Singapore firm Vuestar Technology (formerly known as Blue steel dragon) has threatened to sue websites that uses visual images/graphics to link to another page. As ridiculous as it sounds, as long as you have images on your website or blog that connects to another web page you are infringing Veustar’s patent .The company’s managing director Paul Smith said if sites want to remain using images as links - you’ll have to pay up, anything from $200 to millions annually.
Veustar apparently has been awarded this patent in few other countries like United States, New Zealand and Australia, and the company plans to exercise this on Internet giants like Google and Microsoft. Invoices has been sent out to local Singaporean companies and, the giants will expect theirs as well as soon as the patent is enforced internationally.
Technology and intellectual property lawyer Bryan Tan of Keystone Law Corporation said even if Veustar has been granted the patent, but its a rather wide one. Bryan added ” if the patent is allowed to stand, it will probably bring the Internet industry to its knees”. This issue is also currently being discussed over at HardwareZone forum. I don’t know about you, but to file someone a lawsuit for hyperlinking images to webpage is way insane. I just noticed Veustar’s tagline on the website says ‘Good ideas with vision’, now that’s really a good idea.
Your opinion?
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Posted by hongkiat in Blogosphere , at 05.27.08 |
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Comments
David Gonterman May 27th, 2008
Does this mean any graphic from their servers used as a link, or any graphic _period_ used as a link? Because if that’s the latter, they’re going to have a worse problem than the RIAA.
“You can’t sue ALL of us! Believe me, some tried.”
ReplyCincauHangus May 27th, 2008
in the words of a apek gamer: GG LIAO!
and if it goes happen, i dont know what will happen to the advertisement industry where mostly graphical links attracts people..
I’ll wonder what will happen to online image hosting services..
ReplyCincauHangus May 27th, 2008
david: yeah, it would be similar to RIAA/MPAA but on a global scale.
Replyhongkiat May 27th, 2008
@David nothing to do with their server. They are claiming image-linking-webpage as a technology under their patent. ‘Implementing’ it basically infringes it. I find myself foolish even for typing that, how can someone actually practice that as a rule.
@Cincau Advertisement industry? We are talking about the entire http://WWW. Most of us know they are unlikely to succeed, but thinking what will happen to the Internet if they made it, it’s fun :-)
Replyifan May 27th, 2008
Good ideas with vision? Bullshit.
“Stupid ideas for money”. That’s the correct one:)
ReplyLeyton Jay May 27th, 2008
It’s all very well having a patent but you cant let something spread unmonitored, become popular and then try to cream money off of it. It’s not only unethical, but wouldnt stand up in a court of law:
The London Metropolitan Police Force own the rights to the blue Police Call Box (TARDIS) used in TV series Doctor Who since 1963. However in 2002 a court declared that because the BBC have used it for merchandising since the late 1970s without a challenge from the Met, the rights to the box should be transferred to the BBC.
ReplyBoltClock May 27th, 2008
Let me pray to God this very minute that this be just a stupid scam site otherwise the name of Singapore my homeland is really going to suffer in the eyes and minds of the entire web world.
ReplyRice Blogger May 27th, 2008
so no text link and no banner link?
ReplycDub May 27th, 2008
More importantly, no porn.
ReplyPhalgun May 28th, 2008
This is just totally insane. What about Web 2.0? No using images in header to link your about or archive pages?
ReplyWhat,s next? You will find prepaid coupons from Vuestar in eBay. 100$ coupon for 1 image you link per month.
Uzairubiah May 28th, 2008
How can they be granted for that ridiculous patent? This is the most retard patent I’ve ever heard.
ReplyDesmond May 28th, 2008
I read the patent. It describes a specific method for returning thumbnails of website pages in the results page of a search engine. The thumbnails are then used as links to the website to facilitate the user’s choice of link. Since it mentions HTML in the prior art discussion it is absolutely clear that they are not referring to linking to another site via ANY image. The “visual images” have to be either “mini-images” of the target website pages or some icon or logo FROM the website which are also LINKS. This doesn’t cover anything like “nearly all websites”. In my opinion the patent shouldn’t have been granted, but it is being aggressively pushed well beyond its originally intended scope.
ReplyTexas May 28th, 2008
I couldn’t agree more with Desmond. See how vaguely VueStar has explained their patent. Their patent only covers specific areas, but they have not disclosed anything, hoping to mislead.
Next, they will tell you they invented the “a href” tags.
ReplyOldbird May 30th, 2008
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? I quote “Mr Langford claimed he came up with the idea in 2000, before Internet bandwidth allowed for images and other multimedia to be used extensively.”
Where were these people in 2000? When does people started to use the internet? I’ve developed a rich-content multimedia website mainly for video streaming in 1999. And back then, its already a norm as many websites has already done that. And in 1999, people have started to move to flash 3. What is the so-called TECHNOLOGY? Is there even one?
So who own the patent to href before Mr Ron start to realise and learned how to surf the internet, prior to 2000?
Please forgive this people who grant this patent, they probably dont even know that computer actually already exists at that time, let alone the Internet..
Replyhong leong June 4th, 2008
To fight this effectively. You need legal muscle. And plenty of it. This is not abt fairness. It’s all about weighing the situation and whacking it right. If you do it right. They die. You live. If you do it wrong. You die. They live.The way I see this whole saga. Its a throw back to the time when the brotherhood once copied chunks of star wars and BSG plans to flesh out their game in HK. Guess what? The were threatened with legal action. What did they do? They fought back, by quibbling on minor details, small issues and microscopic points of law. It just went on and on and on and on. But as I said. To do all this. What is required is loads of legal muscle.
Replyhong leong June 4th, 2008
I think in their case study, they knew law to law. They can never fight it out. with the likes of Lucasfilm and Sony, so they kept on throwing out as cantonese would say, seih mau (dead cats). They based their OS partially on Linux. That made enforcement not only virtually impossible, but it also meant the cost to the plaintiff was multiplied by a few thousand times as suddenly there are so many people to sue. So at the end of the day it just comes down to a cost/time/benefit calculus. Today its a free market. You can even copy star trek and even disney characters and everyone knows its just impossible to enforce.
But to do all this, you really need good lawyers who know how to run big and small circles
Replybeefstew June 5th, 2008
Hey everyone,
I just want to ask if this refer also to image linking within a website itself and NOT outside to the other website?
Replypaskal June 22nd, 2008
ppl get more creative in order to get more money. but this kind of patent? gosh it’s horrible!
Reply