Patenting Internet Business Methods – Restricts Polaris Offenders
Patenting Internet business methods have become almost imperative with cases of infringement steadily increasing. In one of the recent encounters in this arena, Marshall, Texas-based Polaris IP LLC alleged Yahoo Inc., AOL LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Borders Group Inc., Google Inc. and IAC/Interactive Corp for violating the patent on its automatic message interpretation and routing system. The patent produced by Polaris, is essentially a system that can analyze incoming emails of users and decide whether it can be managed automatically or need to be send to a customer service representative.
Polaris has filed a lawsuit against the alleged offenders in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, as reported in an article in www.computerworld.com, asking for a jury trial, attorneys’ fees damages and a permanent injunction preventing the businesses from using its e-mail filtering system. A year before, the company litigated Kana Software Inc. for violating the same patent. However, the case was resolved in March, and Kana agreed to license the technology from Polaris.