Rich Fiscus
29 Aug 2010 17:30
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has begun a campaign of patent infringement lawsuits against companies ranging from YouTube and Facebook to eBay and Office Depot.
Allen's patents were originally granted to his company, Interval Media, which shut down in 2006. The company w
"We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are the way to protect that," said a spokesman for Allen. When asked about the notable absence of Microsoft and Amazon from the suit, the spokesman wrote in an email, "This is the most recent step in a long process, but it is not necessarily the end of the process."
But do the patents themselves actually have any value? If so, why wasn't Allen's company able to make money on them to begin with?
The patents include 6,757,682, "Alerting Users To Items of Current Interest," which covers suggesting items from an online store based on the content of the current page. AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, Yahoo & YouTube are all accused of infringing on this patent.
The first question which comes to mind is how this wouldn't be considered obvious for anyone in the online selling industry? Just because something hasn't been worked out in code already doesn't mean other developers haven't thought of it.
More likely, what it means is either it's a solution for an as of yet non-existent (or at least minor) problem or it's simply not something they've decided to implement (or prioritize).
Certainly the concept of suggesting products to someone based on what they appear to be interested in already isn't new. It's been done by brick and mortar merchants as long as they've existed. Even before brick or mortar themselves were invented.
Is the idea that an online merchant would benefit from adopting this standard business practice anything but obvious?
So what about the individual bits of the process? They could be a revolutionary approach. But really it's not. The following steps are listed in the patent.
There's nothing revolutionary, or even inobvious, about these steps. What's revolutionary is actually figuring out the metrics to use for steps two and three.
In fact that step is so inobvious, Netflix gave out $1 million for helping them improve it. They could just as easily have worked out an agreement to license Allen's patent, but that wouldn't have helped them in any way.
Patents are supposed to be given for finding innovative solutions but all this patent does, like the others listed in Allen's lawsuit, is list a few vague steps required to computerize every day human activities.
Patents 6,034,652 & 6,788,314 are over adding audio and video content to other content for the purpose of attracting a viewer's attention. The suit alleges AOL, Apple, Google &Yahoo are infringing.
Patent 6,263,507 covers automated comparison of different audio and video files, which Allen claims AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo & YouTube are infringing.
In both these cases the patents are, again, simply explaining the steps required for a computer to duplicate tasks already performed by humans.
TV broadcasters have added information to the content they're broadcasting for decades. That information just happened to be selected by a person rather than a computer.
For much longer, people have provided comparisons of music to share with other people in the form of everything from reviews to personal recommendations.
Essentially all Allen's patents do is take human solutions and explain that they still apply to doing business or providing a service on the internet. Nowhere do they advance the implementation of these solutions, which is where all the value lies.
Simply recognizing the vague shape of a technological implementation of an existing solution isn't inobvious, and neither is it valuable. Building a technological solution and using it to improve your operation is where the challenge is.
And there's no need for the IP protection of patents as an incentive for those solutions to be developed and implemented. If selling more products, attracting more visitors or generating more pageviews doesn't justify coming up with a solution, is it really worth anything anyway?
Punishing the people who come up with the answers to compensate others who merely point out the questions is completely backward.