Online photo contests are patented: the troll requires payments

The Foundation for Electronic Frontiers, together with the law firm Durie Tangri LLP , defended the amateur photographer who was attacked by the patent troll.

The troll requires license fees based on a patent describing online photo contests with voting for the winner. The amateur photographer has just arranged such a vote on his website - and now he is forced to stand trial.

“Part of our job is to identify stupid patents and try to get rid of them, and this patent is one of the stupidest ones I’ve seen,” said EFF lawyer Daniel Nazer, member of the EFF Anti-Patent Committee .

“Our client has held contests like“ vote for your favorite photo ”for several years, just for the fun of it and for the love of photography, comments Nazer. “The fact that you can patent an abstract idea and then demand money in the pretrial settlement of a dispute is contrary to patent law and common sense.”
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The EFF client supports the Bytephoto.com photo site, where amateur photos have been posted, and such contests with voting have been held since 2003.

At the same time, a company called Garfum.com filed an application for patent No. 8,209,618 “The method of sharing multimedia content by users in the global computer network” only in 2007. Although the Supreme Court had previously decided that abstract ideas were not subject to patenting, the company still managed to obtain a patent for online photo contests with voting.

In September 2014, she filed a lawsuit against Bytephoto.com , without expecting EFF lawyers to defend the amateur photographer. Now it is unlikely that the troll has at least some chance of winning. In the event that he loses the case, the EFF requires that the patent be declared invalid.

Recall that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been holding a competition for the most foolish patent of the month issued by the US Patent Office (USPTO) since July. Among the winners and applicants, a patent for a “potent drug” that “fights cancer”, a patent for “email scanning”, “bilateral and multilateral decision making” and others have already been noted. There are so many stupid patents that they have identified an individual employee in the EFF to work with them. “We would like to compile a catalog of them all, but tens of thousands of low-quality software patents are issued every year, so we don’t have enough time and resources to solve this problem,” writes EFF.