Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

BountyQuest vs. Stupid Patent Ideas

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the your-chance-to-score-some-green dept.

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.

3 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. The prior art does not include clicks. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5
    Remember the book (I hope I get the title right), 34 Charing Cross Road? I must have read it 20 years ago. If I remember it correctly, it's about the relationship that a an American customer has with the staff of a British bookstore during World War II. It's in the form of their letters to each other, which of course include business transactions - although the customer gets to know the people in the bookstore, he's writing to buy books.

    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.
  2. Does not end corruption by Benjamin+Shniper · · Score: 5

    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

  3. Stupid or smart? by AtariDatacenter · · Score: 5

    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'.]