based on this patent have been settled.
Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually patents that seem stupid aren't quite ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that *well* before procmail there were products and academic papers covering exactly this subject matter in detail. How a patent like this ever passes the laugh test, I don't know.
Developing products on someone else's insight ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Normally, conventional practices and ethics dictate that when you make money by thinking, you use some kind of original thought.
This is almost as stupid as one click shopping. (Score:3, Insightful)
Software Patents are acts of fraud against the consumer and users.
http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html [threeseas.net]
Re:vacation(1) released in 1983 (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what is wrong with Slashdot.
stop settling with patent trolls (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WHO? (Score:3, Insightful)
But doesn't that mark you as an easy target?
Can you be more specific? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you be more specific on exactly where he is an "idiot"?
So far, so good.
Yes.
Yes. If recipient == X then do Y.
Not only "classifying" but also responding.
Seems like he was right and you were wrong.
Re:one mans idea is another mans patent troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 (Score:3, Insightful)
Which isn't what this patent is about. This patent is about running a message through a text classification algorithm to determine what kind of message it's likely to be, pulling a canned response from a database if it matches a known category and sending that response, otherwise flagging it for human attention. Did the example do all of these things? If not, it isn't useful prior art.
Re:stop settling with patent trolls (Score:2, Insightful)
My opinion is that these companies that keep getting hit with these patent troll lawsuits should just make an example of one of these guys: fight the lawsuit and start parallel procedures to invalidate each an every one of the other patents that the trolls have, until they are left with no IP and have to fold.
It would be expensive, but the message would be clear and in the long run it might even be cheaper than fighting each new patent troll individually.
I usually don't agree with the "prolong the lawsuit until they give up" method because it's an abuse of the system and is generally the wrong/evil way to win a lawsuit.
Those who forget history... (Score:3, Insightful)
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
--Rudyard Kipling
Re:finally on topic! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 (Score:1, Insightful)