Online DVD Rentals are Patently Absurd By Darryl Wilkinson June 13, 2006 — Oh, why can't we just have digital movie downloads and forget this whole packaged media era?

Netflix, the company that was clever enough to think customers might like to rent movies by ordering online and then picking the discs out of their mailboxes a couple of days later, was also clever enough to file for a couple of patents with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). One of the patents (#6,966,484), issued on November 22, 2005, was for "a mailing and response envelope for conveying an item from a sender to a recipient and back". A potentially more significant patent (#7,024,381) involving "a computer-implemented approach for renting items to customers" was the basis of a lawsuit filed in April by Netflix against Blockbuster. Netflix alleges that Blockbuster's online rental service violates Netflix's newly awarded patents.

Blockbuster, still fuming about the Netflix-induced profit-sucking demise of late fees, claims Netflix's courtroom antics are "like a fast-food restaurant trying to patent selling hamburgers through a drive-through window" - and the once king of video rentals filed an antitrust counterclaim in federal court in San Francisco today to prove it. In the most polite and demure terms, Blockbuster says that Neflix's original lawsuit against it "is based on unenforceable patents that Netflix obtained through deceptive practices in an attempt to monopolize the online rental business." (You should see what the Blockbuster employees have written about Netflix on the bathroom walls...)

Patent-law cases are typically filled with endless and interminably boring minutia that only a team of highly paid lawyers and large legal staffs could love. So it will probably be a few years before the whole thing is settled. Regardless, I'll be waiting for my next patented Netflix envelope to arrive.

But I'll be desperately hoping for the day when I'll be able to buy a movie, download it, burn it, and watch it wherever and whenever I want. Maybe even in HD.

I should probably talk to my lawyer first.