On Nov. 20 I received a spam entitled “Graduate with a Job!” from idealhire.com, directing me to the Daily’s Career Channel Web site. At the bottom a reference was made to U.S. Patent No. 5,592,375. Curious, I went to uspto.gov and looked it up:

“A computer-implemented system for brokering transactions between sellers and a buyer of goods or services, including a database, a seller interface, and a buyer’s interface. The database contains information, including multimedia information, descriptive of respective ones of the goods or services. The seller interface enables the sellers to interactively enter information, including multimedia information, into the database. The buyer’s interface provides a knowledge-based interactive protocol, enabling the buyer to select and review the descriptive information from the database, and makes perceptible the multimedia information in response to an interactive buyer request.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seems to have hit a new level of incompetence by patenting e-commerce. This is as bad as Amazon’s “one-click” shopping patent, if not worse.

Overly broad patents are a big problem. They give monopoly power to those who don’t deserve it. Once the patent has been issued they let loose the lawyers and collect royalties from every business in the industry. Other businesses must pay, or hire a team of lawyers to fight. Either way the overly broad patent has cost millions in market inefficiency.

We need to send a message to Ideal Hire that holding overly broad patents, and paying licensing fees on them is wrong. Unless Ideal Hire can stop holding or licensing U.S. Patent No. 5,592,375 they are not fit to do business with. The Iowa State Daily should be socially conscious and find a company to host their “Career Channel” Web site with that doesn’t hold or license overly broad patents.

Chad Brewbaker

Graduate Student

Computer Science