Here is an excerpt from an article that you may also find interesting:
"Much has been in the press lately about the explosion of ?Internet
patents.? The much-ballyhooed Amazon.com one-click patent and the
Priceline.com ?name your own price? patent are two recent examples.
Here are other recent examples:
· Time based hardware button for application launch, a.k.a., a
mouse-click (owned by Microsoft) (U.S. Patent No. 6,727,830.)
· Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
· The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
· Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
· Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
· Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
· Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
· Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
· Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.) and
· Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)
Many of these ?Internet patents? are actually for methods of
operation, or business methods, instead of actual hard technology.
Business method patents came to attention most dramatically in the
wake of the State Street Bank and Trust case. In State Street Bank &
Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir.
1998) ("State Street"), the court reviewed prior patentability
decisions and announced a new test of statutory subject matter for
inventions involving mathematical algorithms, which, as a general
rule, are not patentable. The court held that to be patentable, the
algorithm must be applied in a useful way, and that the transformation
of data could be sufficient to qualify the algorithm as useful.
Although the holding arose in the context of a financial asset pooling
process, it can be applied to any genre of business. Thus, inventions
ranging from an online retailer?s method of tracking sales, to a
method for automated crop fertilization are patentable so long as they
are new and non-obvious (the two other qualifications for receiving a
patent).
By upholding State Street?s patent on calculated mutual-fund returns
the court sparked a surge of applications for electronic business
patents. Spurred by this new opportunity to gain a competitive edge
in the market while protecting their own technology, companies such as
Priceline.com (Patent No. 6,041,308) and Amazon.com (Patent No.
5,960,411) were among the first to apply for and receive patents on
specific internet business methods. The Priceline.com patent is for
?system and method for motivating submission of conditional purchase
offers,? and the Amazon.com patent is for ?method and system for
placing a purchase order via a communications network.?
The issuance of such patents has obviously spawned much high-profile
litigation as patent owners rush to try to license their patents and,
if rebuffed, file infringement lawsuits. For example, Amazon.com sued
Barnes and Noble on October 21, 1999, in Seattle for infringing its
?one-click? patent. U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman entered an
injunction against the Barnes and Noble ?Express Lane? service used on
the Barnes and Noble Web site ?bn.com.? See Amazon.com v.
Barnesandnoble.com, 73 F. Supp.2d 1228 (W.D. Wash. 1999). On
February 14, 2001, a three judge panel for the Federal Circuit
reversed the injunction, finding that Bn.com had raised sufficient
doubt about the patent?s validity to avoid an injunction. See
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=Fed&navby=case&no=001109.
The appellate court, stopped short, however, of invalidating the
one-click patent. The parties later settled the suit in March 2002
(see http://news.com.com/2100-1017-854105.html).
Similarly, Priceline.com sued Microsoft in October 1999 in U.S.
District Court in Connecticut over Microsoft?s travel service
Expedia?s ?Hotel Price Matcher? service. That litigation was settled,
with Expedia continuing to operate its Price matcher service and
paying a royalty to Priceline.com.
In August 2003, Eolas Technologies won a $520 million judgment
against Microsoft after a jury determined that Microsoft had violated
Eolas' patent when it designed its Internet Explorer browser to run
mini-applications that allow Web users to fill out forms and use other
interactive features. Microsoft has appealed that decision, and the
patent office agreed to review the patent after the standard-setting
World Wide Web Consortium challenged it.
There has been no shortage of other attempts to invalidate some of
these Internet patents by, e.g., showing evidence of ?prior art?
sufficient to invalidate a patent. ?Prior art? means the state of
knowledge existing or publicly available either before the date of an
invention or more than one year prior to the date the patent
application was filed. If prior art can be shown, it will invalidate
a patent since the prior art shows that some embodiment of the claimed
invention existed prior to the date claimed by the instant inventor."
Any patent attorney can help you file a patent application on a method
of operation, or, as you say, an application for a business method
patent. If you provide the name of a large city near your location, I
can give several referrals if you wish. Or, you can look up these
patents by patent number at uspto.gov and see who the attorney(s) of
record is/are. |
