Business Wire’s SEO Patent: Enforceable or Useless?

Recently, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway-owned Business Wire made an announcement that has been unprecedented since the birth of search engine optimisation. Search Engine Watch reported that Business Wire made an interesting move that will give the company patent rights over optimisation techniques with the hope of monopolising the use of a particular SEO strategy in promoting the online visibility of their press releases.

This is interestingly strange for most search marketing agencies. Business Wire has been around for 50 years which is involved in distributing press releases. How can the company stake a claim to something generic and mostly use by SEO firms? The technical verbiage used in the SEO patent document appears to be riddled with obscurities.

With the patent, the company now can claim a sprawling intellectual property rights over something that’s considered not new and absolutely something that Business Wire did not invent.

What benefits can Business Wire gain from patenting a particular approach to SEO?

Well, at least the company got legal rights on a set of sequenced techniques and procedures. If the patent document is quite specific on the methodology, how this can it effectively respond to a search engine’s (especially Google) frequent change in algorithm updates? SEO dynamically evolves as it corresponds to technological changes. Quite strangely, Google has been silent on this announcement.

This can be a profitable investment when Business Wire will try to use this patent to sue someone in court over intellectual property infringement issues. We should be seeing some interesting court battles soon.

Is this practically enforceable or simply useless?

This might trigger a series of SEO-related wars of patent rights. This will become an interesting precedent for all other SEO services firms to follow. The patent is obscure on the idea that Business Wire has just discovered a ‘secret recipe’ to better position their press releases online. It is no KFC! The company cannot rightfully claim that they’re the brains behind the list of SEO techniques and tactics.

Interpreting the patented process can be fuzzy. We are yet to experience the full impact that this change will bring to the SEO world.

Or maybe not.

The patent can be practically useless. This would only make SEO professionals more creative in varying their methods so they won’t get caught in a legal mess. A slight modification outside the specifically described and sequential order of procedures may render the patent utterly unenforceable. But if the interpretation of the ‘patented process’ goes beyond what is being described in the document, the SEO world would have to brace itself for legal court battles.

Business Wire should bear in mind these two interesting facts about SEO:

• SEO belongs to everybody
• SEO does not belong to somebody

Most, if not all, of what is being claimed as patented approach is very elementary in the eyes of many SEO experts. Search engine optimisation professionals would surely be preoccupied with a lot of mischievous thoughts of how to outsmart this annoying legal impediment. Sad to say, this patent might only end up as a ‘toothless tiger’ as far as legal safeguards for intellectual property is concerned.

One other important thing: the US Patent and Trademark Office should be overhauled, re-examined, and scrutinised. There are a lot of grey areas in patenting an SEO strategy.