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E-Bay Patents Thumbnail Galleries
goaliemn writes: "In yet another stupid patent filed department, E-bay has filed to patent their thumbnail gallery section of e-bay. I know of afew sites that may have existing work well before ebay." Surely someone who works at Ebay can tell us this is a late (or early) April Fool's joke, right?
Maybe they mean being able to click on a thumbnail and allow you to purchase or bid on it. I don't know. There has got to be more to this patent than just thumbnails because there is prior art of this on private homepages for God's sake.
I can almost bet that the additional "innovation" of this "invention" has to do with the ability to use/take your money in some way.
A link to the patent or something substantiating this news would be very appreciated.
Woz
Anyone else get the feeling that these patent stories are being posted simply to piss us off? I mean, by now, we all know that the patent office has no clue. Let's move on, and drop the patent stories please.
I'm tired of this tirade against corporations. Corporations in themselves are not evil entities. They are run by people. It's those people that decide what does or does not get done.
It was the people that comprise the board at EBay (or whatever functionary who did it) that decided to file a patent for this. This could have been an individual running this website or it could have been a corporation - given the right circumstances they are both equally likely to do the same dumbass thing.
Stop blaming corporations for all the problems of this world and stop listening to Ralph Nader so goddamn much. Corporations in themselves are not evil or good - it's the people that run them that are. It's convenient to blame corporations because they are this nebulous faceless entity that's easy to hate. Too convenient. It's about time the blame started getting put where it belongs.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Uh-hu.
:(
How about you go and read up about the patent eBay has applied for THEN come back - you see, the patent is SPECIFIC to online auctions (in fact, not even THAT general!), so your pr0n galleries are irrelevant to the patent.
I just LOVE the way so many people round here these days post without acquainting thenselves with the basic facts on the subject first
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
This is the same situation I have. I'm holding the patent on breathing, but I'm not enforcing it.
Anything that can go wrong will. - Murphy's Law
Anything that can go wrong will. - Murphy's Law
Be prepared. - Boy Scout motto
I have already contacted them. They are investigating to see if the program is covered by the patent and if it is actually prior art. It looks like it may be, but it is hard to say without a patent lawyer looking it over first.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Even more Ebay patents...
1 6,167,386 Method for conducting an on-line bidding session with bid pooling
2 6,073,117 Mutual credit server apparatus and a distributed mutual credit system
3 6,058,417 Information presentation and management in an online trading environment
4 6,058,379 Real-time network exchange with seller specified exchange parameters and interactive seller participation
5 6,044,363 Automatic auction method
6 6,012,045 Computer-based electronic bid, auction and sale system, and a system to teach new/non-registered customers how bidding, auction purchasing works
You can find them here.
Got this from the United States Patent and Trademark Office
cheers
mike
Corporations respond to the bottom line -- if you want to stop being a victim of corporations, quit buying their products, write them explaining how you feel and the course of action you are taking, and encourage everyone you know to do the same.
You don't sit back and wait for the police to come when there's a maniac with a gun in your house; you take him out, or you get out yourself -- you take action! You don't sue your neighbor when his music is too loud -- you tell him yourself! Can we all take a little responsibility?
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
I don't know the date of their "invention", but there was a web site I worked on MANY years ago. (1996 or so) that used thumbnails in just this manner. The site no longer exists, but the company I wrote it for still does. Incredibly obvious idea. Anyone who has used an image viewing program in the last 10 years could think of a web version.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
So what happens? The strong get stronger, and the weak get weaker, we may as well be kids on a remote island being seduced by the Lord of the Flies. We have two ways out, either people start using their vote (unlikely), or technology will come to our rescue just as it did when the printing press helped society break free from the church's control.
--
... you do realize EBay is only patenting this so they can put the patent rights up for auction, right? You don't suppose the winner of said auction would be a porn site, do you? hmm? ;)
This cannot stand; Genset holds a prior patent... on thumbnails.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
You really think he thought it was serious? C'mon man... shouldn't you be somewhere else?
um.. I done, you can stop reading...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Big deal. Who wants to see pictures of thumbnails anyway?
http://furrybid.transform.to has existed for the past six months or so, so this patent's dead on arrival shoud a lawyer want to take up the challenge (but then, IANAL).
