I couldn’t believe it!  We must owe them so much money!  In a hurry, I wrote a little command to see how many times we infringed.

tput sc && wget --wait=1 -qr -O blah.txt http://freeculture.org & tail -f blah.txt |
sed -r ":a /([^<][^\/][^a][^>]|^.{,4})$/N; s/\n//g; ta" | egrep -o "" |
awk '/|<\/img>)/{ct++}{printf("%d", ct)}{system("tput rc")}' && rm blah.txt

It counted 918 times before I killed it! The horror!

The Singaporean firm VueStar’s website claims it “offers to URL owners the opportunity to secure a ‘Licence of Use’ for locating web sites that are using visual images’ pursuant to Patents granted and in existence in several parts of the World.” We’ve heard outlandish claims like this before, and indeed any four-year-old can put up a website asking the world for money, but news articles indicate they are already asking for royalties on these patents from websites, including non-profit websites like Mr. Alvin Koh’s arofanatics.com according to that link.

Using images in web links is pretty much as old as using images on the web at all. Patents are only issuable in the case that there is no “prior art” indicating the invention is already known. In this case, one must imagine both someone so cynical to think the Singaporean patent office would let this patent through as well as a patent examiner who simply has no idea that this is a universal way to use images on the web. As a result, this company could claim we infringed at least 918 times.

In truth, the patent would disappear in court – the prior art is clear as day. But how much money would be spent on lawyers by people defending themselves from VueStar first?

(Please note that using this command may put undue stress on the web server and admin(s).)