In a press release from last week, Vignette announced three new US patents for what the company calls "Web Experience Innovation."

We first commented on Vignette joining the patent race back in 2004, and each year we see a couple of vendors proudly announcing new, and frequently absurd, patents in our field. Most recently it was search vendor Endeca, with a patent on (the now ubiquitous) guided navigation. Such is the lag time with these things that Vignette's new patents all date back to applications made between 2000 and 2002.

A closer look at the three new patents reveal that they cover functionality and requirements that are common in Web projects anno 2007. The first one sounds a bit like standard Web analytics, the 2nd like portlets (which are a vendor-neutral standard today), and finally the third sounds like being able to snapshot a site, something that quite a few vendors do today.

As a personal anecdote, I used to work at a Web CMS vendor which claimed a patent on...the shopping cart. Quite a common concept today, the claim was staked back in 1994 and surely quite innovative and relevant at the time, when the vendor was focused on e-commerce. Ten years later it resulted in a $40m payment from Amazon.com, to settle a patent-related lawsuit, but by then the e-commerce patents had been spun out into a separate company.

Patents don't always result in settlement payments or licensing fees, but as Vignette is persistently rumored as a take-over target, perhaps this will increase the the company's value (at least inasmuch as the patents could be spun out as a separate cash cow).

Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced the new patents really help customers in any way. They are really more of a distraction. Getting a US patent is perhaps a nice acknowledgment of some bygone R&D investment, but in a young and fast moving field as ours, buyers should rather focus more intently on how the strengths and weaknesses of current product releases match their needs today.