--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Go to Yahoo! Shopping, do a search for something. It gives a listing of merchandise and thumbnails by pulling images from "a plurality of sites". And since you trade money for merchandise, it can be considered "an online trading environment". Been around forever. Screw Ebay.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I am getting tired of seeing this crap happen. If this patent goes through many sneaky lawyers will manage to propogate a new wave of suits against this site or that for having a shopping cart or catalog system that has an image and some information about a product etc. The thing that really sucks about this wave of PatentMania is not just the obvious first round of suits but the second round: the design firms and designers/programmers who build sites that unknowingly violate the plethora of patents being awarded or applied for daily. How the hell are we supposed to keep up on the ever expanding list of stupid patents that we have to be wary of? Is there a central repository or some type of advocacy site (yeah i know there are i'm just spouting ?'s hear me out) that should be mentioned whenever the latest greatest dumb patent application goes in? Can we find some inexpensive form of recourse to stop patents like this from going through? Should we be writing our Congresmen or Representatives enmasse about this just this time or every time this occurs? How come with all this discussion we never really cover this aspect of the dumb patent thing and what to do about it? Who should we write at the USPTO when we disagree with one of these applications? Timothy (or anyone on team /. for that matter) could you please pull together some links for this stuff and put them up on slashdot so that we may easily get to them everytime this kind of idiocy happens(link them to the articles)? I realize that its a bit of extra work (only the first time you set it up) but I really think we as an online community could benefit from an easy way to contact the right people. Letter writing works and I am pretty sure there is enough outrage to get people involved and doing things on thier own if its easy for them to do. Maybe a list of do's and dont's on effective letter writing so that we don't come off as hysterical zealots etc.It just seems to me that an article like this gets posted and after that the ball gets dropped (for the most part) with the exception of a follow up or update to revisit the topic. I'm not saying slashdot should go patent crazy and do this for every patent nor should you guys be obligated to but if it is enough to merit posting as a story on the main page then linking up a pertinent 'to do list' or faq would be a positive way for us to proceed.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
I'd love to be the laywer challenging this in court. I'd have a field day showing "prior art" by demonstrating porn galleries.
The only "research" into prior art the patent office does is to look at existing patents already granted and the applications that exist that pre-date the application being considered.
No web searches, no common sense, no "gee, didn't I see something else that did that?", and certainly no asking someone with real, relevant experience in the field covered by the application ("hey, do you think this is too obvious a concept?" is a question that pretty much hasn't entered their minds in years). nada, zip, zilch.
If a patent doesn't already exist, there's no "prior art". The current view of the patent office is exactly that. Their attitude is "You want to prove prior art or obviousness, do it in court, and not on MY time..."
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Ebay is not patenting thumbnails nor claiming to have invented them. They are trying to patent the use of thumbnails in a new context, as a sales tool for online auctions. There is some precedent for this.
For example, Post-It (tm) notes are protected by a utility patent. Neither the note nor the adhesive was invented (by 3M IIRC), but the use of the adhesive for the temporary sticking of notes to odd surfaces was a new use for existing technology. And that can be patented.
This is really no less stupid than Amazon's one-click patent, which of course still doesn't mean it isn't stupid. But don't assume just because every pr0n site in existence has been using thumbnails since the days of Turing and von Neumann that Ebay can't get this through or enforce it.
(For the curious, the other type of patent is called a design patent and is the kind you would apply for if you had actually developed a new and previously unknown technology.)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The quote is:
"The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own"
;)
As far as I remember, thumbnails started to appear in computer world since icons came up as a way to improve user's interface.
Now that's nearly 10 years if not more. and I'm speaking on PC world only... So what's e-Bay up to?
Frankly it seems that this patenting and trade-marking fever has beaten all possible limits. You know the latest? Have you heard of those small chocolades called "Kinder-surprise". Well the owner trademarked the name. Not the whole name but the "Kinder". I heard that "Kinder" means child or childhood in German. So it seems that our dear Germans should start to use it as "Kinder (TM)"
In face of these things I have a proposal. People, and mainly women, you may hate these small little beings with four legs, a little tail and usually having grey or white fur. I'm speaking about mice. I think these guys have made a lot of good and bad things to Mankind. But we shall all agree that we are utterly bound with each other. "Mouse", I believe, is a cute name for these little creatures and I think it should stay so for many reasons. So let's patent/trademark this name into the correct owners before someone comes up and states that mice have a ball to move, two or more buttons, a long cable, and trademarks this as Mouse.
Given they've only applied for the patent and haven't got it yet, wouldn't there be a way to intervene in the approval process somehow ? Collect prior art and send it to the PTO, showing them that ebay is trying to patent something that's been invented eons ago ?
