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One-Click Reprise
The One-Click Saga has been going on for a while now. BountyQuest has now thrown in the towel on finding a definitive usage of one-click web shopping that predates Amazon's patent. Tim O'Reilly wrote a response
to the finding, where he accepts Amazon's patent as valid - with nary a mention of the fact that most of the world doesn't permit software patents at all. Finally, Internetnews.com looks at the future of one-click and notes that despite any smoking gun, this might help Barnes and Noble fight their lawsuit against Amazon.
Bingo. And to quote O'Reilly: On close examination, I also discovered that the One-Click patent is far narrower than people assume it is. The innovation it claims is based on some very specific software-driven steps in the Web shopping process that were designed to make it simpler and more automatic for consumers to complete e-commerce transactions. The specific steps of the claims were what had to be non-obvious and novel, and O'Reilly points out those claims are narrow indeed.
The XOR patent for cursor display was the favourite whipping boy of the anti-software patent movement (you can still find the odd reference here and there). XOR-ing cursors was according to the anti-software patent folks the "obvious" and "natural way" to do it.
Then at some point a researcher took the care of examining how exactly cursor display was done in all other graphic systems in 1978 when the XOR patent application was filed (there weren't that many) and all those he could find used a copy buffer and not the "obvious" XOR idea.
IIRC, the XOR idea was so quickly adopted that by 1981 it was prevalent and even tought in school. But no documented use before 1980 or so could be found.
In 1989 corporations with deep pockets challenged the XOR patent. It was duly reexamined and held valid by the PTO.
I predict that we will soon start patenting philosophies or religions.
One word... Scientology <shudder>
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Tim O'Reilly says the following (quote):
"16. Online Minivend Reference Guide "MiniVend -multi-catalog shopping cart and mall," March 14, 1997. Mike Heins, the creator of the MiniVend system (now owned by Red Hat under the name "Interchange") provided some great art. He showed us how to very easily configure his open-source system to perform single-click buying. In writing the system, he put considerable effort into saving customer session information, so that buyers would not have to reenter their information to make purchases.
However, the submission is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone made those simple changes and implemented 1-Click shopping in the proper fashion before our Prior To date." (end of quote)
The last sentence is, IMHO, really MORE THAN ANNOYING ! Not that I blame Tim O'Reilly for it, but I simply don't believe it.
I have been reading the minivend mailing list since it started out beginning of 1997. Mike Heins posted to his minivend mailing list as a response to someone who asked exactly for something that represents the implementation of the one-click ordering feature, that this feature CAN be implemented AND THAT IT HAS BEEN DONE. This was on May 13th, 1997 and clearly before the cut-off date of Sept. 27th, 1997.
Please read the short thread of the post on "Retaining user information" here
I am aware of the fact, that Mike Heins might have been under restrictions to release any more information of who had done it at that time, but obviously he knew so much, that he confidently could mention on the mailing list, that it "has been done". I can say, that what later became known as the "famous" one-click feature, was something that was an option to be implemented easily for a programmer who could understand the software, i.e. a person skilled in the trade, and users of MiniVend were aware of it. I am sure several people have thought and played with setting it up, but might not have gone through with it, because many customer didn't like it at that time. It was considered just too mysterious and considered not "slow and clear" enough.
But quite frankly I could very well imagine that in certain industries that feature might have been welcome and that it was implemented. I simply think that the ones, who did it, don't want to come forward for whatever reasons.
Now, may be it is really impossible to find the person or site, who implemented it and prove that it was done, but this is an appeal for whoever it was to COME FORWARD.
So, even if Tim O'Reilly throws the towel, that doesn't mean that the battle is lost.
Would be interesting to know if the site could be found and retrieved in the Alexa archive, which of course now is conveniently owned by Amazon.com itself. What a coincidence. For more on Alexa archives look here and here . The archives have now 16 terabytes of text, audio and graphical files, accumulated from April 1996 on.
