In yet another case of IP gone stupid, patent troll Polaris has sued for infringing their patent on rules based mail filtering.

To quote Ars Technica:

The patent, titled “Automatic message interpretation and routing system,” is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. “The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source,” reads the patent.

The company, Polaris IP, has no products. It’s an IP troll.

Note that Procmail, a rather powerful rules based email delivery agent, was released in 1990, and that auto-responders date to before 1980.

Hopefully, this will get thrown out, but if not, one hopes that the court will obey the recent Supreme court precedent, and not grant an injunction.

Our patent system needs to be fixed.