OK, here's a specific example from an on-line auction system I wrote in 1996. This is, to my knowledge, the thirteenth US software patent where I personally have written prior art. Having said that, of course, it was scarcely a novel idea when I used it.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
No, not until somebody patents online galleries of cat photos.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Calling their "gallery" patent pending is just E-Bay PR bullshit. It tells nothing about what the patent application is really about, except that it relates in some way to their gallery. Wait to see what the claims look like before you get all pissed off. If this thing issues, the claims aren't gonna be directed to a thumbnail gallery in general; no matter how stupid the Patent Office may be at times, they would never let that issue. Apparently, E-Bay is doing something different with this gallery, which may be bogus too, but it's not worth getting all bent out of shape until the patent actually issues (if it does at all). If and when that happens, you can pick apart the claims and see what they really have. Sometimes a company will get a patent with really narrow claims directed to a tiny aspect of their "innovation". This ensures that they get the patent issued. The patent is virtually worthless from the point of view of enforcement, because it's so narrow that it's easy to avoid infringing the claims. However, they get to blab to the world that their "gallery" or whatever is "patented", which gets them advertising points with dumbasses. I suspect this is the case with E-Bay.
But then, I don't know, maybe in the end it makes sense. Many things in America seem to rely on the courts, I have noticed since I've been here, and the Law seems to be the way that disputes such as these are decided. It does seem a little odd though, all the same, hehe.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
It's actually the exact opposite. In capitalism, you assume a free market, which means everybody is competing on their own merit, and not on legal battles.
What happens is that it's easier for large corporations to compete in the courts than in the market.
It is rather hard to put together a civil court system which will discourage malicious lawsuits (and corruption) whilst still allowing the genuinly wronged to seek redress.
Inventors have expended capital (their time and materiel), and a good capitalist free market economy would compensate them and reward the efficient ones.
However a good free market does not guarentee any kind of return (let alone a profit). Therefore it only rewards the good (or lucky) ones.
The idea that people (and companies) should automatically be rewarded for their expended time, money and materials isn't free market capitalism.
Yes, but for people like myself who run auction sites with 10,000 members instead of 10,000,000 -- this is still not a good thing.
---
seumas.com
Maybe it's defensive patenting.
Patent something important so that others won't be able to sue you when they beat you to it.
Paint Shop Pro has had the thumbnail gallery(called the "browser") for years.
If a patent may be given for thumbnail galleries, then whoever enabled html to have pictures act as hyperlinks should get the credit. Displaying pictures is part of HTML, and so is clicking them to get to another page. The notion of having an image act as a hyperlink to a description of that image, and perhaps a higher-res picture, is nothing more than a magazine with contents on the cover (e.g. Reader's Digest). And good style web development teaches us that all hyperlinks should be orgranized in a logical way- so click a picture and learn more about it... Wow, whoever thought of that is a genius!
> The problem is the patent office granting all
>these silly patents.
Perhaps part of the problem is the court system,
for not really being available as a venue to those who need it. If it is truly such a disaster to "be sued" even if one is in the right, that defending oneself against being sued
may put one out of business, then the court system has long ago ceased to serve it's primary purpose -- to protect the people it serves, equally, consistently, fairly, and without prejudice.
The fact that people and businesses must walk on eggs and comply with extralegal demands, because they fear being sued by someone with more resources than they have, is really an intolerable situation. If we tolerate it, we get the government we deserve -- ruled by the
corporate entity with the most money, and which suffers the people to consider themselves "free" so long as its own interests are served.
Guess we need to let this situation go ahead and get worse. When it becomes intolerable enough that people become sufficiently outraged to make the sacrifices needed to bring change, they will,
just like they have done throughout history.
In our lifetimes? One wonders. As a society, our lives are just too cozy and pleasant for us
to really have the stomach for revolution. That might mean people like you and be getting killed at the hands of other people like you and me, or even (gasp!) giving up cable tv or the welfarre check!
Obviously, things aren't bad enough to drive real change. Yet.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Maybe E-Bay does realize just how ridiculous the whole patent idea is.
With the great number of companies trying to patent the most ridculously obvious technologies, perhaps it's emerged as a self-defense mechanism. Sure, patenting something like a hyperlink or a thumbnail gallery is stupid. Everyone who has used the Internet for even a short period of time knows that these are commonly used. Ask yourself though, as a large company (with available money to burn on lawyers), if you're willing to take the risk that some other schmuck will try to patent it first... and possibly... just maybe... win. Losing the right to a patent also decreases the options for someone else to try.
