You may be violating a patent
- From: Eric Eldred <eldred@[redacted]>
- Subject: You may be violating a patent
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 14:38:14 -0500
If the court decisions favoring a business method
patent for delivering online material are upheld, you
may be violating E-Data's patent when you distribute
books online to users' computers. If that is so,
expect to cough up a lot of money to stay out of
jail or keep in 'business'.
Seth Shulman wrote about this in Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/mar01/shulman.asp
(He nicely refers to Dickens's 'Bleak House' and
makes a link to an online text of it.)
the appeals decision text is at:
http://www.patents.com/ige/99-1324.htm
Another reason to fight this crazy 'strong intellectual
property rights' movement by corporations against us,
I maintain.
[Moderator: I'll note that the links above would appear to indicate that
the patent is specifically on *selling* downloadable content.
So, those of us who simply give away _Bleak House_ and other
such books appear to be out of harm's way on this particular case
(which is not to say that this makes the patent any better, but
just that it might not be quite as broad as stated above) - JMO]