“Business methods” such as this in no way deserve patent protection. Basically it’s just a strung together list of simple processing steps that any high school student could have thought up. Wow, people could use the internet to communicate that they saw a bird at a given set of coordinates and combine that information into a database which others could query? And he thought of this in 2004? Wow, it’s a revelation. Or, alternatively blindingly bloody obvious to anyone with the most basic knowledge of web development and an interest in ornithology. At this quality standard almost every competent dev I know could have filed about 200 patents in their careers – except most of them aren’t deluded enough to think their small combinatorial experiments are worthy of patent protection (plus the fact that until recently the European patent systems were encumbered by that inconvenient thing called common sense). The hubris in some of these patents is staggering, as is the fact that they were approved at all.