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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."
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, 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.