CrunchGear

My question is whether or not this will impact developers and service providers using templated RSS delivery processes and or in fact the RSS 2.0 or other standards.

Can yahoo assert this as a patented process or does it really belong in the public domain?

Where are the effects of aggregating user preferences, such as social bookmarking sites?

The issuance of the patent, would conceivably raise more questions, more than its right to ownership. In effect, does the value to the public outweight its right of presumed discovery.

The patents issued over the past 10 years related to technology, shopping carts and others simply assumes that no one could in fact prove that yahoo didn’t own it.

Wherein many more people have and own intellectual property that now seemingly would be overturned if enforcement is presented as a way to leverage their poor fiscal performances.

My opinion would be that they would actually fail in this attempt and cause them more harm than good from the publics viewpoint.

But hey, its just my opinion and I could be wrong.

Chris

I think that Yahoo…doesn’t have strong ground for this…

Also why would a Yahoo exec http://gigaom.com/2007/01/25/ex-yahoo-exec-now-pageflakes-ceo/

leave for Pageflakes if he had known about this?

This is good for Yahoo bad for the rest of us. If Yahoo pursue this and force sites to change the way they operate, pay them heaps of cash or just force them out of business then they will totally alienate the internet community. Having this patent is potentially a stroke of genius by Yahoo, what they do with it could be really bad.

Tom,

I’ve worked in several fortune 500 companies and rarely do the execs know what their patents cover (unless they patents have been leveraged).

I would think the fact that former Yahoo executive is now the CEO of Pageflakes provides even more reason that those two would strike a deal.

In fact this may be an opportunity for Pageflakes to strike an exclusive and get a big stick themselves.

Given both its early priority date via a vis the Internet landscape as well as its breadth of scope, this does indeed appear to be a very powerful patent.

It should also be noted that even if such customization were accomplished in a (slightly) different manner(s), under the Doctrine of Equivalents (DoE), if the “result” is the same/virtually the same as Yahoo’s method/system, others could still be found to be infringing.

This certainly points out–again–the importance of IP protection in the age of the Internet…a painful lesson Digg’s Mr. Rose is no doubt feeling as others copy his content aggregation and ranking system/s.

This is Internet (International Net), they won’t be able to do anything about it! What are they going to go after millions of free-lancers? Patent, Trademark, whatever is nothing if becomes too general.

To conclude, U.S. patent office is out of pace - just like all new U.S. businesses

I’ve been building websites since 1997 for SMEs and I can barely remember a website I built that *wouldn’t* be infringing based on a superficial reading of this patent. Almost all non-trivial websites include user customization: a template (JSP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Vecolity, whatever) and stored user specific information (anything from their name for “Hello Bob” to a whole web 2.0 mash up) is the basis of just about every non-trivial site. Details of patent may mitigate, but I’m guessing this is either going to be ruled too broad if it goes to court, prior art will come up (nobody ever used templates and user specific variables before Yahoo?) or Yahoo! is going to have a bigger better toll booth on the information superhighway than Google!!!

Hi

My company files patents internationally - golf, engineering, and web navigation. We are not patent attorneys but give them a lot of money! I deal with the patents - writing most, so I know quite a bit here…………..

This Yahoo patent at first glance is very unlikely to survive challenge (from Google for example)

Why?

1 Obviousness - seems all that Yahoo is claiming is taking a methodology off the web to the web

2 Took 7 1/2 years to pass - that tells a story - usually 3-4 years with the USPTO

BUT this is the kicker………………….

3 JUST One website using this technology - even one webpage - ANYWHERE in the World - if able to be demonstrated as being in use (web archive) PRIOR to SEPT 10 1998 ( 1 year before application date) would be DISCLOSURE. …… >>>>>>>>>> “PRIOR ART” is the term and will always win in court - voiding a patent - if clearly demonstrated (aka credible documentation or archive)

So folks check your web archives - find a site - any site - could be a cat club site in Scotland/Israel/Togo, including Yahoo’s site that was doing as the patent suggests PRIOR to SEPT 10 1998 and you have this patent totally screwed - send the link to the archive to the legal team at Google, with this article link, and you can sit back and watch the fireworks!

Cheers

Simon Puku Golf New Zealand

Tom. FYI - Contrary to what was reported, the Yahoo “exec” was in fact not an exec. A little does of reality - fairly common departures are routinely dressed up by the media to appear much more sexy than they really are. Don’t read too much into it.

How can patent something that was inherent in the functionality of web browsers and servers? Javascript alone allows for dynamic loading of content as well as MS’s DHTML. Templates? Give me a break, technically I could come out and say I have a patent on all web-based database applications if I got a patent on using databases for message boards because EVERY application usinga database is a message board with different interfaces. It’s all CRUD (create, read, update, delete) in the end.

So Yahoo thinks they can patent using functionality someone else created? It’s like Yahoo saying ‘yeah someone else created AJAX but we have the patent on using it’. Patently absurd. And don’t get paranoid either.

“In a page server coupled to a network…”

Could prior art be found in the green-screen days?

These mono-chromes used a ‘page’ display.
Some were connected to a ‘network’.

Pages would have been ‘customized’ to individuals.

Not long after, Novel networks, X25, also would have used similar?

Markt

I’ve worked in several fortune 500 companies and rarely do the execs know what their patents cover (unless they patents have been leveraged).

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