ActiveBuddy wins patent despite prior art (Anders Jacobsen's blog)

August 16, 2002

ActiveBuddy wins patent despite prior art

There's an interesting article available at internetnews.com called ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers:

Apparently, ActiveBuddy, the company behind AIM "bots" like "SmarterChild" and "AgentReuters" have filed and won a patent for automated intstant messaging responses although the Perl Net::AIM module was available a full year before the company filed for the patent... Obviously, this so-called "prior art" will invalidate all claims for uniqueness, rendering the patent worth only PR to ActiveBuddy...