Slashdot Mirror
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."
What? You've figured out a way to patent something with a single mouse click? Now that is an idea worth patenting!
__________
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.
(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.
[
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.
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.