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Did you learn anything from the failure of bounty quest?

thogard wrote:

>FSF or EFF [should]Provide a database of 'prior art

There is already a tool for collecting prior art! This is one purpose for the pubsub.org site. The idea is that if you find a patent or patent application for which you have or seek prior art, you can get it listed on the site and record your prior art. This makes a permanent record that others will be able to use as a source when filing "third party" prior art with the PTO as well as when defending against infringement cases in the future.

Today, there are many discussions of specific patents or applications scattered all over the web. This makes it difficult for those with a real interest in defending against some patent or application to find the prior art they need. However, on PubSub.org, you can write a comment directly linked to a specific patent or application and identify the prior art or other argument you might have for why the patent should not be (or have been) granted. Try it. If you don't find a patent or application that you're interested in, just use the "request new thread" option to get the patent listed.

The system on pubsub.org is different from what you'll find on other sites like BountyQuest where they are only collect prior art on "major" patents. At PubSub.org, you can provide prior art on *any* patent or application and what you provide will be publicly available and reviewable.

If there is demand to do so, I'll expand the scope of what we do at PubSub.org to include providing a place to record "defensive" or "Open Prior Art." This would allow anyone who has a method that they consider patentable to "block" anyone else from getting a patent on the same method. The PTO considers "internet publications" to be valid prior art as long as they are accessible. Should I do this?

bob wyman

I oppose Amazon.com's 1-Click Patent
As one of the founding programmers at Amazon.com, I was very dismayed to learn
of the company's legal attempts to enforce its 1-Click (TM) patent. ...
www.op.net/~pbd/amazon-1click.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages

Amazon, Barnes&Noble settle patent suit - Tech News - CNET.com
... The story behind Amazon's 1-Click patent Mark Grant, author, Law
and the Internet Play clip. Amazon.com said Wednesday that it ...
news.com.com/2100-1017-854105.html - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

Apple - Media & Analyst Information - Press Releases
Apple Licenses Amazon.com 1-Click Patent and Trademark. New Apple Online
Store with 1-Click Shopping Premieres Today CUPERTINO, California ...
www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/sep/18amazon.html - 11k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Salon Technology | Amazon to world: We control how many times you ...
... The 1-Click patent suits suggest that the company is forsaking this understanding
for a more conventional, bare-knuckles corporate strategy. ...
www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/12/21/bezos/ - 23k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

www.oreilly.com -- Ask Tim! -- Software Patents Issue
... At the same time, I completely agree with RMS that the Amazon 1-Click Patent
is one more example of an intellectual property milieu gone mad. ...
Description: The founder of O'Reilly & Associates (the top computer manual publisher) criticizes Amazon's attempt...
Category: Society>Issues>IntellectualProperty>Paten ts
www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/amazon_patent.html - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

Amazon's 1-Click Patent Survives Bounty Hunt
Amazon's 1-Click Patent Survives Bounty Hunt By Elizabeth Wasserman Issue Date: Mar
15 2001 No one wins the prize for invalidating the e-retailer's patent for ...
www.thestandard.com/article/display/ 0,1151,22862,00.html - 32k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

1 Click Results!
1-Click Patent: No Exact Match But Runners Up Will Split $10,000 Cash Prize. ... Read
Runners Up Profiles>>. History of the 1-Click Patent Conflict. ...
www.bountyquest.com/infocenter/1click.htm - 15k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

allNetDevices: - OpenTV Claims 1-Click Patent
... OpenTV Claims 1-Click Patent. Latest News. ...
www.allnetdevices.com/industry/news/ 2000/10/06/opentv_claims.html - 35k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Amazon Loses Round in 1-Click Patent Case
Amazon Loses Round in 1-Click Patent Case ...
www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/7528.html - 10k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Wasn't Bounty Quest supposed to help fix this problem?

What happened?

Anyone know of any countercartels of small businesses organizing to put this stuff to rest?

Where are our lawmakers?

A patent is, first of all, not even a constitutional right. The constitution says that congress may provide inventors with certain rights to their invention. This lead Jefferson et. al to set up the first patent board some 200 years ago.
Now, for a patent to be granted, the invention it describes must be:

New

Useful

Nonobvious

For a good definition of new, see new

The useful property is questionable, but the nonobvious is very interesting, see nonobvius

A quote from this link:

It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an
idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of
manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate
invention.

