This article comes at a particularly opportune time for me. A site I'd built for a client was sued by Channel Intelligence in their mass filing last week (TechC

This article comes at a particularly opportune time for me. A site I'd built for a client was sued by Channel Intelligence in their mass filing last week (TechCrunch covered it) for their revolutionary and genius idea of "configuring a database system to store information regarding a plurality of items," focusing on wishlists. The client (#12 in the suit if you're curious) called me in a panic telling me to pull down the site, so all its users are screwed. I've also run a free wishlist site at GreedyMe.com for several years which wasn't named in the suit, but if it had been, I couldn't financially justify trying to fight it. PageRank was pretty revolutionary. I'm on the fence as to whether that should be patented. Amazon's 1-Click and Channel Intelligence's "list storage" are obvious methods, and I can't fathom how any lawyer or businessman can submit a patent for such nonsense with a straight face.