A company named Vuestar has reportedly been sending out invoices to companies that it believes are making use of its image-linking patents. The Singapore-based operation appears to be a patent holding firm, the only purpose of which is to license its IP out to other companies. Vuestar argues that it owns patents in Singapore, Australia, and the US that cover the linking of images (instead of merely text) on the web, and therefore everyone that makes use of such a technology needs to pay up.

The patent in question was issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office is titled "Method of locating web-pages by utilising visual images," which was filed for in 2001 and granted in 2006. It describes a system that would list out images from web pages in search results so that users don't have to follow links to get a visual representation of what they're looking for. The links would not necessarily point to images, but could also include video, animation, a mini-screenshot of the web page itself, streaming video, or the logo of the organization that runs the page, among other things.

If you think that description sounds a lot like Google Image Search (and just about every other image search tool across the web), you would be right. It's not even limited to image searches anymore—many search engines show images associated with your search terms on the main page, depending on what you're looking for. Vuestar's patent also addresses "a system for locating a web-page using a distributed computing system," which involves querying a database and displaying a list of linked results. Hello every search engine ever made!

Given that practically the entirety of Vuestar's web page addresses licensing—my favorite question in the FAQ is "Why are you invoicing me?"—it's obvious that the company believes it is owed for everyone else's making use of its technologies. Even just regular old web pages that link to images apparently have to pay up, according to Vuestar. So for all of you who have blogs or personal sites, stop combining anchor links with image tags in your HTML, immediately! "If your site is only text and has no images, icons or other patent methods then no license required," Vuestar says. Well, that's a relief.

Unfortunately for Vuestar, sending out invoices to everybody on the web is probably as far as it will ever get with its patents, at least here in the US. Last April, the US Supreme Court reinvigorated the "obviousness test" used to determine whether a patent should be issued and upheld. "The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote at the time. "Were it otherwise, patents might stifle rather than promote the progress of useful arts." Since then, the decision has been used with varying degrees of success, like RealNetworks' fight with Friskit over streaming multimedia.

If Vuestar were to ever try and sue US-based companies and website administrators for patent infringement, it might run headfirst into the Supreme Court's ruling and fail the obviousness test. There are also prior art issues—after all, there's no possible way that Vuestar first came up with linking to images as "late" as 2001—although the company claims on its website that it is "not in any way relying on or offending any third parties’ prior art." As for Singapore, things might be a bit trickier. An alert (PDF) from Singapore-based law firm Keystone Law says, "We believe that this development would have a wide-ranging impact on the Internet community in Singapore... We therefore believe that the claims of Vuestar should be taken seriously and urge clients to seek legal counsel."

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