And that kind of sums it up...

Another purpose of the patent idea, combined with licensing, was to open up trade secrets. Let the rest of the world know how we do it, so that all may benefit. But, if you want to use it, you need to license it.

Again, a good idea spoiled by insane capitalism.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a genuine capitalist, but it is scary to see what happens when capitalism goes berserk.

Bummer, you already missed the $10,000 bounty.

The basic problem, I think, is that there is no shortage of ideas for computer software...there is mostly a shortage of good implementations of old ideas, and locking down the ideas so that only one entity has a monopoly on implementing them doesn't help matters.

Put another way, when most patent infringement cases seem to involve independent invention, the patent system is not doing its job.

I agree that your "magic database" is unlikely, but there has to be some way to streamline the process and make finding prior art easier for the patent office and for filers. One place that's trying is Bounty Quest, which awards cash for finding prior art on existing patents. They're now marketing themselves as a service for patent holders and applicants. This may work, except that companies unwilling to divulge trade secrets may reject the concept.

I agree that your "magic database" is unlikely, but there has to be some way to streamline the process and make finding prior art easier for the patent office and for filers. One place that's trying is Bounty Quest, which awards cash for finding prior art on existing patents. They're now marketing themselves as a service for patent holders and applicants. This may work, except that companies unwilling to divulge trade secrets may reject the concept.

This is guaranteed to end up on Bounty Quest, and this guy should definitely get first dibs on the cash.

Amen on that hypertext comment. The battle has not even begun.
Most folks aren't lawyers, but generally people have seen some texts of court opinions at one point or another. I was just going over some court documents related to the patent courts --AKA, the CAFC-- and I was struck by how computer code-like the text was. The only reason people think it's hard to read court cases, especially patent court cases, is because they're riddled with links to other cases. Since the system was developed in a book only format in a rather rag-tag fashion, the text becomes very difficult to read because of all the notations they've used to indicate varying types of links.
In my opinion, requiring the legal system to use electronic hyperlinked texts for court opinions and other legal documents is absoultely essential to any kind of IP reform. Until judges are benefitting from hypertext in an immediate way, they're going to fail to see the urgency of advocating its use or deciding in favor of electronic formats.
Law and court documents should be readable by anyone with standard high school level English skills. The same is true for patents themselves. The core of a patent isn't the drawings. In fact, the drawings are often intentionally misleading to avoid disclosure of importatnt information valuable to competitors. The important part of a patent is the references to other works, these are natural places for hyperlinks. I bet Bounty Quest would move a lot quicker if patents had hyperlinks.

Also.. prior art means prior PATENTS that are similar.

That turns out not to be the case. Check out this Prior Art Tutorial:

"In essence, any publication, in any language, located anywhere in the world is valid prior art for invalidating a U.S. Patent. One copy of a thesis, written in the Chinese language and stored on a dusty shelf of the Beijing University Library will invalidate any and all U.S. patents that were filed one year after that thesis was published and that claims as an invention ANY of the subject matter that was disclosed in that thesis."

Q: What degree of diligence did BountyQuest exert in trying to understand the very high profile 1-Click submissions? Were people contacted who had actually used or were at least familiar with the prior art described in the submissions? (Submitted by Edie)

TOR: Again, I can't really answer for BountyQuest. However, I imagine that they used the same criteria a court would use, namely to read the documents and to do "pattern matching" on them.

Q: Of the four entries cited specifically by number as "Terrific Submissions" by BountyQuest, Tim O'Reilly chose to exclude only one - #25, which referred to anIBM mainframe system -- from receiving a portion of the $10,000 "unofficial" award, even though it's arguably the most similar to the Amazon patent and represents prior art that Jeff Bezos could have personally used or seen earlier in his mainframe days. Why? (Submitted by Ted)

TOR: Well, I actually thought the Doonesbury cartoon was the best example - it made it pretty clear to me that 1-click shopping was an "obvious" idea. But as programmers say on the net, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and the lawyers at BountyQuest obviously didn't think that it would pass muster in a court of law as evidence of prior art.