Don't worry about your thoughts. You can think whatever you want at any time, and if you're ever concerned you can't, there's always tinfoil. :) But just like you can think about blowing up a building but get in trouble if you do it, you can think about a technology that will violate a patent if you make, use or sell it.
I am one of the folks who thinks that Amazon's destined to go belly-up, that the reason they haven't yet is because they were the giant, and it's harder to get the big tree falling -- of course, once it starts it's impossible to stop.
So assuming that I'm right (and please save your joke about "assume", those of us out of elementary school have heard it already), Amazon's going to be having a great big "We've lost our lease, everything must go, we're holding nothing back!" sale. And then what will they have to offer? Limited inventory, a huge database of customers cross-correlated and analyzed out the wazoo...and, of course, a patent portfolio. One which if rigorously enforced pretty much gives the online store to whomever ends up owning the patent.
So what happens then? I'd especially like to hear from real live professionals, who might know what happens when the legal entity holding intellectual "property" dissolves.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
...
In 1989 corporations with deep pockets challenged the XOR patent. It was duly reexamined and held valid by the PTO.
Just because something hasn't been done before does not mean it's "non-obvious." It's especially hazy with computer algorithms.
Consider something George Carlin once said... (I paraphrase)... "Here is something no one has ever said before: 'As soon as I get done sticking this hot poker up my ass, I'm going to chop my dick off!' You've never heard that. Right! No one ever said that! Which means I'm the first person in the history of the planet to put those words together, in that exact order! First Ever!"
Ahh crap... what was I saying?
"And like that
Having said that, I can see why awarding the one-click patent to Amazon might rub people the wrong way. There isn't a substantially new discovery or technique in their claim. In fact, it looks more like the machinations of their IP attorneys.
The problem is exactly that. Patent battles have become (by and large) exactly that. Lengthy legal wrangling over patent portfolios. The patent system as it exists today neither 1) fosters innovation nor does it 2) rewards the innovator.
This, combined with the fact that many of us (although certainly not all) question the whole concept of intellectual property, brings us to the broad, sweeping conclusion that patents are bad, mmmmkay?
And a nice intellectual property discussion would be woefully incomplete without this gem (seeing as somebody inevitably brings up the constitutional heritage of patents/copyrights):
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
In their briefs filed with the court in question, B&N uses the example of a Compuserve stock quote system which allowed a subscriber to order (with payment charged to their CIS account) a stock chart with a single command. This example seems to posess all of the claims of the Amazon patent and was influential in getting the preliminary injunction quashed.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Patents are NOT a competitive advantage. There is no competition in a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to make something then market forces can't select the best product.
Patents IMHO last longer than they should. The purpose of a patent shouldn't be to ensure a monopoly, it's to let you get to market first. This is accomplished with a limited term monopoly sure, but the monopoly should be the means, not the end.
With a mechanical process you need to tool up, a process that isn't even taking as long these days, and then ship a new physical product. With software you can ship a product in six months (I know of which I speak, my company is releasing products we were having first design meetings about in September 2000.) so a nearly twenty year monopoly is insane.
So, that's a problem with the implementation of patents in general. If it takes a company two years to bring hardware to market the patent should be for three years or so, not seventeen (last I heard). Protection should be removed when the company brings a product to market, or when they stop production. This would stop companies from laying a mine-field in an undeveloped industry.
Then, onto the specifics of software patents... Most software patents seem to either cover a basic universal property just used in a new medium. Discoveries supposedly can't be patented. If you discover a formula for pi you can't patent pi, or the formula. But that's the sort of thing I feel you see in software patents. What should be patentable is a specific chip that is designed to calculate pi more quickly than a general CPU.
To use the favorite example, using XOR to draw a cursor.
This was patented in the late 70s, before the PC revolution. Nobody was really working on GUIs and the ones who were weren't doing it for production systems. To implement ASM-level optimization in drawing routines on a concept system would have made it harder to design for and wasted developer time on speed tweaks. (Tweaks for speed come before release, when the number of users is such to justify their savings vs the outlay of the programmer's time.)
So this patent was basically granted to the first company to get around to optimizing a GUI to the point where they did the obvious thing for drawing a cursor.
