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One Click Patent News
Agro writes "OpenTV is is trying to broaden one of their set-top box patents to include one click shopping. They say their claim predates Amazon's by "more than three years." The press release is posted here. I can't decide if the filing is the worst part or the fact that OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer." As well: Darrin Cardani writes "This article on Yahoo claims that OpenTV thinks that Amazon's 1-click patent infringes on one of their patents filed 3 years earlier."
Right, then they get to pay OpenTV instead, and how much do you want to bet that he isn't going to get his money back from Amazon?
(for that matter, OpenTV might be inclined to charge him retroactively for his unlicensed (by them) use of the ... ahem ... technology)
DNA just wants to be free...
I don't like CIPO. How about CHIP OFF? (CHief Intellectual Property OFFicer)
Genes can -not- be patented. 'Discoveries' of natural things can -not- be patented. 'gene patents' is media shorthand for 'have patented the process of extracting or synthesizing the gene sequence'.
... but I doubt it. I think it's 'obvious' even to the patent office that math can be done with a pencil and paper...)
Similarly to 'algorithms cannot be patented'; you can't stop people from engaging in public key cryptography if they do it with pencil and paper. (Or maybe you can if you patent 'a process implementing public key cryptography with pencil and paper'
So, software patents are on the -synthetic- process of a program running in memory, and gene patents are on the -synthetic- process of extracting/synthesizing genes. The 'natural' processes of thinking through a math problem or procreating are unpatentable.
The -scary- part of gene patents is the same thing that is scary about -all- medicinal patents. What if you have a deadly disease but have no insurance and cannot afford the inflated prices of the exclusive manufacturer of the treatment? (As happens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with AIDS right now... ). Anyway. Don't dilute important issues just because the media is too lazy to describe things properly. (They do, you know, at least once every few weeks have an 'in-depth' discussion of gene-patents, and the first question is always 'how can you patent a gene?' followed by the explanation I just gave. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by NPR and the BBC... )
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
From what I've seen from looking into filing a patent (IANAL), the person filing is supposed to check for previous patents.
Personally, I hope that:
1) OpenTV sue the $#!+ out of Amazon.
2) Amazon has to pay fines/licensing fees up the wazoo.
3) OpenTV's patent is declared obvious or nullified by the Berman-Boucher bill passing.
BTW, slightly off-topic, but if you read the B-B bill, the $200 fee to challenge the obviousness or prior art of an idea can be waived "if such waiver is in the public interest".
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
It the responsibility of the patent filer. That is why patent attorneys make butt-loads of money. They have to research all related patents then determine if you'd have a leg to stand on in court.
-tim
I'm thinking of opening a sourceforge project to write software which will, given a complete list of objects, problems, methodologies, nouns,adverbs buzzwords, makey-upey words, and adjectives will generate syntactically correct descriptions of how to do anything to anything, using any damn method. :)
Then I'll publish them all and we'll be done with this patent rubbish.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
What? You've figured out a way to patent something with a single mouse click? Now that is an idea worth patenting!
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No one should be allowed to prevent someone from working. .. That's why there's a time limit. Should anyone be allowed to own highways so that anyone can put up road blocks?
Whether it's any benefit to society is irrelevant. Society is definitely not beneficial to society. It's hypocritical for anyone to ask for all decisions to be based on whether there's benefit to society. For example, not one of the organizations concerned about world hunger ever talks about doing the dirty work of making sure governments don't import the food or resources that undeveloped countries need in order to begin to grow. It's all one bloody (speaking figuratively of course) pointless crusade like the bloody (speaking not so figuratively) drug war.
The problem is that we allow a vocal uneducated group known as The Shareholders(TM) to control what companies do. I think that if a company is publicly owned beyond a certain percent it should be dismantled. A piece of land would be horribly ruined if many people shared it as it would no longer be managed properly and would fail to perform its function in agriculture. Similarly after many stab wounds a human being dies.
Take any machine and give too many people control and it falls to pieces.
Public shareholding is too communistic in my opinion for it to work. That why the system fails.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Exactly. It's rather more complicated to reduce the number of steps. Not necessarily enough to be patentable, but the implementation details are much different than 10 click shopping.
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I think its time for some major action on the part of the consumer. If the gov't doesnt take away our rights, the corporations will. Granted, we'll have free speech...but first you'll have to download the and pay for the program to write with, pay the access costs to upload, bypass all the ad banners and EULA's , and then face corporate censorship if they dont like what you have to say. People, we need to rally up and start writing letters to the different branches of our govt, most importantly congress. The patent office needs a major overhaul, and the supreme court needs to make some major decisions as far as copywrites are concerned. Plus, we need some sort of tort reform so these people cant rake innocent developers through the coals because they create soemthing neat. Enginuity is now a 4 letter word in the corporate mindset. They want to own everything. Im convinced the government wont be the ones limiting our freedoms, it'll be corporate america
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Scratch OpenTV off your christmas card list.
I'm just musing here, but there must be some technology for disabled people that allows them to click on some device to indicate "I want to buy one of those" to a clerk. Make sense?
