In case you've never heard of them, "patent trolls" are individuals or companies that aggressively seek to sue others who may be infringing on their patents, usually for the sake of exacting financial gain with a side-order of stifling innovation. The most popular trolls hold patents are on widely-used technologies that everybody is already using, so that they can just pick their unsuspecting targets and ready their lawsuit cannons. They are the prime example of what is wrong with our patent system.
That being said, there's a new patent in which the patent-holding company, Channel Intelligence, claims to hold a patent on storing a wish-list in a database system (US Patent 6917941). They are now suing a bunch of companies who they claim are in breach of their patent.
As you may know, I have a wish-list program. It's at wish.darylbeattie.com. The beauty of it, and more importantly the reason I won't get sued by this patent troll, is because it doesn't use a database system at all. It keeps all of its data in memory, periodically serializing its memory directly to the disk for back-up using a Java system called Prevayler, thus avoiding a database altogether.
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1 comment:
Good for people to know.
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