EBay in Patent Fight Over ‘Buy It Now’
“A small Virginia company in a patent fight with eBay Inc. asked a federal judge Tuesday to stop the online auction powerhouse from using its ‘Buy It Now’ feature allowing shoppers to buy items at a fixed price.”
And here I thought buying items at a fixed price was just the way most stores sell things! I never knew it was such a novel concept that someone could actually file a patent on it.
Obviously, there’s some absurd obfuscation involved that some patent clerk thought was good enough for a filing. This is just like the ridiculous “One click buying” patent Amazon.com had — a company being granted ownership of a concept so utterly simple and obvious.
I’m all for intellectual property rights, but this is beyond absurd.
