According to this article, if you own an e-commerce site and have an “automated sales and services system” or an “automatic business and financial transaction-processing system” you can be sued. That’s right, sued. Apparently a San Diego-based company, PanIP, has a patent on these two things, and have started to sue small companies with less resources. They claim if you use graphics or text to sell items on a visual screen, you’re violating their patent.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Obviously, after they’re finished suing these smaller companies, they’re going to start going after the big guns (i.e. Amazon). In fact, even Lockergnome is at risk. One of the companies that was shut down by a lawsuit is trying to fight back luckily. I’m not too familiar with patent laws, but hopefully the government will step in soon and end this, imagine how much negative impact this could have on e-commerce. Why the Patent Office would allow something like this to be patented just doesn’t make sense to me, can I get a patent on selling merchandise in brick-and-mortar stores? I think not.