Re: [Patents] 2/26 Internet Tourbus: Pay Per Click?

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> But I digress...  Even the judge at the hearing warned that it may be
> difficult for BT to prove that their 25-year-old patent, filed more
> than a decade before the Web's invention, somehow applies today. "The
> language is archaic," Judge Colleen McMahon said.  She suggested that
> comparing the 1976 computer described in the patent to today's desktop
> PCs was like comparing a dinosaur to a jet plane, and that the
> invention at issue "was already outmoded"  by the time it was patented
> in the US in 1989.

This is true of any software patent and perhaps of most patents.
The patent covers only one functionality, and this functionality may not
have changed since BT claimed it, even if everything around it changed.
Also the prior art does not seem to cover the full functionality but only
some aspects of it.

> But even if they score a partial victory, the court of public opinion
> will find them guilty of an ugly money grubbing contrivance.

At least Eurolinux has congratulated British Telecom, see

        http://www.eurolinux.org/news/btltrD6en.html
        http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/

and I can't find anything particularly ugly in what they are doing.  It is
the judges sitting at the CAFC who are to blame for everything that has
happened.  It won't help anyone in the long run if they bend the law once
more in order to avoid the consequences in a highly publicised case.

I even find the journalist here guilty of an ugly attention defusing
contrivance.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/