Today in Patent Trolling: VueStar

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

The internet has a few kinds of links, but the most common are text and image links. For example, I can link this image of VueStar’s logo:

To a website featuring stuff on a cat (luckily I’m in a good mood or you guys would have been in for a surprise). It’s one of the backbones of our freedom. Sadly, a Singapore firm,VueStar, patented a system for “Method of locating web-pages by utilising visual images”, which is kind of like creating a patent to identify a goat on sight. Obviously this “patent” has implications in Web 2.0 because soon those curved buttons and image reflections might cost you a visit from Vuestar’s lawyers.

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