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Local Search patent wars: another reason software patents suck

Found this today on TechCrunch, “Patent Wars: Local.com Nabs Local Search Patent“.

From the post:

“Local.com saw its stock price rise 52% today after it was awarded patent number 7,200,413 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to the text of the patent, it covers what they term “Enhanced Directory Assistance”, which will deliver keyword specific ad referrals based on user input via operator, SMS, WAP, or voice.

This is in addition to their recently granted patent number 7,231,405, which covers crawling the web and geocoding location based content.”

That second bit is even more troubling, since it could impact anyone crawling web pages for addresses. The unfortunate thing is that we’re just starting to see sites doing interesting things with scraping and geocoding — and many of the possibilities are actually quite helpful. For example, sites like Zillow already scrape property addresses from local tax records and plot real estate prices on an interactive map… Chicago Crime plots scraped crime reports… Heck, anything that scrapes content with an address for use in plotting on a map would conflict with this patent.

If the idea of locking down automated crawling and geocoding isn’t enough to raise concern, check of these listings of mapping-related concepts that may also end up off-limits if the patent race continues:

• Google Local Search Glossary
• Microsoft Virtual Earth and Local Search Patent Applications