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."
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  • identicon
    AMetamorphosis, 20 May 2004 @ 6:33am

    No Subject Given

    Hey Mike,

    this is becoming a topic unto itself.
    Perhaps ya need a catagory called
    " Techpatent " :-)

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    NOBODY, 20 May 2004 @ 10:05am

    No Subject Given

    Mike, why don't you do a story on some of the crazy ebay patents. Did you know that they patented listing items with multiple categories in a "generic" database? Some of their other patents are equally broad. Right now, it looks like ebay is stayting out of the patent enforcement business, but it might make for a good read. Just go to the uspto and do a search. You should find 6,604,107 and 6,523,037 especially interesting.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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