Patents for dynamic Web pages to get another look

U.S. patent examiners are poised to take another look at two controversial patents that critics say may sweep up the dynamic Web page systems commonly used by search features, online merchants and millions of other sites.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced the move last week in letters to the Public Patent Foundation, which last November requested the re-examination. PubPat, as it is known, is a public interest legal group whose directors include free and open-source software advocates.

The patents in question, Nos. 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, cover systems and methods for managing dynamic Web page generation requests--that is, sites that return a customized page based on user input. An enormous number of Web sites use some form of dynamic processing, often through programming languages, such as PHP, that are designed to create Web pages based on database queries.

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