Confessions of a Patent Infringer.
I have infringed upon a patent, and I have no regrets.
ActiveBuddy now has a patent on your garden variety chat bot, and they plan on enforcing the patent. Unfortunately, I’m not prior art. But lots of things on the net are…
Somehow, the patent examiners neglected to do a google search, as the first page of hits for elizabot has two examples of prior art (prior to 8/2000), irc bot comes up with a few, as does chat bot. The Net::AIM module for perl (including a simple bot) was released a year earlier. The ALICEbot won prizes before the filing.
So go ahead, sue me. (sosumi-bing!) But first you have to figure out if the entity on the other end of the chat is me or a bot.
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