[ic] divine, Inc. patent infringements

[Dan Browning]

At 11:07 PM 9/19/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>At 01:55 AM 9/20/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>>Quoting Charles Chang (cchang2000@yahoo.com):
>> > 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?
>> >
>>
>>I certainly wouldn't. This sounds like a scam -- I have never
>>heard of such a patent and I bet we would have....
>
>Here's two links to the patents in question.
>
>http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=''5,715,314''.WKU.&OS=PN/
>
>http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=''5,909,492''.WKU.&OS=PN/

Is there there there an echo echo echo in here here here?  ;-)  I know a 
guy who got a patent last year on a rather simple idea ("business process", 
ugh); they aren't hard to get.

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