US Patent 7,000,180
It is hard to believe this story. On February 14th 2006, the US Patent Office granted Neil Balthaser from San Fransicosco the patent for “Methods, systems, and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the internet”.
What this means is that any rich internet application created in the United States that use AJAX, Javascript, Flash or Flex is subject to a licence fee that must be paid to Balthaser Online Incorporated. This has worried a great number of businesses across America and luckily the patent is now being challenged in court as it is obvious that Mr. Neil Balthaser did not design and develop the concepts for RIA’s.
Hopefully a consortium of web companies (Adobe, Microsoft and Sun for example) will take Mr. Balthaser to court for wasting the US Patent Office and US Courts of Justice’s time, and falsely claiming that systems that those companies had spent over 20 years developing had been stolen by a cheeky web designer. However my sympathy for the US Patent Office is limited because before granting such a patent, it would have been prudent to investigate this claim properly before approving such an obvious scam.
This case also demonstrates what a joke the US patent system has become. As one commentator put it, “I’m off to patent electricity and creative thought!”
You read the patent information yourself here.
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