Prior art on OpenMarket patents

Dan Kohn (dan@teledesic.com)
Mon, 9 Mar 1998 10:23:54 -0800

The Internet company I started in 1993, NetMarket, has prior art to
OpenMarket's shopping cart and session ID patents. We were located half
a block from them in East Cambridge, so it was pretty easy to keep track
of their progress.

OpenMarket's patents <http://www.openmarket.com/whatsnew/patents/> were
filed for the following:

(1) shopping cart patent, filed October 1994
(2) session id patent, filed June 1995
(3) real-time credit card payment patent, filed December 1993

NetMarket conducted our first web transaction on July 14, 1994, and used
session IDs and shopping carts. (Only branch.com beat us for the first
commercial transaction over the web, and they were using static HTML
forms to send e-mail to the merchants.) We then conducted the first
secure commercial transaction on the Web on August 13, 1994, and were on
the cover of the Business section of the NYT the following day.

Does anyone know to whom I can forward this info for it to be useful in
the fight against OpenMarket's patents? Patenting stuff this obvious is
just pathetic.

- dan

--
Daniel Kohn <dan@teledesic.com>
Teledesic      PGP KeyID: 0x6129DD6D
+1-425-602-6222 (voice)   602-0002 (fax)
http://www.teledesic.com




P.S.  OpenMarket's logo, "We ARE Internet Commerce (tm)", now seems to
take on whole new meaning.