Patent on the Shopping Cart

You've Gotta Read This

[flyingpep]

We received a letter today from Divine Inc telling us that we need to arrange to pay for a license or stop infringing on their patents and pay restitution for the time we have violated.

The patents are for shopping carts and real time credit card processing. Not their shopping cart mind you....... just because we use a shopping cart on our site.

They have a patent against the idea of having a site that stores what people want so that they can pay all at once. The other patent keeps sites from being able to do real time credit card transactions.

Has anyone heard of this before? We have looked and these are actual awarded patents by the USPTO.

Any info would be appreciated.

[oilman]

hi flyingpep - welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I've spent about 20 minutes pokin around and even went to Divine's site and didn't find anything to reference that they had a patent on that stuff at all. Did they include a link or patent number in the email to you?

[flyingpep]

The numbers are up at my office. We have also been searching tonight and found that they are currently suing ftd.com because they are doing online credit card transactions apparently.

This is unreal.

[mivox]

I hope they have an inexpensive or in-house legal team, or they'll bankrupt themselves before they see a dime out of ridiculous lawsuits like that.

[jdMorgan]

I don't believe that end-users can really be sued in this kind of case. Their beef is with whoever sold you your on-line shopping cart and credit-processing software or service, unless you wrote it yourself. It is the makers of the software or the providers of the infringed service that would normally be sued if they used the idea without licensing.

If you have an attorney, make him or her aware, and ask for basic instructions on whether to reply, ignore it, or what. If you don't have an attorney, keep an eye on the sites that report this kind of news for a few days, and if they report that this suit is serious, then retain one!

Unless you are as big as FTD, I doubt you will be a high-priority target for them. They are probably just sniffing for site owners who are easy to scare into paying without asking any questions.

I'm not an attorney, but this sounds very suspicious to me.

Jim

P.S. Did they violate BT's patent on hyperlinks to find your site - What scoundrels! ;)

[flyingpep]

I found the number on the "network sales system" The number is 5,715,314 and can be found on the uspto.gov site. This is one where they have the patent on having a user computer, a server, and a payment processing computer all networked.

[4crests]

I heard a short blurb on CNN this morning about this.

[flyingpep]

jdMorgan,

I wrote our cart myself and we are in process of getting all of the information to our attorney.

The drag here is we've only been in business for about 10 weeks so it's really not a good time to have to deal with this sort of thing.

Maybe we'll just close and start patenting things that people already use ;)

[jdMorgan]

Well,

If it is an option, switch to a commercially-available script, or contract an outside service to handle this until the suit against one of the big companies is heard. Crunch the numbers through your business model, and compare that to the potential cost of litigation, and see what makes sense. Contracting this out will cost more, true, but it beats padlocking the doors on your way out.

Jim