There are different levels of ridiculousness when it comes to patent lawsuits, with the lowest of the low being patent lawsuits based more on spite than on any legitimate claim. For a while, it seemed like Ray Niro's use of the infamous JPG patent, to sue a bunch companies he just didn't like, was perhaps alone in that category. But, it appears that we now have a new entrant. Apparently, some company (who we won't even name, since there's a good chance it's doing this just to get press attention) sued a more well-known competitor for patent infringement, over a location-based services patent. Looking over the patent itself it's difficult to see how it was approved. People were talking about location-based profile matching a decade ago, let alone five years ago when this patent was filed.

TechCrunch wrote a post mocking the lawsuit as a weak attempt to get press coverage (it worked!), while noting that TechCrunch itself was partnered with the sued company to provide a "co-branded community." This apparently caused the patent holder to amend the lawsuit and include TechCrunch as a defendant. Apparently, there were no threats or notification (though, the guy claims he tried to call TechCrunch). This will likely get tossed out incredibly quickly, as any judge will recognize that TechCrunch is just licensing its brand, not supplying the technology (and also hopefully question the validity of the patent itself). Already, though, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is planning to countersue, so this could get fun.

The patent holder claims that adding TechCrunch to the lawsuit had nothing to do with the original post, but that's rather difficult to believe. There's also this somewhat amusing quote from the patent holder:

"TechCrunch can say whatever they want, and I applaud them. But no one has the right to infringe on a patent that I worked very, very hard for many years to bring about -- not just on paper but in reality."

Yes, and thanks to a broken patent system, you now get to dump a totally frivolous lawsuit on a site that clearly did not infringe on your highly questionable patent. Just like Thomas Jefferson intended.

Al Gore, who, last we checked had founded a "citizen journalism"-based TV channel and internet site, has apparently told the RSA conference that one of the terms of his keynote speech at the event is that no press are allowed (and no photographs or audio or video recording either). That may have made sense years ago, but in this day and age, where everyone is a "reporter" and everyone has an outlet, it seems rather ridiculous to even think that you can ban "press," let alone make it a clause in a speaking agreement. Last year, the same event drew 17,000 people. You have to figure that a decent number of them have blogs, social networking pages, Twitter accounts and whatnot -- and a very high percentage probably have mobile phones with cameras on them as well (and, of course, it doesn't hurt that CNET appears to be offering to give people a free fleece for taping the event). Sorry, Mr. Vice President, even if you ban them, the press will be attending your talk.

You may have noticed lately that whenever a story breaks about a young person doing something bad (say, shooting up a school or losing a bank billions of dollars), one of the first things the press does is rush to MySpace, Facebook or other social networks to see what they can learn about the person in question. Apparently, that's ticking off some of the people whose profile info is being used. Thus, a media industry watchdog in the UK is trying to come up with guidelines for the use of such info. This seems a little odd, of course. The info you put on your public profile is just that: public. So getting upset that it's being used in the press seems a bit questionable. Instead of setting guidelines for the media, why not just remind people that public info is public?