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...
Related story: Wired on Amazon's "one click shopping" patent
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Anders Jacobsen [extrospection.com photography] |