Create a Wishlist and Get Sued By A-Holes
An Open Letter to Channel Intelligence:
In conflict to your patent, Independent Sources has created a wishlist:
1. Patent Reform to stop idiots like you from abusing a broken process.
2. Tax Reform so I don’t have to have a Phd to fill out my tax forms.
3. Personal responsibility to return to our society.
4. “Get Smart” DVD.
Well, that’s it. You can sue us now.
Channel Intelligence, a company based in Florida, filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in Delaware on Tuesday against a long list of startups and other companies and individuals who have one thing in common – they offer wish lists for products people may want others to buy for them. The complaint is embedded below. Our understanding is that many of these companies don’t yet know they’ve been sued, as the documents are still in the process of being delivered to them.
The patent in question, No. 6,917,941, appears to cover the invention of creating a list of things in a database. It was issued in July 2005. Defendants include Lemonade, Scott Aikin, de Brun Design, Listafterlist, MindValley, My Life Registry, On My List, Remember The Milk, Shimon Rura, Stylehive, Sprout, Chad Van Norman, WhiteStripe, WishCentral, WishList and Zlio. Channel Intelligence alleges that none of the defendants have licensed their patent to create lists. In a database.
Notable in their absence is Amazon,, Ebay and most other large etailers, all of which maintain wish lists for users. As far as I know none of them license Channel Intelligence’s patent, but we’re checking on that. More likely: Channel Intelligence isn’t prepared to litigate against Amazon, who would likely lawyer CI into the ground over this “patent.”
Okay, readers, it’s your turn. Create your own wishlist and wait to be served by Channel Intelligence.
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July 25th, 2008 at 6:50 am
[...] The guys over at Independent Sources are a bit undone by a bizarre lawsuit filed by Channel Intellig…. It seems the guys at Channel Intelligence have filed a lawsuit over anyone who has developed a wishlist using a database. They however, have not taken on the big boys like Ebay or Amazon. They’re smart enough to know that the frivolty of their lawsuit would get them swamped in legal fees if they did. Basically they’re just tryign to blackmail the little guys. That’s bogus and won’t get very far. Primarily because all the little guys have to do apparently is change the name of their feature to an “I want” list as opposed to a “wish” list. Or, all they have to do apparently is use the engines of one of the big boys to handle their “wish” list, something like this for example: [...]
July 25th, 2008 at 7:03 am
You’re safe, you saved it as text within a blog database, not as a wishlist database. If you were serious, you would have made it more like my link up there.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
They should talk to the people who own the rights to the song “Happy Birthday” (they want royalties) and the outfit a few years back who wanted royalties for using the GIF image format.
Good luck collecting.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Blog database or wishlist database, they are the same thing under their patent. It is a very fundamental parent hierarchy or Normalized database that almost every website out there uses. I have a feeling that they are trying to win the cases against these little guys, then go after the larger players like google or Amazon.