Slashdot Mirror
BountyQuest vs. Stupid Patent Ideas
Sara Winge pointed out
BountyQuest which (not surprisingly) allows people to post cash rewards if people can find prior art on a patent. Tim O'Reilly has posted a bount on Amazon's notorious 1-click shopping patent. If you can produce a document describing one click purchasing that was published prior to September 12, 1997, you can earn the $10,000 bounty.
For years Star Trek has allowed clients to order whatever they want with a single command. Knowing the clients STORED voice print, it knows who's credits to charge for the item. (No, items are NOT free onboard the enterprise). Sounds dumb, but Star Trek replicators can "order" anything" with a single command based on stored information about the client/person requesting the item. The original series ran from 1966-1969. ST The Next Generation ran from 1987-1994. Deep space nine was from 1993-1999. ST Voyager has run from 1995 to now. All of these (I think with the exception of the first series) showed people making purchases in this way.
If I win, donate my money to EFF.
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
It does conjur up visions of the old west.
The need for such a site is indicative of the failings of the patent office and perhaps the concept of patents in general.
Do patents really serve a viable purpose anymore? It would be interesting to know what percentage of patents are held by struggling "inventors" and what percentage are held by huge multinationals who really don't need an inducement to invent. Their existance is dependent on their abilities to perform/provide servics/things to generate profit.
Perhaps we should leave patents as they are for individuals but shorten their duration by more then half for large companies. (perhaps something inbetween for small entities)
In the realms of technology and especially software the patents seem to hurt more then help.
Is it as bad in other fields? What about materials engineering and genetics? Are the same kinds of abuses occuring with the same frequency as in the technology field?
The body of information is too big to research by yourself. There is no place you can go and see what technology everyone came up with. If you want a piece of information that is not readily indexed in an "In a nutshell" book, information like did anyone ever do this, ask the public, they have the widest knowledge base.
This isn't sloth this is efficency.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
I remember in the 1980's they had these machines where you put quaters into it and pressed a button (just once) and out came a can of soda pop from the bottom of it. It wasn't over the internet though and you did not have to pay for "shipping and handling" but the delivery happened in seconds!
I miss the Karma Whores.
However, here's the best one:
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure, this is a good idea, but the problem with many of the patents (at least in the computers section) is not prior art. It's that they shouldn't have been issued because they're obvious to anyone working in the field, not because someone else did it earlier.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The patent is not, actually, if you read it, on '1-click' shopping, but on single-action-to-purchase' shopping. ;)) , however you'd have to cite the Amazon patent (because it covers in general, any single event to initiate a purchase, including a mouse-button press), and you'd have to license the amazon patent before you could even use your patent.
You could patent button-press shopping (that's what the first half of a click is, a press-event; the second half is a release-event; your OOP library may vary in terminology.
This also applies to one-word-voice-activated shopping, 'point-and-buy' gesture-recognition-shopping, etc, etc.
Amazon's -PATENT- may be stupid, but their Patent -Attorneys- are not, and they covered the bases.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Look at the bounty for the patent describing the BountyQuest patent for $14,159.
:)
This brings the total from $300,000 to $314,159. Does that number look familiar?
æeee!
Amazon.com's patent directly conflicts with my more general patent on "1-Click-Credit-Card-Fraud'.
Now give me my money.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
The point of this is that the people in the bookstore know the customer and will send him what he asks for in a letter. Although he usually repeats his address in a letter, he doesn't have to - they know it. They know his payment history. This is essentially the "one-click" business system, without the clicks.
The problem with business system patents is that you can take a business system that's been going on without a computer for centuries, make a single change of using a computer to perform it, and that is granted a patent. There is no real invention and no patent should be granted.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This does not fix the basic problem of too few patent clerks going over a growing number of bad patents. I also don't think that this will solve problems like the Church of Scientology's copyright on all information about their cult. Nor the growing amount of information being stolen from the public domain for a very long 17 years by corporations demanding everyone else standardize on their products (like Microsoft).
Large corporations like it this way - small businesses are more or less excluded from the patent trade and they can have thousands of jargon-filled patents over their section of the economy. It's a government enforced monopoly system that rewards larger corporations over innovation. What we need is fewer patents. Far far fewer, and better decisions up front.
And who said the patent people have to pay for it all up front? How does this help poor inventers who go all out for their invention and don't always have money for patents (and who therefore have to sell their ideas to GREEDY investors who are more interested in finding a big pile of money than using the invention as intended)?
-Ben
I don't know if this is really stupid, or really smart. But what if someone patentened the 1/2 click? No, this isn't a troll. Read on.
If a "one click" is defined as clicking on the mouse button and releasing it (as is needed for any web browser), then a "half click" could be defined simply as the act of clicking on an object (without regard to releasing or not).
Make a javascript a submit button, and viola! You've got 1/2 click shopping. Amazon's patent becomes irrelevant.
[Note: Devil's in the details, tho'.]