When all else fails, sue! That seems to be the new rallying cry for e-business. Perhaps we should rename e-business l-business (as in legal business). Setting yourself up to sue your competitors is now part of many business plans. One e-business incubator--Walker Digital--is based on the premise of getting business method patents and suing whoever infringes on them. Hence the Priceline.com suit against Microsoft for the reverse-auction patent infringement.

As a news storyon our site describes, patent reform is on the way in the form of a bill in process for the 107th Congress. And because many of the larger contributors to campaigns and high-tech lobbying sponsors face these suits, I expect the bill to become law. And I hope it has the desired effect.

In the meantime, what to do about all these lawsuits? The interesting aspect of the suit in the aforementioned story is the ongoing court battles between NetZero and Juno--two titans of the free ISP game. I'm surprised one of them hasn't been granted a patent on being a free ISP. Barring that, each of them is patenting readily available technologies for exclusive use. In this case, NetZero has patented what looks like interstitial advertising--something in use on thousands of sites on the Web for quite a while. Earlier, Juno sued NetZero over the use of offline advertising--another prevalent practice.

Perhaps it takes this kind of litigious bickering to force the patent reform issue. Whatever the outcome of the 107th Congress, neither NetZero nor Juno are doing themselves any favors by enforcing these ridiculous patents. Netizens are so tired of patent problems, they won't be inclined to choose either Juno or NetZero if there are other choices for a free ISP. Priceline's suit against Microsoft certainly hasn't helped its cause. And while Amazon's one-click-ordering patent has given it a small advantage over Barnes & Noble and even brought it some licensing from Apple, it's going to need more than that to survive long-term. And don't get me started on British Telecom's patent on HTML.

The reality is, business-method patents are bad business. Regardless of whether they become illegal, businesses that plan for patent litigation are born losers. If you rely on business-method patents to survive, the writing is already on the wall.

James Mathewson is editorial director of ComputerUser.com. Also check out his monthly Insights column in ComputerUser magazine.