If E-Bay were to win that sort of patent (and they won't) they could prove they aren't also a bunch of schmucks by announcing that they have no intention of ever enforcing such a patent, but explain they were doing so to protect themselves from just that sort of abuse.
Or... it could just be my wishful thinking that a large company genuinely has the interest of the common web guy at heart.
I checked the link out - I don't see a way to look at anything but the abstract, so let's analyze it a bit, shall we?
A method and apparatus for information presentation and management in an online trading environment are provided.
Note the bold (my emphasis). This shouldn't affect the cat photos James_G mentioned.
According to one aspect of the present invention, person-to-person commerce over the Internet is facilitated by providing prospective buyers the ability to quickly preview items for sale.
Again, this is related to commerce. This basically says that the site is going to be allowing two parties to buy/sell items with some sort of preview system. Duh, right? Right.
Images are harvested from a plurality of sites based upon user-supplied information. The user-supplied information includes descriptions of items for sale and locations from which images that are to be associated with the items can be retrieved. Thumbnail images are created corresponding to the harvested images and are aggregated onto a web page for presentation at a remote site.
This basically says, "people give us info and we show it". What innovation. The only thing of interest will be the aggregation of the images on to a web site (we don't really know what that means yet) and the harvesting of images. I'm sure those are defined somewhere. I doubt it's anything special.
At face value, it sounds like they are given a link to an image, they go get this image and display it with the description. Extraordinary. Edison would be proud.
According to another aspect of the present invention, a user may submit a query to preview items for sale. After receiving the query, thumbnail images corresponding to items that satisfy the user query are displayed, each of the thumbnail images previously having been created based upon a user-specified image.
It's called cataloging. Yahoo! has done this for ages. The "query" probably amounts just clicking along some links that are grouped by similairity. Hell, it may even be a search. Again, I can hardly contain my admiration of such forward thinking.
The abstract makes it out to be absolutely nothing special. It's all be done before, but since it relates to "online trading environments", it's different. My ass.
Woz
Patents are easier to have overturned in the first year after being issued. "We, the Open Source Community," should have some sort of watchdog effort pointed at the USPTO to keep track of new stuff being issued, that really isn't new. Then we could go after it.
We can all be Stupid Patent Police, every one.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But e-bay hasn't even come up with an original idea, here.
If you write the application in technical language and make it difficult to understand then the USPO will probably believe it's an original idea. Which IMHO is the actual problem.
It really doesn't matter (as has been pointed out everytime something like this happens) a quick appeal and it will be wiped out.
Is there actually such a thing. e.g. send a letter to the USPO saying "patent XYZ is invalid, because...". Then if the original claiment attempts court action simply forward a copy and the plaintiff winds up fined for contempt....
Or does it mean that someone still needs to go to the time and expense of hiring lawyers (and paying those lawyers to understand why the patent is invalid in the first place)?
How about expanding that to patenting "A photon emitting device." Leave it vague enough and you just might get it through.
Then get rid of all of the current system once it got passed by insisting on high royalties for any "photon emitting device" associated with the USPO. Though how you'd cool the entire thing down to absolute zero if they didn't comply is an interesting engineering problem.
If Ebay tries to enforce this, they will be laughed out of any court in the land.
But it first has to get to court, even if it did and was "laughted out" then the plaintiff (Ebay) whould not be forced to pay the defendant's costs.
BT tried a similar stunt recenlty in the UK saying it had a patent on hyperlinking.
Again this case involves the US patent and court system. No doubt BT has far deeper pockets than any of those it is going after.
Do they really think they have a cats chance in hell of having this upheld in a court?
They tell people "It would cost you X to defend this in court, we want Y". Where YX though both in the 10's-10's of thousands of USD.
Ok so the patent is there to protect your ideas fine it is only right that someone who spent time and effort developing the idea.
The original idea of patents is to encourate innovative ideas to be applied as technology. With the original criteria being that something was original and non-obvious (to someone familiar with that type of technology). i.e. nothing to do with how much time/effort/money/etc was spent on it.
If someone or some company spend vast amounts of money "inventing" something obvious then it used to be the case that they'd be though of as foolish, deserving of nothing but sympathy.
Why not simply run all software patents across a Slash based we site where we geeks can surf on over and provide prior art to the latest 15 ill-conceived patents...
Let this be part of the 'fact finding' process of the existing system. Its so simple.. and frankly I think the collective interest of anti-IP geeks could probably crush 99.999999% of software patents - easily.