(No, this is NOT offtopic.)
Sometime between 1984 and 1988, a week-long strip of "Bloom County" comics by Berkeley Breathed, involved prior art for this disputed 'one interaction shopping'.
I've not been able to find this strip. Please, if anyone is a Bloom County fan, and has the older anthologies, search for them.
The plot: Opus the Penguin has gotten addicted to Virtual Reality Home Shopping. An unwieldy helmet and computer hookup gives Opus a VR shopping experience. Opus' friends try to dissuade him before he goes bankrupt.
The key strip: Opus explains that they have his credit card on file, and the VR system takes simple gestures to make purchases. The punchline was, as Opus gestures blindly with a pointing finger, "Oops, I think I just bought a forklift."
If we can show any example of a concept that includes networked, shopping, single gesture and completed purchase, we can nip this stupid Amazon/OpenTV patent dispute in the bud.
Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.
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Patents are NOT determined by 'whether humanity gets a new benefit that nothing else would give.'
Patents are SUPPOSED to be given for a new product that is useful and non-obvious to an expert in that particular field.
For example, discovering that an altered form of Vitamin C acts as an immunoamplifier (I am not a doctor.. yet.. so I don't know what the term for the opposite of an immunosuppressant is) and makes the body tolerate organ transplants would be patent-worthy.
Public-key cryptography, the practice of a two-key system was a new thing 28 years ago, and it was non-obvious to experts (who denied that it was possible to have a secure cryptosystem with a pair of keys), so it was patent-worthy.
But, a great number of software patents are NOT patentworthy. The GUI Apple built in 1984 was patentable; I mean, no consumer hardware could support a gui on so little! But Microsoft patenting Win32? No way.
I also feel that patenting genomes is wrong, because PEOPLE ARE NOT PROPERTY. Patenting parts of genes could easily lead to 'licensing fees' for human beings.....
philosophy on the half-shell ]=[ d.valued
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
And no, I don't think that helps the argument tremendously. 35 USC 103 says that to be non-obvious, it has to be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the field. While I think that's the case, I don't think that 2 patents proves that to be true.
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Please what do we have to do to get /. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???
First click here to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page, and watch the patent stories disappear.
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?
A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?
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( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
When someone files for a patent on something, and it turns out that there was, in fact, prior art that they were not aware of, not only does it invalidate the latter patent, but it also provides evidence that the patented "device" was, in fact, obvious.
It's not conclusive, but certainly helps the argument when several people came up with the same idea independently.
Well, I don't like it, but I can't help but smile at the thought.
Everyone warned Jeff Bezos that these patents wouldn't work. Tim O'Reilly did. We did here on /.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. This is exactly why software patents are so dangerous. Why they are bad for everyone-- including the patent holders. There are some cases where they make sense, but going wild is very risky.
I really, really hope that this claim goes through. Then, perhaps Amazon will get serious about stopping these ridiculous patents.
Turnabout's fair play, I suppose. Jeff Bezos, just look what you started.
The idea is so basic that I doubt OpenTV is really the first entity with a patent covering "one-click" either. This could get interesting.
It's like the idea of Mutually Insured Destruction with nuclear weapons, except the participants are a bunch of kids holding their fingers in the "gun" configuration.
Like as not, they'll stand there for a few seconds, there'll be a big argument over who yelled "bang!" first, and it'll degenerate into a big fistfight.
Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and the corporate world will back off from IP abuse, but I doubt it.
"Gimme another hit on the patent bong, Jimmy..."
I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.
DNA just wants to be free...
Or does this responsibility fall on the prior patent holder?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
It was his decision to use the Amazon business method patent offensively rather than just defensively that set the ball rolling.
Stupid patents have exited for a while, but only now are corporations starting to really put a hurting on each other.
To use the playground analogy (again), it's like a bunch of kids playing in a yard with a lot of big sticks laying around. Occasionally a kid will pick one up and wave it around, and then forget about it for a while.
Then, suddenly, one of the kids (Jeff Bezos) picks up a stick and whacks another kid with it. Now, one of two things are going to happen:
OpenTV was just the second kid to pick up a stick (in this case, one that looks rather like the one Jeff had). Watch for more. And yes, I do think the coming state of affairs will be very much Mr. Jeffery Bezos's fault.
DNA just wants to be free...
Okay, the filing is stupid. But why should IP not be guarded by a company? There are plenty of things that a company can do that need to be protected. Maybe you can find it funny that a company named "OpenTV" has a CIPO, but IP is a serious matter in the corporate world.
Sometimes I wonder if the line between honest desire to see free, open standards and anti-corporate hatred even exists in the minds of those who want to whack IP upside the head. I've had an idea or two that's patentable--but not in the software realm. I like my software open and my engineering design closed. =)
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-- Geof F. Morris
well, i guess OpenTV has only held assignment of the patent for about a year or so anyway (before it was Thompson Consumer Electonics Inc.). assignment data shows the patent has been assigned to OpenTV since late september 1999. ten bux sez OpenTV didn't even realize they had the patent until some patent agent or attorney noticed it cited in another application or something, who knows.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!