The formatting of my response was lost let me try again....
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This is really a curious patent that Neomedia got. There has to be a lot
of prior art in the US but especially Japan that would invalidate this
patent. Should Neomedia want to wield this patent it could be a headache
for those of us either developing or implementing bar code technology.
If anyone knows of some prior art let the list know.
To understand this patent one needs to really look a lot deeper than the
Neomedia press release. If you read their press release (what is now all
over the web) you would think that they had gotten a patent on cell
phone barcode scanning. They did not!
What they got comes in two main claims:
1. Decoding a barcode that carries a URL, then when the cell phone
accesses a server the server redirects that URL to another URL which is
returned back to the cell phone. The essence is not that the barcode
carries the URL, it is the redirect that is the novelty. How one can
patent a web redirect is beyond me. How can one patent a process that is
part of the original W3 specification from Tim Bernards Lee? Also, web
redirects happen all of the time for a variety of reasons.
In any case, I would expect that there must be prior art in Japan.
Anyone have documentation that they were doing web redirects with camera
phone scanned URLs prior to Jun. 6, 2003 which was their provisional
filing date?
2. The second issue that they got a claim for is to put a contact lens
onto the optics of the phone to correct for the lens of the phone. This
seems to be even more ridiculous since glasses and magnifying glasses
essentially do this, plus such lenses were commonly available for camera
phones in Japan. I recall seeing a strip of little press on lenses
available in Japan in 2002 that would stick over cell phone optics to
provide macro capabilities. Anyone have a record of having bought any of
these back then?
Dave Harper
Wireless Ink/WINKsite.com
Received on Sun Feb 5 03:57:53 2006