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Life Imitates The Onion |
posted by Vurbal at 2 years ago
It seems that the patent licensing firm responsible for the dumbest patent I've ever seen is suing Netflix for recommending DVDs to their customers without paying a licensing fee for "optimizing interest potential. " That's right, according to their lawyers, if you categorize customer preferences based on prior activity and make recommendations to them based on that criteria you're supposed to be paying patent royalties.
The best part is the the diagram included with the patent filing which clearly shows its complete lunacy.
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Yup. That's the entire patent. The only thing that would make less sense than granting this patent would be upholding it in court. Unless the Netflix legal team is senile and doesn't speak English I don't see that happening.
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IanFarquhar wrote at 2 years ago
ROTFL!!!
OMG, it looks like they're trying to patent... the sub-category!!! Yeah, I don't see several thousand years of prior art there.
What the patent number on this "innovation"? It could be amusing to read the rest of their claims.
You know the old phrase about the lunatics running the asylum? That's what's happening in pretty much every patent office worldwide right now. :(
Ian.
Nice
Ha! See, this is the insanity involved with some of this intellectual property law... Not saying it doesn't serve an important purpose, but come on -- the potential for abuse is so huge...