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Ebay sued for $3.8 billion
ONLINE GARAGE SALE Ebay has been sued by an outfit that claims it owns the patent on payment systems that do not need a credit card.
XPRT Ventures told a federal court in Delaware that Ebay nicked information shared in confidence by the inventors and incorporated it into features in its own payment systems. Apparently the technology was seen in Paypal Pay Later and Paypal Buyer Credit.
XPRT said that when Ebay filed a patent application titled "Method and System to Automate Payment for a Commerce Transaction" on April 30, 2003, it failed to tell the US Patent and Trademark Office that it knew of XPRT's own patent applications.
However, by filing for a similar patent, Ebay "admitted the patentability of the inventors' claims," the complaint said.
Steven Moore, a partner at the law firm representing the plaintiff told Reuters that Ebay was involved in a trade secret theft, in addition to sheer patent infringement.
He told Reuters that it is bad enough to take someone's technology, but it is a bit much to use it in your own patent application.
We agree. We would have thought that if the patent infringement was that bad you would go for an immediate injunction to protect the product you had out there based on it.
Oh, you don't have a product? Well, we guess you would be insisting that Ebay pull its product right away? Oh, you are not, you just want them to write a large cheque to make you go away? Hmm.
Apparently XPRT wants all of Ebay's profits on the disputed methods. Ebay's payments business generated $2.8 billion revenue in 2009, or 32 per cent of the company's $8.73 billion revenue for the year. µ
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Anyone who has ever dealt with US patent law knows that the easiest way to leech onto IP is to copy a patent and hope the USPTO reviewer doesn't notice. Engineers are instructed by patent attorneys NOT to search for prior art.
ebay don't create wealth, they facilitate it. that's not a difference in semantics
We get it, Ebay are bad. That doesnt mean that XPRT are good, of course.
In fact, you could argue that exploiting a clearly broken patent system (it is supposed to "promote innovation for the public good", remember) makes them *worse*, since at least Ebay are circulating money and thereby creating wealth.
So there you have it: two parasitic ticks trying to feed off each other. This truly is the best of all possible worlds, isnt it?