A company named Pangea Intellectual Properties (PanIP) is suing 11 US companies for patent infringement. Pangea owns patents concerning the display of text and images on e-commerce Web sites, as well as a patent covering automated credit checking for online transactions.
The lawyer representing Pangea says that the number of sites potentially infringing the company's patents could run into the millions, giving Pangea's patents, and these early cases concerning them, an importance for any business hoping to sell its products online.
This is as ridiculous as the patent refused to Amazon.com by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1999. Amazon.com wanted to patent a "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network." Details on this attempt can be found here.
And don't forget British Telecom who wanted to sue many companies because it owns an obscure patent about hyperlinks. You can read Linking Patent Goes to Court (Reuters, Feb. 7, 2002) or Attack of the Zombie Rembrandts (Seth Shulman, MIT Technology Review, May 2002) about the BT silly case.
A note for curious people: do you know the meaning of Pangea?
A hypothetical supercontinent that included all the landmasses of the earth before the Triassic Period. When continental drift began, Pangea broke up into Laurasia and Gondwanaland.
(Definition from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Published by Houghton Mifflin Company)
Let's hope that PanIP will also soon break up!
Sources: Sam Costello, InfoWorld, May 15, 2002; and various other stories
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