When venture captial dries up, "innovative" companies like ActiveBuddy look for other revenue opportunities. In ActiveBuddy's case, the new money in the door will come from intimidating other technologists who ship instant-messaging bots, a concept on which the enemies of progress at the USPTO have just granted ActiveBuddy a patent. IM bots are an idea with well-known, invalidating prior art going back to well before the ActiveBuddy patent was filed. ActiveBuddy demonstrates its ignorance thus:
"I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer.
This is: So. Much. Bullshit. There are 1998 AIMBots, there are IRC bots going back to the mid-nineties (earlier?). ActiveBuddy swears that it will enforce its wretched patent.
When you file a patent, you aver that you have disclosed all the potentially invalidating prior art you know about. I wonder if there's a basis for pursuing a fraud claim against the inventors whose names are on the patent, since it's hardly credible that they didn't know about all this invalidating prior art before they told the federal government that they'd never heard of any of these well-known technologies.
Crooks, liars and the USPTO — partners in undermining and sabotaging American innovation.
(via /.)