But as to the specific entry you mention - # 25 - it isn't at all clear to me how it's relevant. I didn't read every page, but in scanning through it, I didn't see much evidence of relevance in it. Perhaps if whomever had submitted it had pointed specifically to the passages they thought were relevant, we might have been able to see it as well. But frankly, based on what I did see there, it's hard to see why it was submitted at all!

The three selected entries were patents. The other one (#25) was not. So while it might have been closer in a conceptual sense, it arguably wasn't as close in a patent-law sense.

Though the statement on the BountyQuest 1-Click prior art page gives me pause:

What's also interesting, though, is the number of submissions that talk about simplifying the buying process on the Web without actually inventing 1-Click shopping. Look at submission #25 to see how much work some IBM engineers did on the subject of digital shopping without actually inventing 1-Click.

Anyway, I've probably spent more time on this than I should have. Chalk it up to my extreme sympathy for those subject to journalist attack, because of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Q: What degree of diligence did BountyQuest exert in trying to understand the very high profile 1-Click submissions? Were people contacted who had actually used or were at least familiar with the prior art described in the submissions? (Submitted by Edie)

TOR: Again, I can't really answer for BountyQuest. However, I imagine that they used the same criteria a court would use, namely to read the documents and to do "pattern matching" on them.

Q: Of the four entries cited specifically by number as "Terrific Submissions" by BountyQuest, Tim O'Reilly chose to exclude only one - #25, which referred to anIBM mainframe system -- from receiving a portion of the $10,000 "unofficial" award, even though it's arguably the most similar to the Amazon patent and represents prior art that Jeff Bezos could have personally used or seen earlier in his mainframe days. Why? (Submitted by Ted)

TOR: Well, I actually thought the Doonesbury cartoon was the best example - it made it pretty clear to me that 1-click shopping was an "obvious" idea. But as programmers say on the net, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and the lawyers at BountyQuest obviously didn't think that it would pass muster in a court of law as evidence of prior art.

But as to the specific entry you mention - # 25 - it isn't at all clear to me how it's relevant. I didn't read every page, but in scanning through it, I didn't see much evidence of relevance in it. Perhaps if whomever had submitted it had pointed specifically to the passages they thought were relevant, we might have been able to see it as well. But frankly, based on what I did see there, it's hard to see why it was submitted at all!

The three selected entries were patents. The other one (#25) was not. So while it might have been closer in a conceptual sense, it arguably wasn't as close in a patent-law sense.

Though the statement on the BountyQuest 1-Click prior art page gives me pause:

What's also interesting, though, is the number of submissions that talk about simplifying the buying process on the Web without actually inventing 1-Click shopping. Look at submission #25 to see how much work some IBM engineers did on the subject of digital shopping without actually inventing 1-Click.

Anyway, I've probably spent more time on this than I should have. Chalk it up to my extreme sympathy for those subject to journalist attack, because of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Let's face it. I would expect that we would have an increase in the number of contests. or did it quickly get into areas that were just to obscure?

Well looking at recent bounties on, Client-end web filtering (ala Cyberpatrol, i.e. the nemisis of Peacefire), Embedded web servers, web-based database systems which users can login to and update

While they may not be on areas the average Joe knows about, I imagine anyone reading slashdot would at least have heard about the abovementioned areas.

Let's face it. I would expect that we would have an increase in the number of contests. or did it quickly get into areas that were just to obscure?

Well looking at recent bounties on, Client-end web filtering (ala Cyberpatrol, i.e. the nemisis of Peacefire), Embedded web servers, web-based database systems which users can login to and update

While they may not be on areas the average Joe knows about, I imagine anyone reading slashdot would at least have heard about the abovementioned areas.

Let's face it. I would expect that we would have an increase in the number of contests. or did it quickly get into areas that were just to obscure?

Well looking at recent bounties on, Client-end web filtering (ala Cyberpatrol, i.e. the nemisis of Peacefire), Embedded web servers, web-based database systems which users can login to and update

While they may not be on areas the average Joe knows about, I imagine anyone reading slashdot would at least have heard about the abovementioned areas.

