PanIP Patent Overturned

This has been dragging on for a couple of years, and I’m glad to see the USPTO has come to its senses somewhat.  I’m no lawyer, but I would think having your patent overturned due to “obviousness” would sort of put a damper on all those IP lawsuits you’ve been filing:


Patent Office issues initial rejection of patent claims in PanIP suit


Following a reexamination, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued an initial rejection of claims in a patent it had earlier granted to technology developer Pangea Intellectual Property on payment processing technology used at e-commerce sites. It is one of two patents held by PanIP whose validity is being challenged by a group of 15 e-retailers PanIP had in a separate action sued, claiming it was due licensing fees. PanIP has since settled with those retailers. A second patent on which the retailer group, the PanIP Group Defense Fund, also is challenging PanIP still is under review by the Patent Office.

PanIP has two months to respond to the Patent Office’s Action document, says Jonathan Hangartner of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, the retailer group’s attorney, who terms the preliminary findings “a critical first step.” However, overcoming the initial findings will be “very difficult for PanIP. The Office Action is very well reasoned and strong,” he says.

Hangartner notes that nine of the 10 individual claims in the patent were rejected on the basis of “anticipation” in “prior art.” That essentially means that the Patent Office examiner determined that every element that the patent holder claimed to originate actually predated the patent and could be found in a single reference, such as an article, according to Hangartner. The remaining claim in the patent was rejected on the basis of “obviousness,” meaning that most elements of the claim existed in prior art and that the remaining elements would have been obvious to someone skilled in the art.

“The Patent Office has rejected the 10 claims that we challenged. That means that if that rejection holds throughout the process, the result will be the patent itself is invalid,” Hangartner says. The attorney representing PanIP, Kathleen Walker, said that while the action is ongoing, PanIP would have no comment. “We have 60 days to respond and we’ll make the appropriate responses,” she said.


The group of e-retailers formed a defense fund at http://www.youmaybenext.com.


Update 2005-08-19: YouMayBeNect.com has not been active for a while, apparently, and the retail group has disbanded after their victory.  No peep from PanIP yet. 

Don’t sniff browsers–sniff objects

As good as ASP.NET’s adaptive rendering is, I sometimes find myself needing to do some fairly substantial client-side scripting.  I used to sniff browsers, but that was getting tedious, and most common scripts are written upside down anyway.


The best method I’ve seen is to use ‘object sniffing’–testing browsers for support of different objects and methods.  This saves a considerable amount of time, since all browsers will fall into 3-4 categories of object support, and you don’t have to parse out a zillion different browser types and subtypes and still run the risk of excluding one that may work on your site.


My guide was http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/objectdetection.html.  The article is a couple of years old, but it’s still useful to me today.



The pace of new browser releases may be slower than it was in the early days, but developers must still confront a bemusing array of browser versions and brands that support some JavaScript features but not others. To combat the problem, scripters commonly provide two or more code branches so that a browser follows an execution path containing statements that it supports. Browser sniffing — the task of inspecting navigator object properties for version information — has become largely unmanageable given the browser version permutations available today. This article presents details on an alternative solution — object detection — that frees JavaScript developers from most of this versioning mess.


I haven’t played around with custom server controls, so I don’t know how applicable this is for that purpose.

Allowing Only Numbers in ASP. NET TextBoxes – Use Regular Expression Validator!

[update 2012-07-16]

Kendo also has a numeric textbox input (both a widget and MVC extension), and Telerik has a numeric text input for ASP.NET Ajax.

[update 2011-10-07]

This continues to be a popular post, even though it was written in 2005.  If you need a solution for ASP.NET MVC, I’d suggest using a validation attribute on your model, and the Wijmo Complete Input jQuery UI widget (also available in the ASP.NET MVC Tools).

If you’re using WebForms, this method will still work, or you could look at the Wijmo-powered Input control.

[/update]

This article came up on the news today: Allowing Only Numbers in ASP.NET Textboxes.  In this article, Bipin uses a custom validator to enforce input.  I usually like Bipin’s ideas, but this one seems to be a little more difficult than it needs to be.

I think there’s a better way to do this–use a regular expression validator.  To test this, create a page, and add a textbox, regular expression validator, and a button.  For the validation expression, enter the following:

^[0-9]+$

Compile your page and test with some different inputs.

A quick explanation of the expression:

^ indicates the start of the input
[0-9] indicates a range of allowable characters.  You could do [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], but that’s not lazy.
+ indicates ‘match preceeding one or more times’
$ indicates the end of input

If you wanted to enforce a length of input, you could do something like:

^[0-9]{6,12}$

which would enforce a minimum of 6 characters and a max of 12.

I think regular expressions are too often overlooked, but they’re very powerful and simple once you work with them a little bit.  For a good basic overview of regular expressions, check out:

 

The Web Professional’s Handbook

 

And a more in-depth RegEx reference in:

 

Pure JavaScript: 2nd Ed. (an absolute steal if you buy it used)

 

Regular Expressions with .NET [DOWNLOAD: PDF]

Downloadable e-bok in PDF format, from Amazon.

 

Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition (The Owl Book)