Another Series of Lawsuits Based on Seemingly Spurious Tech Patents

Polaris IP is a company that doesn’t seem to have any products, but does hold US Patent No. 6,411,947. This patent covers systems that “comprise interpreting electronic messages with rule base and case base knowledge engines”. They are suing Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, A9, Borders, AOL, and IAC in a Texas court for infringing on this patent.

This patent seems to be ridiculous on it’s surface. However, there are other unbelievable patents that the USPTO has seen fit to give out and US courts have seen fit to allow to stand. Among these are Amazon’s “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network” (the famous 1-Click patent) (5,960,411) and Tumbleweed’s ” Private, trackable URLs for directed document delivery” (6,192,407).

Polaris IP hasn’t had to defend it’s patent in court yet because every lawsuit to date has been settled.

I’m still not sure if I’m for or against software patents on the whole. However, I am fairly certain that the folks in the USPTO are in over their heads on them and there needs to be more scrutiny when issuing these patents.