I was thinking with his time in the industry this guy's got a claim at more than a few of the bounties at www.bountyquest.com (www.bountyquest.com) - and I hope noone else can claim based on his revelations!

I think I have been infringing on this patent myself since 1995 :-), as I started telling my friends at that time: "don't send me heavy documents in the e-mail, dump it on the web with my name on, and send me the URL". This patent quite simply covers things that the web was specifically made for. But that isn't publicly available information so...

Make sure you to go to BountyQuest every now and than to check if a bounty is posted, so that these patents can be killed once and for all.

Hm, come to think of it, there should be a similar site that organizes prior art claims and challenge patents on the basis of it... Anybody know about anything like that?

BountyQuest would be a good place to start.

Goto BounteyQuest.com and sign up. This is a site that's set up to help kill patents with existing prior art, and is a sensible, practical, and legal way to help restore some sanity to the patent process.

(It may be argued that the patent issuing process is broken beyond repair, but even if so, a viable alternative has yet to emerge.)

Disclaimer: I have no interest in the above site other than a registered user.

That's what Amazon did (We're going to keep our customers address and credit card number in a rolodex 'and we do it with a computer') and we all hate them for it.

Speak for yourself, and the slashdroids. I don't hate amazon at all, I use them all them time, they're extremely convenient and have reasonable prices. As far as I can tell, they really were the first site to offer one-click shopping. If you can prove otherwise, go collect your $10,000 Bounty

Everything is obvious in hindsight.

Before running off to australia or where ever - I hear australia is nice tho - I have an idea to purpose. It seems IP is causing a stagnation of creativity, or at least, slowing down the progress of new ideas. It might be too early in the game to make a bolder statement because we are sitting at the cusp of how IP laws will effect our future.

What is the destructive force of IP? Prior art. If you can prove prior art, patents are squashed and hold no more power over ideas.

Would it possible then to create a site where people can submit ideas and papers to be released straight into public domain? The benefit this would have is a growing database of prior art which can be used to encourage growth of ideas and creativity. Not to mention to squelsh an IP claim to an idea.

It seems to me this would be a good way to approaching the growing problem with IP. Would anyone be interested in doing this?

Besides... I'm the guy who WON $10,000 on Bounty Quest and I always wanted to do it.

Check out your local library - microfilm, march 1987 Byte Magazine for a completely great hardware hack that won me $10,000 ba hahahah....

Besides... I'm the guy who WON $10,000 on Bounty Quest and I always wanted to do it.

Check out your local library - microfilm, march 1987 Byte Magazine for a completely great hardware hack that won me $10,000 ba hahahah....

...and make money at the same time.
Check out Bounty Quest, they reward people for finding documents that mention the idea before it was registered as a patent. That way the patent does not fulfil the new criteria and becomes invalid.

You get paid too... :-)

Here is an excellent article on IP issues and mad patents.

Also check out IP.com and BountyQuest

so I imagine well be seeing something here about this soon!

I'm tempted to immediately blame the companies for doing this, but I guess they are just trying to work within the system to make money. It's the system that sucks. Still I'm gonna hold off buying that antivirus software for a while now.

Nothing so funny. Though... "DoubleClick Banner Ad" patent has already been crashed by one of bounty hunters on BountyQuest. 1-Click has been partially crashed there, too. If you find the best prior-art regarding any of the BountyQuest's listed patents, you win $10,000.

well there is one, bountyquest. And you get paid as well :)

There is such a site already... and has been mentioned on Slashdot fairly often. It's at http://www.bountyquest.com.

BountyQuest here.

We invite the Slashdot community to judge for itself on this one. Here are a few points to consider.

1) There were no winners in the 1-click contest, but we did receive a lot of great art.

2) Tim O'Reilly, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to give away $10,000 of his own money, split among some of the best art we received, as a consolation prize.

3) We posted all of the art for all the world to see on our web site. (Something we were under no obligation to do.)

4) One hunter who didn't win or get a share of the gracious award is upset.

We suggest you look at his submission: #25 and see what you think. Is it better than the TV-Remote control submission (#18)? We'd love to hear what you think about it.

And now, back to reforming the patent system!

The BountyQuest team

BountyQuest here.