"E-Bay Patents Thumbnail Galleries" implies that they have won the patent. They have simply filed for a patent, however.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
I keep telling myself it can't be the act of merely displaying a thumbnail...there must be something more to it...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
>Unfortunetly, this is one of the many negatives
>of capitalism. And even more unfortunetly,
>capitalism is the best we have.
Well, the fall of currency can, has, and does happen. This could change a whole lot of things
if it happened in the USA. Can't happen? Maybe it can't, here in the jewel of the world.
Perhaps there are readers of slashdot who have lived through the experience of having their money be "money" one day and used it for toilet paper the next day.
Can't happen to the dollar, the pound, the yen, or the euro? Why can't it? The law of good taste? Inertia?
Tell it to someone who left Cambodia in 1969, or a Albanian refugee in Italy.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
> Wonder if I can get a patent on first posting at slashdot.
Naw, do mankind a favor: patent the blink tag. Or the marquee tag. That'll clean up the Internet in a way to surprise everyone.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
There are many good ideas that are evolved from other good ideas and occur to many making the point of intellectual property moot - this is one of those things (along with hyperlinking).
Most sectors of business realize this and only patent something that came about through their hard work and research, not just anything that hasn't yet been patented in the field (especially if it's common practice!). Why are they trying to do this, and why is the patent office letting them?
Any spoon would be too big.
It's only invisible until it hits "an opaque surface". They're just talking about your average LED style laser.
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The only independent claim states:
1. A method performed by a marketplace computer for facilitating electronic commerce over a network between a plurality of seller and buyer computers, the method comprising the steps of:
presenting a registration web page to a remote first seller computer over the network;
receiving a first registration for a first product from the first seller computer over the network, the first registration including a first product description and a first Universal Resource Locator (URL) indicating a first location of a first image of the first product, the first location referencing the first seller computer or a third computer on the network, and the first image being in one of a plurality of predetermined source image formats;
presenting a registration web page to a remote second seller computer over the network;
receiving a second registration for a second product from the second seller computer over the network the second registration including a second product description and a second URL indicating a second location of a second image of the second product, the second location referencing the second seller computer or a fourth computer on the network, and the second image being in one of a plurality of predetermined source image formats;
retrieving the first image based on the received first URL;
manipulating the first image to produce a first thumbnail image of a first predetermined size and format;
retrieving the second image based on the received second URL;
manipulating the second image to produce a second thumbnail image of a second predetermined size and format;
creating a customized web page including the first and second thumbnail images; and
presenting the customized web page to a buyer computer.
Nowthen, in order to infringe this patent (i.e. potentially be sued by EBay) there has to be at least 2 seller computers and a buyer computer involved, in an ecommerce situation. The images must be referenced from a third location.
This claim (although not particularly deep) certainly overcomes most of the "prior art" that has been tossed around. For example, all individual photo galleries, like the one shown here reference larger images on the same site. Furthermore, they are not in the context of ecommerce. Most sites generally have thumbnails of other images on the same site. This is not the case that is protected by EBay.
Seriously, read the claim FIRST, then bitch about the scope of the patent.
Thalia
From what I understand, porn sites have been doing this for years and years. I can vouch for this fact, being an exp-- err, I only go to those websites for the articles. Really.
REALLY!
------------
CitizenC
The Delphion link includes a good bit of information including a pointer to images of the original paper patent application
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Your scenario is hardly even plausible. The only IP laws that protect the inventions themselves are patents, and these expire after 20 years.
Yeah, sure, and copyrights used to expire after seventeen years, too. But now that big business interests have stolen the Presidency (look at GWB's cabinet!), and they, not voters any more, control this nuthouse of a country, any reasonable person can foresee that new legislature will spring up, increasing the period for patents to thirty, forty, fifty years...forever.
Just like the duration of copyrights, which, for the benefit of the loathsome Disney Corporation and its ilk, apparently is going to be extended out to eternity.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
nice try for an FP, but as we all know around here, gifs use LZW compression patented a million years ago by unisys. compuserv got screwed by this. ever heard of burn all gifs day? slashdot was all about posting articles of that. slashdot supports the cause 100%. you can tell. just look at the top of the page. oh wait, title.gif. well, np, look at the story pictures. wait, those are gif too. at least the banner ads are png, oh wait, gif too. good work slashdot. we know you are the most hypocritical site on the web currently.
