Several people including RTV71,drpino and shimman used our news submit to tell us that Netflix has been awarded a couple new patents that speak to renting out movies through a monthly fee. They wasted no time in enforcing them against rival Blockbuster in a patent infringement lawsuit. In a nutshell, Netflix wants Blockbuster to pay them damages and also to pull the plug on their similar service. This is all quite interesting, but shimman has this to say: "Netflix has been really slow & dishonest about whether the DVDs are shipped or received...at least I felt that way. On top of their lousy business practices, they were awarded two trivial patents. I wonder how much worse Netflix can be when Netflix wins this legal battle."
We have to wonder about this comment, as it is certainly better if there is competition in the marketplace. We also have to wonder if patenting business models is such good idea! ArsTechnica does a good job summarizing for us from a Reuters report that was filed last night.
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Approach for renting items to customers [...] According to a computer-implemented approach for renting items to customers, customers specify what items to rent using item selection criteria separate from deciding when to receive the specified items. According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider provides the items indicated by the item selection criteria to customer over a delivery channel. The provider may be either centralized or distributed depending upon the requirements of a particular application. A "Max Out" approach allows up to a specified number of items to be rented simultaneously to customers. A "Max Turns" approach allows up to a specified number of item exchanges to occur during a specified period of time. The "Max Out" and "Max Turns" approaches may be used together or separately with a variety of subscription methodologies. |
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Source: ArsTechnica