For a cursor you want speed much more than looks. It doesn't matter if the cursor changes color as it moves, in fact, it's easier to see if it's always in reverse-video relative to the background. So the tradeoffs involved in display quality are irrelevant with the usefulness of being able to draw and erase the cursor with the same routine, and with not having to have a buffer to store the part of the screen being overwritten.
But there's no reason this would have been developed early. A generic drawing routine would have been of use for anything you wanted to draw. It would have been slower and taken more memory, but a single test system can afford to be faster and have more memory than the eventual target system. Thus slower, more general routines are obviously what should have been used.
So why does a company deserve a patent on someone that any competent programmer (of the era, back when people learned ASM) could have done, had they had the need?
Patents are supposed to reward innovation, not simply the first person into an area.
Similarly, almost all software patents I've heard about have been trivially obvious. Sure, the patenter was the first, but that's not a high enough standard for non-software patents. We also require that an average professional in the industry wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstance.
But was any programmer of the era asked to optimize a cursor drawing routine in ASM, to see how they'd go about it?
Granted, they don't call them post-it notes, but they're exactly the same thing! Now, are you really a lawyer? Care to continue the conversation?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
From my point of view, all business-model and software patents are bad mojo on the face of it, and finding prior art for them is wrongheaded and simply plays into the "software patents are acceptable" mindset. Proving Amazons 1-Click Shopping is invalid due to prior art is only a way of saying that that prior art should have gotten the patent in the first place, which is just as bad.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Now how could anyone ever be weary of goatse.cx?
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People patent all kinds of stuff no one would really ever want. Particularly individual inventors who think the world wants their better dog dish/sex toy/etc. It's always fun to go to Delphion and search on the name of your favorite sex toy, and see if you (or anyone) would really ever want the innovation.
I'm asking this question because it seems like there are two major groups of /. members: The ones who think "all software patents are bad" and a few (like me) who think " this software patent is bad".
Please understand that this isn't flamebait. I'm very interested in understanding why so many people in the /. community think that patents are wrong.
As an entrepreneur and systems architect I advocate the approval of patents because that will give us one or more of the following:
Having said that, I can see why awarding the one-click patent to Amazon might rub people the wrong way. There isn't a substantially new discovery or technique in their claim. In fact, it looks more like the machinations of their IP attorneys.
Please share your thoughts. Thanks,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Just hold your mouse over the button and amazingly enough, after a few seconds you'll be transported to another screen (the "buy" screen or whatnot) without the bothersome click.
http://www.tropo.com/techno/java/zeroclick/
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
A patent is an exchange. The United States gov't which operated somewhat sanely in the old days, took the problem of the natural need for money in any individual's life and said, "You can't make money if you can't learn. If share your ideas, you get the right to produce that and only that idea narrowly defined and exclusively."
Patents nowadays are seen as some sort of prizes. To think of patents as prizes is to ignore the real world and the goal of individuals to progress beyond mere survival and to secure some life, liberty, and happiness (not job, not car, nor anything else collectively agreed upon and wrongly assumed).
Patents do not offer any competitive advantage. The slightest improvement on your work opens up the playing field. Why is this allowed? Not everyone needs the improvement nor wants it. See the ACM complaints against Computer Scientists (granted I think the ACM went a little too far in whining).
Ability to raise capital improves to the extent people are encouraged to read patents. The more eyes that of their own voliton seek patents the less work you have to do to pitch your idea. It also means that some investors will get the idea that you might be able to improve on a pastent thereby removing your and his responsibility to the original patent owner. Our society illogically frowns upon individuals reading patents.
Marketting edge? You attract quite a few investors like the one I just described.
Problems: By whatever course of action it seems we have encouraged schemers not entrepeneurs and I'd even argued that we've alienated and discouraged entrepeneurs from profitting in marketplaces. Most entrepeneurs have a sense of pride. The current market is flooded w/ those who do not.
These schemers make no distinction between components which are necessary because they are innovative parts of their inventions and those components which are necessary by definition of the task that the invention accomplishes.