We invite the Slashdot community to judge for itself on this one. Here are a few points to consider.

1) There were no winners in the 1-click contest, but we did receive a lot of great art.

2) Tim O'Reilly, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to give away $10,000 of his own money, split among some of the best art we received, as a consolation prize.

3) We posted all of the art for all the world to see on our web site. (Something we were under no obligation to do.)

4) One hunter who didn't win or get a share of the gracious award is upset.

We suggest you look at his submission: #25 and see what you think. Is it better than the TV-Remote control submission (#18)? We'd love to hear what you think about it.

And now, back to reforming the patent system!

The BountyQuest team

BountyQuest here.

We invite the Slashdot community to judge for itself on this one. Here are a few points to consider.

1) There were no winners in the 1-click contest, but we did receive a lot of great art.

2) Tim O'Reilly, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to give away $10,000 of his own money, split among some of the best art we received, as a consolation prize.

3) We posted all of the art for all the world to see on our web site. (Something we were under no obligation to do.)

4) One hunter who didn't win or get a share of the gracious award is upset.

We suggest you look at his submission: #25 and see what you think. Is it better than the TV-Remote control submission (#18)? We'd love to hear what you think about it.

And now, back to reforming the patent system!

The BountyQuest team

BountyQuest here.

We invite the Slashdot community to judge for itself on this one. Here are a few points to consider.

1) There were no winners in the 1-click contest, but we did receive a lot of great art.

2) Tim O'Reilly, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to give away $10,000 of his own money, split among some of the best art we received, as a consolation prize.

3) We posted all of the art for all the world to see on our web site. (Something we were under no obligation to do.)

4) One hunter who didn't win or get a share of the gracious award is upset.

We suggest you look at his submission: #25 and see what you think. Is it better than the TV-Remote control submission (#18)? We'd love to hear what you think about it.

And now, back to reforming the patent system!

The BountyQuest team

BountyQuest here.

We invite the Slashdot community to judge for itself on this one. Here are a few points to consider.

1) There were no winners in the 1-click contest, but we did receive a lot of great art.

2) Tim O'Reilly, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to give away $10,000 of his own money, split among some of the best art we received, as a consolation prize.

3) We posted all of the art for all the world to see on our web site. (Something we were under no obligation to do.)

4) One hunter who didn't win or get a share of the gracious award is upset.

We suggest you look at his submission: #25 and see what you think. Is it better than the TV-Remote control submission (#18)? We'd love to hear what you think about it.

And now, back to reforming the patent system!

The BountyQuest team

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/08/2058216.shtm l

...and...

http://www.bountyquest.com/bounties/displayBounty. php?bountyName=1019

..., respectively.

My .02,

I don't know if they keep a database available for others though.

While there are a number of organizations (notably Bounty Quest) involved in breaking already issued patents are there any watch-dog groups devoted to looking for "trivial" pending patents? Based on what I know about the process it is easier to stop a patent before it is issued than to try to overturn one after it exists. I think such a group could significantly reduce the number of "bogus" patents out there.

Tim O'Reilly says the following (quote):
"16. Online Minivend Reference Guide "MiniVend -multi-catalog shopping cart and mall," March 14, 1997. Mike Heins, the creator of the MiniVend system (now owned by Red Hat under the name "Interchange") provided some great art. He showed us how to very easily configure his open-source system to perform single-click buying. In writing the system, he put considerable effort into saving customer session information, so that buyers would not have to reenter their information to make purchases.

However, the submission is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone made those simple changes and implemented 1-Click shopping in the proper fashion before our Prior To date." (end of quote)

The last sentence is, IMHO, really MORE THAN ANNOYING ! Not that I blame Tim O'Reilly for it, but I simply don't believe it.

I have been reading the minivend mailing list since it started out beginning of 1997. Mike Heins posted to his minivend mailing list as a response to someone who asked exactly for something that represents the implementation of the one-click ordering feature, that this feature CAN be implemented AND THAT IT HAS BEEN DONE. This was on May 13th, 1997 and clearly before the cut-off date of Sept. 27th, 1997.

