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Technology Stocks : OnSale Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brad Davies who wrote (4062)	4/12/1999 7:57:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 4903

I have filed my own patents in the past and worked with patent attorneys. Even though one attorney offered to sponsor me for the bar exam, I never became one myself.

To: Brad Davies who wrote (4062)	4/12/1999 8:08:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 4903

It doesn't matter what the press release says. The patent itself is the legal document of final resort. It says that OnSale is the assignee. That means that Kaplan and his partner have assigned it. An agreement separate from the patent, if there is such a thing, could say that they will get paid on any revenues received but we don't know that. If this is the case, then if the payment were unusual, investors could contest it. But why should Kaplan and his partner need to be paid? After all, they still own a large part of the company - what should they care if they get paid directly or by having the stock price go up? If they got the benefit directly how would they pursue it? They couldn't personally leverage the patent nearly as well as OnSale as a company should be able to do. In this speculative stock market for Internuts, they would likely benefit much more by letting the company keep all rights to payments. Why worry about something that we don't know and that doesn't make much sense? Get on to the conference call and ask Kaplan yourself.