Store Payment Info In Your Online Store? Watch Out For Patent Infringement Lawsuits

from the pay-now dept

Bill Squier alerts us to the news that a bunch of companies have been sued for daring to store consumer payment information and allow either stored value payments or one-click payments on their site. The article linked here focuses on Apple as a defendant, and notes 14 other companies were sued as well, but in researching this, I found that Joe Mullin actually wrote about another batch of companies (20 of them) that were sued back in April. The earlier lawsuit included Google, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Mastercard, Visa, Vivendi, Disney and Western Union among others. The more recent lawsuit has (as mentioned) Apple, Best Buy, Amazon, American Express, Barnes & Noble, Citigroup and eBay among others. So... basically any online e-commerce site, credit card company or big bank.

As for the patents in question, they're all a variation on a "method and apparatus for conducting electronic commerce transactions using electronic tokens." The specific patents are 7,376,621, 7,249,099, 7,328,189 and 7,177,838. Reading through the claims, this seems like an incredibly typical online system for storing payment info and seeing if the person can actually pay. Since the patent system defenders among our readers get quite upset whenever I say something seems "obvious" to me, let's flip this around. Can anyone explain how these concepts were not obvious at the time of filing?

Not surprisingly, the cases have been filed in Marshall, Texas... and as Joe Mullin figured out, the guy who is running "Actus" is a lawyer known for representing some infamous patent hoarding companies. He also discovered that the lawyer representing Actus in these lawsuits appears to share an office (or at least the same address) with the son (who is also a patent attorney) of the judge handling the case. At some point, do people start questioning whether or not there's a conflict of interest there?

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Does ActiBlizsion Make Sense? Can A Merged Activision And Blizzard Really Work?

from the the-studio-model-at-work dept

The big news in the tech world this weekend, of course, is the slightly complicated merger between video game firms Blizzard and Activision to form the not-particularly-creatively-named Activision Blizzard. You can read the link above to figure out the complicated parts, including Vivendi's role, as well as the various amounts of cash going into the deal from both sides. As for the rationale behind the deal, it's one of those deals that seems to make sense on paper. It makes the combined company somewhere around the size of EA, the major player in the space. It also aligns the complementary strong points of each firm. Activision is big in console games like Guitar Hero while Blizzard is big in multi-player online games like World of Warcraft. Blizzard also has a strong presence in Asia. So, on paper, it sounds like a great deal. The tricky part will be actually making it work. Even with such clear complementary successes, it's not always so easy to merge two large players like this with different approaches to the market. What almost always happens when two large companies merge is that one side ends up taking over and the other group fights for a while and then leaves -- taking much of the reason for the merger away. Even more complicated in this case is that both companies are pretty dependent on coming up with new "big hits" on a regular basis to keep bringing in the revenue. EA's success (whether on purpose or not) has largely been driven by the ability to release "franchise" games that people will buy the next version of every year -- particularly in the sports arena. If the merger makes the company take its eye off the ball, leading to a weak set of products, it could be quite damaging. Maybe the companies will pull it off. Maybe they can figure out a way to actually build on their separate strengths without fighting themselves -- but it's a big bet to take.

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Universal Music Execs Finally Recognizing That It Needs To Make Its Money On Complementary Goods

from the slowly,-but-surely dept

The press and various tech blogs have had something of a field day with the news of Vivendi's CEO, Jean-Bernard Levy, calling Apple's iTunes' contract "indecent." Vivendi, of course, owns Universal Music, a company that has been rather aggressive in trying to squeeze money out of just about everyone while searching for new business models. However, reader Cannen writes in to point out that, while the "indecent" quote is getting all the headlines, there's a much more interesting quote buried further down in the article. Levy then is talking about Universal Music's plans to make money, and there are a few very interesting quotes:

Fleshing out UMG's strategy, Levy said it planned to focus on better exploiting the "monetization of an artist's image" which included branded clothes and TV shows. "This is what we hope will revive our business," Levy said. "People indulge in piracy but spend a lot of money on many other things that are linked to an artist." Levy forecast that "in the not so distant future", traditional music products such as DVDs and CDs would make up less than 50 percent of music publishing revenues.

That sounds shockingly similar to what some of us have been advocating for about a decade -- which had record industry insiders telling us we didn't understand their business at all. Of course, it's not all the way there. What's missing is the realization that if you stop thinking of it as "piracy" and start thinking of it as "promotion" then you want people to share the content, recognizing that it will spread further, creating more fans with more interest in buying all those other things linked to the artist. Of course, if any of the record labels want to get a better idea of how to do this, they should contact us. We could have helped them avoid much of the mess of the past ten years. There's still time to make sure that the next ten aren't even worse.

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