Please read the short thread of the post on "Retaining user information" here

I am aware of the fact, that Mike Heins might have been under restrictions to release any more information of who had done it at that time, but obviously he knew so much, that he confidently could mention on the mailing list, that it "has been done". I can say, that what later became known as the "famous" one-click feature, was something that was an option to be implemented easily for a programmer who could understand the software, i.e. a person skilled in the trade, and users of MiniVend were aware of it. I am sure several people have thought and played with setting it up, but might not have gone through with it, because many customer didn't like it at that time. It was considered just too mysterious and considered not "slow and clear" enough.

But quite frankly I could very well imagine that in certain industries that feature might have been welcome and that it was implemented. I simply think that the ones, who did it, don't want to come forward for whatever reasons.

Now, may be it is really impossible to find the person or site, who implemented it and prove that it was done, but this is an appeal for whoever it was to COME FORWARD.

So, even if Tim O'Reilly throws the towel, that doesn't mean that the battle is lost.

Would be interesting to know if the site could be found and retrieved in the Alexa archive, which of course now is conveniently owned by Amazon.com itself. What a coincidence. For more on Alexa archives look here and here . The archives have now 16 terabytes of text, audio and graphical files, accumulated from April 1996 on.

I cannot understand how Amazon got this patent to start off with. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. I'm very happy to see that they are (hopefully, fingers crossed) not getting away with this!

Well... after getting rid of the doubleclick patent, it is time to get rid of the single click patent :)

Aren't corporations supposed to be more focused on doing business than suing?

For what it's worth, I hope RAMBUS loses this particular battle, even if it isn't likely. The Motley Fool posted an article a while back predicting the success of RAMBUS based on these patents. Hardware patents can be as harmful to the industry as software--it's a hot issue right now, and some people are trying to do something about it already.

So what should be done with patents? I haven't really heard a good solution yet. Most solutions either favor the corporations (and lawyers) or they throw out the entire system, innovation to be done at your own risk. Is there a middle ground?

Tim

Any other programmers out there every had to write anything to update customer data file definitions to a newer version regardless of what the current definition was? I sure have with a few different file formats.

I sure we can come up with a couple thousand examples of prior art on this one.

Of course, we must wait until there is a bounty is set.

Just what the world needs,

Well, at least it doesn't scare BountyQuest. They issued a bounty on their own business model.

Doesn't the first key investor have a problem with putting a bounty on this kind of thing?

Probably not. A lot of people acknowledge that Amazon was the first to implement one click shopping, but that doesn't mean it isn't an obvious idea. Some day when man colonizes Mars, people will set up shops on Mars, and there will be a shop which becomes the first to sell peanut butter. Although this shop was the first to sell peanut butter on Mars, this should not be patentable because it is obvious, it's only that it was not feasable until recent technology. The same holds true of the Amazon one click patent, it was not until cookies came around that they could implement it, but that does not mean it was non obvious, it doesn't even mean other people didn't think of before time they did, it just means they were the first to finish it. It's not the possibility of prior art which makes the One click patent a bad one, it's the obviousness of it.

Doesn't the first key investor have a problem with putting a bounty on this kind of thing?

Probably not. A lot of people acknowledge that Amazon was the first to implement one click shopping, but that doesn't mean it isn't an obvious idea. Some day when man colonizes Mars, people will set up shops on Mars, and there will be a shop which becomes the first to sell peanut butter. Although this shop was the first to sell peanut butter on Mars, this should not be patentable because it is obvious, it's only that it was not feasable until recent technology. The same holds true of the Amazon one click patent, it was not until cookies came around that they could implement it, but that does not mean it was non obvious, it doesn't even mean other people didn't think of before time they did, it just means they were the first to finish it. It's not the possibility of prior art which makes the One click patent a bad one, it's the obviousness of it.

Doesn't the first key investor have a problem with putting a bounty on this kind of thing?

Dancin Santa

Doesn't the first key investor have a problem with putting a bounty on this kind of thing?

Dancin Santa

If you're not in the know, BountyQuest is a site to sort of publically ask "So, uh. Anyone have any prior art on this?" before they go ahead and patent it.
Nice in theory, but honestly it's about as valid as oh, say.... your average "hacker challenge"...

Apparently so!/a& gt; Or so they claim. But it's slashdotted now so I can't check the details...