You can patent a business practice? Who knew? Perhaps Microsoft should go back and patent its practices and avoid all that monopoly stuff.
M$ has a patent for "tabbed browsing" and "double click." I think eBay has the "buy now" button patented.
Who knew !? Man - that *crap* has been going on forever. You think it's a coincidence that there's a childrens play area only in a McDonalds ? I've yet to see one in another fast food restaurant.
By the way, in my opinion, business practice patents are *complete* boloney. Oh, so I decide to resell widget X by running around screaming and naked, patent my running around screaming and naked while selling X, and now, voila, you can't do that. Oookkk...
If you can't compete... take them to court.
Kind of like McDonalds trying to patent a double cheeseburger.
The court ruled that patent laws were intended to protect any method, whether or not it required the aid of a computer, so long as it produced a "useful, concrete and tangible result." Thus with one stroke, the court legitimized both software patents and methods of doing business, opening the way for Internet-related patents. In the six months following the ruling, patent filings for software/Internet business methods increased by 40% and the USPTO created a new classification for applications: "Data processing: financial, business practice, management or cost/price determination."
Since the State Street case, patents have been issued for an online shopping rewards program, referred to as the "ClickReward" (U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,870); a system that provides financial incentives for citizens to view political messages on the Internet (U.S. Pat. No. 5,855,008); an online auction system by which consumers name the price they are willing to pay and the first willing seller gets the sale, also known as "name your price" or as a "reverse auction" (U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207); and a process that supposedly blocks the auction practices described in the previous patent (U.S. Pat. No. 5,845,265).