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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Sep 15th 2004 11:16am





Online Retailers Sued For Violating Patent On Tracking Visitors

from the oh-come-on dept

The latest in an incredibly long line of silly patent lawsuits comes from BTG (who already has a series of silly patent lawsuits against Microsoft and Apple for a patent on "updates over the internet), who is suing Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Netflix and Overstock for violating their patent on tracking the path a visitor takes through their websites. Once again, you have to wonder how this could ever have been approved as a patent. Looking at the actual patent, it seems likely that just about anyone who uses any kind of advanced log file analysis software probably violates this patent. How dare you analyze how visitors use your site without paying extra!

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    Daniel Lurie, Sep 15th, 2004 @ 1:34pm

    Oh noes! tracking cookies violate patents! :-P

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Wrong target?

    identicon
    Mikester, Sep 15th, 2004 @ 1:59pm

    Not that I agree with this patent whatsoever, but shouldn't they be going after the companies that produce software for analyzing log files and not the companies that use said software?

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    I was there...

    identicon
    Ed Watkeys, Nov 4th, 2004 @ 7:35am

    I was there at Infonautics when these patents were applied for. My name is on four of them. I was unhappy with the patent applications' triviality, but the story was that they were only being filed to be used defensively when Microsoft decided they wanted to destroy us.

    Of course, Infonautics died a slow, painful death, and now the patents are in the hands of extortionists.

    Circle of life.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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