

Patents question - territorial limits in the internet - dageroth

I am curently researching a few patents since our company is considering to make the leap and attract some american companies as customers. We are providing a web analytics solution which works by putting a pixel into the  website to be tracked. Said pixel is stored on our servers in Europe. Now I wonder how patents on webanalytics are applicable, when they are filed in the United States. Our company would not operate an office there, we do not even have servers there. The client computers would receive their pixel from europe and an american company would access a frontend in europe or collect data via SOAP.<p>If we now attract american customers and provide stats for american websites are we then suddenly violating patents, because they are american? I don't understand how the international fences are drawn and before we start setting out to the american market we certainly will ask a lawyer, but my experiences with lawyers were rather bad when it came to such technical and complicated issues they rarely understand. So if anyone of you has some reasonsable speculations to offer or could point me to a source or a case, let me know.
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jhancock
Go after whatever market you can get paying customers. Worry about settling
with patent trolls only after they hit you with a suit. There is really no
other approach.

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peterhi
So this is just a web bug? Whats the problem? I have worked at several
companies that have inserted small images in web pages so that we can analyze
the log files to provide usage statistics.

To my knowledge there is no patent on this and I suspect that there would be a
large body of prior art should anyone claim to hold such a patent.

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dageroth
Well there are a number of patents and recently Nielsen/Netratings sued
Omniture (<http://www.omniture.com/press/242>) and Coremetrics
([http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-
conferenc...](http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-
conference/274569896-netratings-files-patent-infringement-suits-against-
coremetrics-omniture.html))

The number of patents is surprising, so far I have found 24 patents we seem to
be violating, among them:

Content display monitoring by a processing system
<http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7386473>

System and method for analyzing remote traffic data in a distributed computing
environment <http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+6112238>

Online Traffic Sampling <http://www.google.com/search?q=Patent+7185085>

And plenty more.

