[ic] divine, Inc. patent infringements

Charles Chang interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Thu Sep 19 22:37:10 2002


Hi All,

I've been contacted by a lawyer who represents a
company called divine, Inc.  They claim that my
website has infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 5,715,314 and
5,909,492. I have been using Interchange for about a
year for my online store. The lawyer asked me my
yearly sale and proposed one-time license fee of
$5,000 based on my yearly gross volume sale of
$20,000.

He also said that any site that uses ability to
accululate items and then checkout those (i.e.
shopping cart capability) is infringing divine's
Patents.

I have no intention of infinging anybody's Patents,
and I always had impression that using Interchange was
free under GNU license.

Should I pay the $5,000 fee and get over with the
license?  Or is he bullshitting?  What will happen to
me if I ignore this? 

Thanks.
Charles

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