"Big Baboon ain't gibbon up"
Excellent!
SAP and HP Inc have failed to get an e-commerce patent case brought against them by a small software firm thrown out. The plaintiff, California-based Big Baboon Inc, has alleged that the companies directly and wilfully infringed on its patent. The outfit filed the suit in 2017, but was initially dismissed because it failed to …
“A method comprising the steps of: providing an end-to-end, business-to-business, e-commerce business automation software for automation business functions across multiple business domains.”
WTF! .. Who Is Big Baboon Inc.? .. appariently a serial patent troll. Big Baboon Corporation v. Dell, Inc.
Exactly. Every time I see one of these cases and read the patent application, it reads like an SOP for nearly every business I've ever worked form. Nothin innovative or new, just putting into words what every half decent programmer has been doing for decades.
Another favourite seems to be to take an existing process and add the word "mobile" to it and it is re-patentable.
I'm glad they threw out the idea of being able to patent software over here.
The plaintiff alleged that the version of R/3 that predated the '275 patent lacked the web functionality described in claim 15 – and that "at some point in 1997 or thereafter, the web-enabled R/3 system was made and sold by SAP which included web-enabled or disabled software modules".
So prior to the .com boom, companies software wasn't web-enabled. And during said .com boom it became web-enabled? *Gasp* Say it ain't so!
Unlike most of the Reg readership, I don't reject software patents out of hand. I've had a quick look at the '275 patent, and it does have a few marginally substantive claims.
However, most of it boils down to "have a website, a database, and automated order / returns processing". It was filed in 1997, so Amazon, for example, has prior art on most of the claims. Amazon was doing that sort of automated processing at least as far back as 1995.
Of the claims BB are specifically claiming infringement on:
- Claim 15 is "do the web/database thing, but with multiple databases and 'modules', which are used as appropriate". Really it's just "have more than one kind of workflow". Shouldn't be hard to show prior art for that.
- Claims 20-34 don't exist, as far as I can tell. The list of claims stops at 19. If there are claims 20-34, they'd be secondary, I'd think, so if infringement can't be proven for #15, I think there's nothing here.
In my view, the problem with this isn't that it's a "software patent", but that it tries to patent a very generic business method: take something that the patent authors themselves admit is already being done manually, and "automate" it, with very little technical detail about what that automation might involve. When a software patent describes a novel algorithm, that's one thing. This is just "do it with a computer".