Essentially, they're a means of querying a database (potentially, distributed among a plurality of sites in the case of parallel DB's) for image content, presenting the results as thumbnails and permitting links back to the original images. They also provided the capability to query by drawing/doodle and by color distribution in the image.
Be sure to send e-Bay feedback about any other prior art that would definitely turn their application into an organizational embarrassment. Stuff like Oracle interMedia or any given imaging product library from Xerox PARC.
It's only fair, I should think...I mean, they probably have no clue how open they are to a world-class stomping by the largest organizations in the industry...
xv has been doing thumbnails of all the pictures in a directory for several years. Depending on what exactly eBay thinks they've patented, there may be a number of example of prior art.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
And that's what it looks like to me.
Can't show investors a profit, let's see if they fall for the "innovative" things we do. Next keyword: revolutionize.
Emperor's clothes and all that.
Oh well. Happy new year, everybody!
There *could* be an element of 'uniqueness' to their approach. I don't know of too many commerce sites that let you see a thumbnail gallery of the actual items you're able to buy - usually only professionally done photographs of stock items.
And how many auction sites do this? Again, it's not a case of 'I've seen thumbnail galleries before, so ebay can't do it cause it's prior art' - they're not saying they invented thumbnail galleries. What they'd be claiming is that they've invented a unique business process of some sort. If the scope is narrowed some, they might be the first auction site to do this, making it unique and perhaps patentable.
creation science book
here is a patent I found a while ago on "Method of exercising a cat" with a handheld laser. It is patent number US05443036, and info on it can be found at http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05443036__
Besides, I'm sure there are *many* sites that can claim prior art for thumbnailed images...
-mdek.net
everyone is patenting everything. It really doesn't matter (as has been pointed out everytime something like this happens) a quick appeal and it will be wiped out.
:)
no, the patent people do not know what they are doing, and no, no one cares. just let it go.
as for EBay being stupid, that is another story..
BT tried a similar stunt recenlty in the UK saying it had a patent on hyperlinking.
why Ebay would even try to patent something that clearly already existed before
Here's why...
You patent it. Even if it's stupid.
Then you go after the infringer who is most likely to settle. In BT's case, they are going after Prodigy.
How many times have you ever seen a press release about some lawsuit that was settled, but the terms of the settlement were kept private?
So Prodigy settles with BT, and agrees to pay BT some absurdly small amount of money for BT's extremely innovative hyperlink technology. Now what happens? Why did they do this?
Well, they both got soemthing out of it. Prodigy got out of a lawsuit. Prodigy got a license to the innovative hyperlink technology. Prodigy now gets to watch as BT goes after Prodigy's competitors. What did BT get? BT got a little bit of money. BT got some precedent that their patent is valuable because others have already licensed it. Prodigy gets to watch their competitors pay absurd amounts of money that Prodigy got for free.
Of course, only the first few licensees get such favorable treatment. After the first few, the licensing fee suddenly goes way up and becomes an actual source of money to BT.
Need an example: rambus. How much are they asking for these days?
Why are the terms of these settlements kept secret? There must be something worth hiding. Something too embarrasing to make public. I think it the absurdly small amount of money they got. If everyone knew this, and both people thought of what I just explained, then both sides true motives would be exposed. Bad PR.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Here are some more I found...
Integrated Auction for remote online bidders and live participants at an auction site
Information presentation and management in an online trading environment
I got this from the website of the European Patent Office
cheers
mike
We can also patent the transfer of GIF files thru electronic means, the printing of GIF files, as I doubt any of those are covered in the patent for the GIF format it's self. Is Ebay, Amazon, and everyone sure they can't go back and patent TCP/IP, or electricity while they are at it?
Abstract: A method and apparatus for information presentation and management in an online trading environment are provided. According to one aspect of the present invention, person-to-person commerce over the Internet is facilitated by providing prospective buyers the ability to quickly preview items for sale. Images are harvested from a plurality of sites based upon user-supplied information. The user-supplied information includes descriptions of items for sale and locations from which images that are to be associated with the items can be retrieved. Thumbnail images are created corresponding to the harvested images and are aggregated onto a web page for presentation at a remote site. According to another aspect of the present invention, a user may submit a query to preview items for sale. After receiving the query, thumbnail images corresponding to items that satisfy the user query are displayed, each of the thumbnail images previously having been created based upon a user-specified image.
So, it sounds like it's specific to online auctions, so although this isn't any less stupid than it originally sounds, I wouldn't start to worry about your online gallery of cat photos too quickly.