Big Baboon ain't gibbon up: SAP, HP accused of aping software squirt's e-commerce patent

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!

Not a compelling patent

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".