I may have linked to the wrong one. They have 2 active owned via AllConnect patented by Glenn Goad. One is zip code availability lookup/search and the other is address level search for availability of services. They also have a 3rd more aggressive one that the patent examiner gave them headaches over and they ultimately abandoned.
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We were sued in 2018. My knowledge of their patents is from then. They may have abandoned some since then.
Examiners are overworked and under-resourced, and the current system gives too much latitude to filers, especially if you have resources to do many filings with many rounds of back and forth with the examiners.
I believe they cause more harm than good and we should just get rid of software patents. At most, they should be replaced with IP protection that's similar to software innovation timescales (ie, 1-2 years, not 20 years).
Regulatory capture and incompetence, par for course of industrial complexes - where lawyers make more profit via the most successfully, doing whatever dark patterns to earn more profit/extract more from society, then having more $ to pay lawyers, and it's also initially funded by VC industrial complex.
It's ultimately why I believe control mechanisms must be abandoned, no patents (or if allowed, perhaps only for 3-5 years to give a head start but longer than that is clearly harmful and costly to society and innovation/competition).
