Patently Absurd

Check out these assholes, who have somehow gotten some idiot at the patent office to agree to their claim that they invented internet applications. What hubris!

Now, what I know about intellectual property law is pretty limited, but I do know that whatever is patentable needs to useful, novel, and non-obvious. Now, ask yourself, is this unusual and no one else ever thought of it:

A host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded over the Internet for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account, with rich-media components added to, modified in, or deleted from the rich-media application based on information contained in a user request. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system over the Internet.

That's half the internet right there.

His justification for doing this (is this guy 12 or something?): ""My mom saw me struggling, and one day said, 'Why don't you figure out a way to bottle up that Balthaser magic and let people purchase the bottle and do it themselves?" Note that he was using Flash 3 at the time this happened. So obviously some of the tools and processes for internet applications were already in place. And as we at Adaptive Path have been made acutely aware of, Microsoft had already laid the groundwork for Ajax back in 1998.

I can't wait to see who (Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Microsoft) will try to challenge this in court first. And when the hacking community gets wind of this and takes a hungry look at Balthaser Online. Then we'll see what Balthaser magic really amounts to.

Originally posted at Friday, March 3, 2006 | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)