Contextual Advertising In Email May Be Patented - And Not By Google
from the silly-patent-wars dept
Here we go again with more pointless patent battles that will do more to hold back, rather than encourage, innovation. While Google has made the big publicity splash (with both good and bad publicity) concerning their Gmail offering that puts contextual text ads alongside email based on the contents of the email, another company applied for a patent on a similar idea well before Google applied for their own patent. Now, there's almost certain to be some sort of patent battle concerning this type of offering, which will do little (if anything) to help ensure better solutions reach the public. Instead, it will just tie up lawyers in a long term battle that will pay off handsomely for lawyers - but only delay innovation for end users. Besides, I still wonder how such an idea is patentable? It's not as if it wasn't obvious. Hell, even I came up with the idea before Google announced their product - and if I could think it up, it's pretty hard to say that it's "non-obvious."
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
this is becoming a topic unto itself.
Perhaps ya need a catagory called
" Techpatent " :-)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]