Patent Hoarding Firm Sues Google, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL, IAC & Borders For Automating Email Responses

from the because-no-one-would-have-done-that-without-the-patent dept

It's time for yet another patent lawsuit filed in Marshall, Texas by a firm that appears to do nothing other than buy up patents and sue big companies. This time, the patent hoarding firm is called Polaris IP, and it's apparently one of a bunch of patent hoarding firms associated with a single patent attorney. He's suing Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Borders, AOL and IAC for using a rules-based system to process emails. The patent, as you might expect is extremely broad and seems to cover the obvious idea of setting up some rules by which an email is automatically sorted, or even a reply is selected. Lots of companies use such systems -- and while the concept may not have been widespread in 1998 when the patent was filed, does anyone really believe that it wasn't where the industry would have naturally (obviously) headed? Does anyone really believe that without this patent, no one would be using such rule-based sorting of emails?

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