Polaris IP filed a Lawsuit yesterday against
AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo. They claim they hold the patent to basically processing email automatically with a computer.
The patent was filed in 1998, although according to a unix program name vacation they were doing this in ’83!:
vacation is Copyright (c) 1983 by Eric P. Allman, University of Berkeley, California, and Copyright (c) 1993 by Harald Milz
The entire US Patent system is out of whack, we need some type of public review system for patents.