Why one photographer decided to fight a patent on online contests

[silicon_toad2000]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/why-one-photographer-decided-to-fight-a-patent-on-online-contests/

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawyer Daniel Nazer's Sisyphean task is right in his job title: he's the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

So when Nazer says he's seen one of the all-time dumbest patents, that's saying a lot. Yesterday, Nazer and his fellow EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri filed court papers seeking to invalidate a patent on photo competitions. US Patent No. 8,209,618, owned by a little-known video website called Garfum.com, was used to sue four small photo websites last September that dared to ask people about their favorite photos.

One of those four defendants, Ruth Taylor, runs weekly photo competitions on BytePhoto.com. Out of money but determined to not give in to an outrageous patent demand, Taylor is now the EFF's newest client—the first patent defendant to be directly represented by the public interest group.

“It seemed like a scam”

Taylor first encountered BytePhoto back in 2003. Her husband had bought her a digital camera, and she enjoyed submitting her photos to the site's weekly photo competitions. In 2008, Taylor lost her job at a pharmaceutical company. It was a big pay cut, but she decided to give photography a try as her full-time gig. Going to more than a dozen art festivals a year near her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she's managed to make a go of it.

Taylor was sued by Garfum in September, and she first heard about the case from a lawyer who had seen the case filing online and was looking to represent her. Still not served with the lawsuit, she found it unbelievable. "I was kind of in a daze, because it seemed like a scam," she said in an interview with Ars. "I said, 'How could that be? How could you have a patent on a contest?' I'm not a lawyer, but it's not logical."

Days later, she found out it wasn't a scam—a man knocked at her door, and she was served. Taylor and her husband didn't even have the $10,000 retainer that would be needed to hire a lawyer to do the initial paperwork, much less the hundreds of thousands it costs to challenge a patent in court.

"I knew we weren't infringing and it was a junk patent," said Taylor. "I would just lay there at night, not really sleeping. You could lose everything, and what do you do? It's quite frightening."

[GhostShip]

When folks invent / create or undertake something exceptional we all applaud such efforts and are happy to pay the extra cost premium but a patent should never be issued on a common sense concept and it staggers me why such a patent can be granted in the first place if it doesn't even deliver anything of exceptional benefit or originality.