Contextual Advertising In Email May Be Patented – And Not By Google

Legal Issues

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.”