Visa sued over alleged SMS alert patent infringement

This is patently nonsense.

Although I don't know the circumstances of the two guys (apologies to them if they have been genuinely screwed over) I was involved in card-based transaction alerts over SMS nearly a decade ago.

I don't know which is more irritating: (a) the fact that agencies are stupid enough to award patents for common sense or (b) the fact that it takes more than ten years for the cards industry to implement common sense.

Isn't is similar to this: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.stm

What do you think of Chase's big announcement of their First Watch Intelligence patent? Chase's patent which claims "receiving a phone call from a customer and determining the caller's state of mind...".

I'm with Lui on this one, 100%.  It's not like SMS text alerts are new: I have been receiving them from First Direct for years.  Sometimes they charge for them, sometimes they don't, so they have been around for a number of banking economic cycles at least.

How is this new and innovative?      

I look at Marite's comment, and it made me wonder if anyone has patented the vital, but hitherto undocumented, business operation of answering the phone when it rings.  I reckon it probably hasn't been patented, and if we are quick, we can register our idea and make a fortune by requiring all new phones deployed in a business environment to incorporate an answerometer.  The answerometer would be ip connected, and therefore able to report usage back to central servers supporting the generation of customer friendly, itemised billing services.  We just hang back and wait for the money to roll in.

Or maybe I could patent the idea of getting up in the morning and going to work ... !