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Stupid Patent of the Month
A newly formed patent troll is looking for big money from small business websites, just for using free, off-the-shelf login verification tools.
Defenders of the American Dream, LLC (DAD ), is sending out its demand letters to websites that use Google’s reCAPTCHA system, accusing them of infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,621,578. Google’s reCAPTCHA is just one form of a Captcha test, which describes a wide array of test systems that websites use to verify human users and keep out bots.
DAD’s letter tells targeted companies that DAD will take an $8,500 payment, but only if “licensing terms are accepted immediately.” The threat escalates from there. If anyone dares to respond that DAD’s patent might be not infringed, or invalid, fees will rise to at least $17,000. If DAD’s patent gets subject to a legal challenge, DAD says they’ll increase their demand to at least $70,000. In the footnotes, DAD advises its targets that “not-for-profit entities are eligible for a discount.”
The DAD demand letters we have reviewed are nearly identical, with the same fee structure. They mirror the one filed by the company itself (with the fee structure redacted) as part of their trademark application. This demand letter campaign is a perfect example of how the U.S. patent system fails to advance software innovation. Instead, our system enables extortionate behavior like DAD’s exploding fee structure.
DAD Didn’t Invent Image Captcha
DAD claims it invented a novel and patentable image-based Captcha system. But there’s ample evidence of image-based Captcha tests that predate DAD’s 2008 patent application.
The term “Captcha” was coined by a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. It’s an acronym, indicating a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Essentially, it blocks automa
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Read the original article: This Captcha Patent Is An All-American Nightmare