An example is the MDI (multiple document interface) of a word processor. To the layman it might seem that because Microsoft Office has so many components (an icon is a compenent right? ) it should be patentable. To computer all MDI is is multiple locations in memory. Thats it. There's nothing innovative in having more than one screw in a device, nor should it be in a word processor. To the computer programmer MDI is likewise simply multiple buffers.
What to the layman is a complicated powerful program, to the computer and programmer it is a large use of simple components.
As a programmer I see the patenting of simplicity as a threat to my job security as well as to my right to create tools I may use around the house or in my computing environment for fun and profit.
Did I miss anything?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
First, just because something hasn't been done, doesn't mean it's not obvious. I can think of many other reasons why nobody before Amazon may have done one-click ordering on the web, among them:
Taking an idea that everyone could see and being the first to make it work may be laudable, but it does not advance the art of software.
Second, the idea that narrowness somehow makes a patent less obvious is flawed. It is true that I might not have implemented one-click in the exact same way as Amazon. However, in software, it is typical for a problem to have many superficially different, but essentially similar, solutions; and while different programmers would come up with different implementations, another programmer comparing them would find no interesting differences. They're all "much of a muchness".
Put another way, you might say of one-click,
If the pattern of the solution is obvious (for one-click, it is; why do you think Netscape introduced cookies?), and the specifics of the implementation offer no notable benefits over other implementations, the criterion "obvious" is not met.The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
This only protects those who have a staff of lawyers and a large legal budget. Everyone else is still in the "You loose, sucker!" category.
The existence of the patent means that it is presumed valid until successfully challenged. This means that you must be able to pay lawyers, court fees, time, etc. to defend yourself, or it is valid against you.
Bountyquest may think they have won, but they haven't won for me. Or you.
These patents are evil. The only current plausible defense is to convince other countries to not honor them, and that doesn't help much, or maybe it will just keep things from getting worse.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This may be so, but the XORing of pointers (as opposed to cursors) was published in the Art of Computer Programming, and long predates it.
If you are a speaker of english, then the connection in meaning between pointer and cursor makes the idea of using the same operations on one, also on the other, obvious. Perhaps is isn't obvious in French or German, since it's based on a pun, but in English it is obvious.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Despite thousands of geeks clamoring about how obvious the idea was, nobody has been able to produce a usage of one-click shopping prior to Amazon's patent? This strikes me as interesting, to say the least.
What a lot of people appear to forget is that everything looks obvious in hindsight. Hell, even the concepts of advanced physics are pretty straightforward if you don't have to think of them yourself.
Geeks tend to constantly overestimate their own ability in what amounts to severe egotism. They assume that if someone else could create something, then surely it wouldn't been no trouble to them.
This is absurd, and most of the time they can't provide an account of why they didn't create it! Face the facts. One-click shopping is a highly useful but non-obvious idea, and Amazon deserves to reap the sole rewards of the hard work put into developing it.
- qpt
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Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
They are trying to limit and mutate the definition of prior art. Once they have something defined as a test case that will create precedent for the rest of the industry, lawyers pour lots of money into it.
;)
Consider the future this will have judicially. All this does is raise the amount of capital you have to get togethr to start an e-business of this type- by increasing the level of liability you have to insure against. That hurts the dot economy, all those "entrepreneurs" you are always talking about, guys.
Ironically, the lawyers glom onto the juiciest cows, the ideas most likely to revolutionize some aspect of our computing experience and thus to justly make money. Thus they retard progress.
Just another note from the Ban the Lawyers foundation..
Goat sex free since 2001
Sorry, just thought it was kinda funny.
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suwain_2
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I am a single developer, and have yet to complete my bachelors. Yet, I believe I can implement this feature on my site in less than a week. The only reason I have not done so yet is because I am the sites sole developer and have not yet had the time to get around to this feature.
