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Patents question - territorial limits in the internet
I am curently researching a few patents since our company is considering to make the leap and attract some american companies as customers. We are providing a web analytics solution which works by putting a pixel into the website to be tracked. Said pixel is stored on our servers in Europe. Now I wonder how patents on webanalytics are applicable, when they are filed in the United States. Our company would not operate an office there, we do not even have servers there. The client computers would receive their pixel from europe and an american company would access a frontend in europe or collect data via SOAP.
If we now attract american customers and provide stats for american websites are we then suddenly violating patents, because they are american? I don't understand how the international fences are drawn and before we start setting out to the american market we certainly will ask a lawyer, but my experiences with lawyers were rather bad when it came to such technical and complicated issues they rarely understand. So if anyone of you has some reasonsable speculations to offer or could point me to a source or a case, let me know.
- peterhi 17y agoSo this is just a web bug? Whats the problem? I have worked at several companies that have inserted small images in web pages so that we can analyze the log files to provide usage statistics. To my knowledge there is no patent on this and I suspect that there would be a large body of prior art should anyone claim to hold such a patent.
- dageroth 17y agoWell there are a number of patents and recently Nielsen/Netratings sued Omniture (http://www.omniture.com/press/242 http://www.omniture.com/press/242) and Coremetrics (http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-conference/274569896-netratings-files-patent-infringement-suits-against-coremetrics-omniture.html http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-conferenc...) The number of patents is surprising, so far I have found 24 patents we seem to be violating, among them: Content display monitoring by a processing system http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7386473 http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7386473 System and method for analyzing remote traffic data in a distributed computing environment http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+6112238 http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+6112238 Online Traffic Sampling http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7185085 http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7185085 And plenty more.
- jhancock 17y agoGo after whatever market you can get paying customers. Worry about settling with patent trolls only after they hit you with a suit. There is really no other approach.