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Divine patent - a shopping cart loaded with cash?

Charles Cooper, CNET.com CNET News

Published: 18 Oct 2002 14:12 BST

If the stars line up the right way, Divine is going to wind up one very lucky company.

How big? Think "cashectomy."

Because of a little-known but far-reaching patent for conducting electronic commerce, the Chicago-based enterprise services firm is in a unique position to squeeze lots of companies that have no idea they are violating the claim.

The message is being sent. In the last six months, Divine filed suit to demand back payments from six companies it accuses of infringing its intellectual property. If the courts uphold the claim, Divine's management will have the best racket going since some bright bulb invented Wednesday night bingo way back when.

This particular story begins in 1994. Just as the world was waking up to the notion that this Internet thing might be a pretty big deal after all, Open Market filed a claim with the United States Patent Office for a network-based sales system.

The 20-page filing sketched out in some detail a shopping cart metaphor that subsequently became popular with electronic retailers such as Amazon.com and L.L. Bean. Open Market's patent filing for the network sales system was broad, consisting of a minimum configuration of a buyer computer, a merchant computer and one payment computer. This goes to the heart of the concept of shopping and paying for purchases online.

In other words, it's a good chunk of latter day e-commerce as we know it.

Open Market received government approval for its patent in 1998 but fell upon hard times after the dot-com implosion. The company sold out to Divine last October, which acquired the rights to Open Market's patent portfolio. It did not take long for the brass there to realise that it also had taken possession of a potential goldmine.

"It's always been our goal to maximise the return to shareholders and maximise our assets," Rich Nawracaj, the assistant general counsel for Divine, told me. "And one of these assets is this portfolio of patents."

Nawracaj refused to get into specifics, but he knows what's at stake.