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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?
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
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People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
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
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.
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... 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? ;)
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.
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I'd love to be the laywer challenging this in court. I'd have a field day showing "prior art" by demonstrating porn galleries.
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:[.]
No, not until somebody patents online galleries of cat photos.
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
> 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.
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"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
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!
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CitizenC
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.
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.