Complaining about patent abuse is easy and generally non-productive. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is giving people a more useful outlet for their opposition with its Patent Busting Project.
Here’s the EFF’s latest target:
A company called Polaris has a patent on a method for telling whether or not an incoming message (e.g., an email) is a simple, standard request that can be answered automatically, and, if so, for answering it. The method processes incoming messages by consulting two databases: a database of IF-THEN rules, and another database of previously classified messages (cases). In other words, Polaris claims to have invented the basic concept of almost any technology that is used to determine whether the message can be answered automatically or must instead be forwarded to a human being.
To bust this overly broad patent, we need to find prior art that describes a product made before 1997 in this way.
Obviously, this isn’t the type of information that just anyone has at their fingertips, but someone does and if you suspect you know that someone, pass the word along.
