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Saturday, February 16, 2002
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/02/15/bountyquest/index.html Losing the war on patents - Attempts to fix the intellectual property system from below are faltering. Is it time to bring in the feds? Damien Cave Just three months after it launched in the fall of 2000, BountyQuest.com, a self-described "patent-busting" Web site, declared itself a success. In January 2001 it awarded four $10,000 prizes to individuals who had presented evidence that BountyQuest believed would successfully undermine a set of specific patent claims. One award attracted widespread attention. In April 2000 a company called InTouch sued Amazon.com and five other companies for infringing on a pair of its patents covering a type of music sampling -- technology that lets users preview part of a song and tracks their preferences. But less than a year later, BountyQuest announced that it had found evidence of "prior art": an example of a similar digital music sampling technology that long predated -- and thus undermined -- InTouch's patent....
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