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Technology: 10 Most Wanted Bad Patents — Wanted Dead
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is picking a fight against some of the most notoriously bad patents that are on the books. Coming up with a list of ten isn’t easy. Patents like Amazon’s single click on-line shopping or the ubiquitous hyperlink are good examples of bad patents, but the EFF is targeting bad patents with owners that are trying to bully others for cash.
The EFF has had some success in their crusade. They succeeded in invalidating a patent by Clear Channel and Live Nation to transmit live concerts on the Internet. They are a not-for-profit company that originally founded in 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow.
Of their current top ten, they’ve managed to get the US Patent and Trademark office interested enough to put under review four of them. One of these is a patent held by test.com to administer on-line tests or assessments and then to be able to report the score results on-line. Test.com was targeting universities to get payment who they say used their patented test methodology. Other patents under review include Ideaflood’s patent on personalized subdomains and Neomedia Technologies’ patent on directory lookups.
Patents on the EFF top ten that are not yet under review include some related to VOIP, streaming media and natural language processing.
While the EFF only has resources to target a few of the very many bad patents, every little bit helps. And in the process the US Patent and Trademark Office may come around to developing a better patent process and system.
