Droplets, Inc sues Apple over iTunes, movie trailer site

When you apply for a patent, you are duty bound to disclose prior art. Ignorance and swearing that you didn't know of any do not bolster your claim.

But it can cause you to pay lawyers.

And lawyers will tell you anything you want to hear, just to insure that they have a paying customer.

Software patents are stupid, business process patents are stupid. If hardware was treated this way there would only be one cell phone and one TV and on of everything else.

actually, its scarier than you think but to be honest, I can think of Adobe and Oracle (Flash Actionscript and Java VM) respectively that have prior art for at least 2 of the points,if not all.

from the précis on the patent, it covers:
requesting a batch of information from a remote site containing data and code and executing the code (hmm, a browser making a request for a JS file from a remote server covers this point)

requesting a batch of information from a remote site containing data and code and executing the code, and making a second call to retrieve information and presentation from a remote system

all the other variations are simply to change the visual representation of the data presented in different formats e.g. a link appearing as an image (wonder how much prior art there is on that, even Hypercard had this way back in the 80's)

this would cover the stuff I do for web design/development wouldn't it? I guess I need to get a lawyer. I am pretty sure this will be thrown on terms of malarkey. If there is a judge out there that sees this go to trial or whatever the first step is...well I with FreeRange...nuke nuke nuke

Let's just nuke east texas and the patent abuse will go away. Or better yet lets just give it back to its rightful owners, Mexico.

This is stupid.

I just checked the internet wayback machine, and found apple's movie trailers site from back in 1999, which is before the patent was granted, and doesn't that invalidate their claim? Follow my link- it was called "quicktime movie trailers theater" at that point.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990909020538/http://www.apple.com/quicktime/trailers/

No! Wait... "Lodsys" is suing people for this on their own behalf already... So now Lodsys gets to sue Droplet Inc.? Or does Droplet Inc get to sue Lodsys?, Or do both company join together and just Sue every body on the planet for even thinking of a vague thought that they already thought of???

and again... yet again.

This patent is actually pretty scary to me... because it sounds like it covers a lot of what we do all the time. However, it also seems incredibly generalized and not inventive at all. But I have a hard time reading these stupid patent documents that instead of saying exactly what they do... they try to be as vague as possible to enable some "elbow room" when it comes time to go to court.

Wouldn't it be so refreshing to have a political candidate whose primary focus was to reform such aspects of government as the patent mess ?