Patents question - territorial limits in the internet
3 comments
Go after whatever market you can get paying customers. Worry about settling with patent trolls only after they hit you with a suit. There is really no other approach.
So this is just a web bug? Whats the problem? I have worked at several companies that have inserted small images in web pages so that we can analyze the log files to provide usage statistics.
To my knowledge there is no patent on this and I suspect that there would be a large body of prior art should anyone claim to hold such a patent.
To my knowledge there is no patent on this and I suspect that there would be a large body of prior art should anyone claim to hold such a patent.
Well there are a number of patents and recently Nielsen/Netratings sued Omniture (http://www.omniture.com/press/242) and Coremetrics (http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-conferenc...)
The number of patents is surprising, so far I have found 24 patents we seem to be violating, among them:
Content display monitoring by a processing system http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7386473
System and method for analyzing remote traffic data in a distributed computing environment http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+6112238
Online Traffic Sampling http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7185085
And plenty more.
The number of patents is surprising, so far I have found 24 patents we seem to be violating, among them:
Content display monitoring by a processing system http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7386473
System and method for analyzing remote traffic data in a distributed computing environment http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+6112238
Online Traffic Sampling http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7185085
And plenty more.
If we now attract american customers and provide stats for american websites are we then suddenly violating patents, because they are american? I don't understand how the international fences are drawn and before we start setting out to the american market we certainly will ask a lawyer, but my experiences with lawyers were rather bad when it came to such technical and complicated issues they rarely understand. So if anyone of you has some reasonsable speculations to offer or could point me to a source or a case, let me know.