Does your web site have photos that hotlink to other pages? Pay up!

[thewayne]

A Singapore patent trollfirm has announced that they hold a patent on having a link on a clicked photo that pulls up another page.

This is not a joke, they've already sent out bills. There's no mention yet of this being challenged in court.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/techguide/smb/0,3800010798,62041802,00.htm

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/27/1643258

I think I need to upload my photo galleries, all of them have thumbnail pages that link to larger images.

*sigh*

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Are they claiming they made up the img src tag?!

[silveradept]

No, but the combination of using "img src" with "a href", yes.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Weird. But the article also is confusing. First it says it's about any hotlinking,and then it says it's about image search engines.

[silveradept]

It's the process they have patented. Both hotlinks and image search engines put up an image with a link to some content, be it a full-size image or another webpage. So, if this holds up in courts, both of those types of usages could require the payment of royalty fees.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

So I might have to shut down the gallery on burn-gorman.com?

[silveradept]

Potentially. Although unlikely. I don't see a sudden summary judgment where everyone has to pay up for that kind of usage. There will be something negotiated, I'm sure.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Well,and we run gallery software, so it's possible they'd go after the software co and not sites that are running it, anyway.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

There's no way it'll stand. It is an obvious combination of tags, you might as well try patenting the combination of bold and italic tags.

It will be overturned but it'll have to be challenged first. It'll be ignored until then.

[silveradept]

I foresee ugly legal repercussions in their future. I also see widespread ignorance of their claim, and/or the patent coming under review. I'm sure there really isn't such a thing as eminent domain for patents, but if there were, I'd expect it to be invoked.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

They seem to be limiting their attempt to extort money to Taiwan at the moment, so that's where the challenges will have to start.

[silveradept]

Hopefully, that's as far as it will go, and the judges there will say "Uh, no. There's no way you can patent something obvious like this."

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

It has to go further than that as the patent is registered in multiple countries including the US. It'll have to be shut-down one country and challenge at a time.

[silveradept]

And at the end, hopefully, after they've exhausted their coffers trying to fight this, they'll realize what a stupid idea it was in the first place.

[deborak]

I say the entire haxx0r community should post pr0n images and link the click throughs to VueStar's servers. ;-P

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I like!