Wouldn't a feature that could be completed by a single non-degreed programmer in less than a week qualify as 'obvious'?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
$man microsoft
Crowded elevator smell different to midget. -Chinese Proverb
Once upon a time in the golden days, when men were real men etc., someone had an idea for something that was not easy to do, but would be incredibly useful if he could manage to make it work. He worked hard at making his idea possible, using a lot of ingenuity and much tearing of hair. When he'd finished, it was obvious from the product how he'd done it, so if he started selling the product others would be able to copy it. So he patented the invention to protect his hard work. And everyone paid him money to use his wonderful new invention, and they all lived happily ever after.
In these modern times, someone has an idea for something that's new and never been done before. He goes along to his programmer, who says "Yes, I can knock one of those out in a few days". So he patents the idea to protect it. And they spend the rest of their days in court, trying to extract money from everyone else who had a similar idea.
Now do you see the difference, boys and girls. In the first patent, it's the technique that's being patented, not the idea. In the second, it's the idea. Once the idea is there, the product can be created by anyone halfway "skilled in the art" as they like to say in "Patentese". Ok, maybe you'd get a different implementation, but that just shows that there's nothing special about the implementation, unless the original has something special that makes it better somehow than the copies.
That's what makes many of the software patents (and probably all of the business method patents) wrong.
I'm not saying I disagree with all software patents. For example, the MP3 patent is (probably) OK - it isn't obvious to any programmer how to gain high levels of compression without losing much quality. However, the RT-Linux patent is bad, because it's blindingly obvious how to do it, once you've had the idea of doing it. And in that case the idea isn't even new.
(The morals of forcing a patented technique through as a standard, or sitting quietly while others do it for you in ignorance of the patent application, is a whole 'nother story.)
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Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Not in a patent sense. Being innovative and inventive is what counts.
Amazon was probably the first to implement one-click. So what? It's so trivial that it doesn't deserve a patent. Patents aren't supposed to be granted on things so trivial that given the task, an average professional in the field could do it. Especially if your method offers no benefit over other methods.
Now Amazon didn't just patent a method, they patented the whole idea of one-click ordering.
So, they used it first and got famous. It took others a while to decide it was worth copying. That's the benefit for Amazon. They can claim to be innovative because they were the first to offer something.
But we shouldn't give them a patent for it. Patents are NOT for rewarding the first. They are for rewarding the inventive. Amazon simply used existing tools in the intended way.
What is innovative about using a cookie to identify a user and fetch their information? What about that couldn't everyone else have done, had they felt customers would want it?
Imagine when the first car came with a round indent in the dash to hold a cup. Would that company deserve to be the only company allowed to sell a car with a cup holder?
It's exactly the same case as with Amazon. Neither involves new technology. So why does Amazon deserve a patent?
When I encounter discussion of things like the one-click patent, it instantly wears me out. It's exhausting trying to think of ways to argue with people who see all ideas as salable "intellectual property". I don't think science would have made any progress if people in former times had been accustomed to thinking this way. Think if the telescope had been enforcibly patented, or the microscope.
.sig. Just click on it once.
What can you say to someone who thinks this is a good idea? I'm not anti-business. But is there nothing that isn't owned, that isn't property.
I predict that we will soon start patenting philosophies or religions.
-- Purchase this
I never thought it was fair to beat someone to the punch at the patent office. Most of the people who are the progenitors of new and useful things never reap the fiscal benefit of their creations. That's when the legalist rapists set in and collude together to prevent this new useful entity from ever being used again without some form of royalty being paid. If the patent system protected the little people and spanked the big boys around, I'd have less the say, unfortunately, the converse is true. It seems the larger companies leverage this system much better to even work against the people who actually should hold the patent. Hindsight is 20/20, but if some grubber thinks to patent the obvious he should be sent down with the same reckless abandon the patent was filed in.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I still don't understand what you mean by "if one-click shopping is prior art." The issued and valid Amazon "one-click" patent will be prior art to future patent applications. I thought we were talking about prior art to the Amazon patent itself, though.
So where's the "prior art"? Because without it, you've got no case. Everything's obvious once you've seen someone else do it. Being first is what's valuable.