Slashdot Mirror
Online Greeting Cards Patented
Trailer Trash writes "According to this story at bizreport.com, Hallmark has given in and licensed Tumbleweed Communication Corp's patent for delivery of online documents with e-mail notification. Will the idiots at the patent office never stop? Jeff Smith of Tumbleweed claims to have been granted three patents last year."
The patents in question are:
Electronic document delivery system in which notification of said electronic document is sent to a recipient thereof
and
Private, trackable URLs fordirected document delivery
The link seems to be slashdotted, try this one.
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try. -- Homer J. Simpson
I'm pretty sure DavidJones.com.au was doing this way before anyone else. (They even had classy cards, long before bluemountain ever rose from the bloody sea). It was quite funny, as they are a respectable retail outlet down in Australia (similar scale to Sears, sorry aussies), but all its site was really useful for was sending cool postcards of dalmatians or pointy hats.
- PURLs are temporary, dynamically generated uniform resource locators which uniquely identify the intended recipient of a document and the document itself, as well attributes associated with the delivery of a document. PURLs avoid attaching information to e-mail messages to send documents, but rather attach a general reference to a document to be sent, and then enable the recipient to access a document via the reference.
Really, any user-specific link sent via e-mail is covered by this patent.I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
What a joke this patent is ...
s /p ress_releases/2002/01_02_02.html
= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,790,790'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,790,790& RS=PN/5,790,790
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,192,407'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,192,407& RS=PN/6,192,407
/ /w ww.cardclub.com/
Anyway, here is what TumbleWeed has to say:
http://www.tumbleweed.com/en/company/news_event
The first patent was registered in October of 96 and was granted in August of 98. The title: Electronic document delivery system in which notification of said electronic document is sent to a recipient thereof. The link:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
The second patent was applied for in April of 97 and granted in February of 2001. The title is: Private, trackable URLs for directed document delivery
The URL is: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Prior art exists for both of these. Thanks you wayback machine! Link from earlier post:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961226182315/http:
The invention to be patented must NOT be obvious "to one of ordinary skill in the art."
This patent fails the test... as do most patents like it.
The patent office is clearly violating the public trust by awarding patents for "inventions" which which are clearly obvious "to one of ordinary skill in the art."
So, let's look at the broadest claim of the newest patent:
1. A document delivery system for delivering one or more documents between a sender and at least one recipient, said system comprising:
a server that temporarily stores said documents, wherein said server generates a URL for each intended recipient of said documents, the URL unique to each recipient, and sends each of the URLs to each respective intended recipient; and
a database which is associated with said server and which records log data describing which recipients accessed said documents;
wherein said server sends the log data to the sender of said documents.
What are the simple limitations in this claim that make it narrow enough to be uninteresting. Well, let's see:
1. The server must store "each of the documents" temporarily. So, dynamic URLs are pretty much out.
2. Log data must be "sent to the sender." This means that if you require the sender to log back on to your side (the traditional way of doing this) instead of sending them the log, you do not infringe this claim.
What do you want to bet that none of the prior art (from BlueMountain to standard email) meet all of these criteria? And this doesn't even take into consideration the fact that likely those limitations were discussed during the prosecution of the patent. If you really want to analyze the scope of the claims -- if for example you want to invalidate the patent -- order a copy of the file wrapper from the patent office, which includes every scrap of communication between the PTO and the company. Once you've reviewed that, we can get a real discussion going.
If you actually look at the patents, and in particular 6,192,407, you will find that they cited a huge number of references, including most of the references that you have discussed. This strongly implies that the patent office actually took a look at this patent, before allowing it. Now, whether patents should be permitted at all or not is a different discussion. But assuming that no prior art technology, articles, or patents were referenced is rather silly, when the patent is available for review.
I will agree that this claim is too broad in my (not-a-legal) opinion. However, it is not nearly as broad as /. seems to imply.
So... for future reference, read the bloody patent claims (not just the abstract) before starting to bitch.
Thank you,
Thalia
I think I have been infringing on this patent myself since 1995 :-), as I started telling my friends at that time: "don't send me heavy documents in the e-mail, dump it on the web with my name on, and send me the URL". This patent quite simply covers things that the web was specifically made for. But that isn't publicly available information so...
Make sure you to go to BountyQuest every now and than to check if a bounty is posted, so that these patents can be killed once and for all.
Hm, come to think of it, there should be a similar site that organizes prior art claims and challenge patents on the basis of it... Anybody know about anything like that?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
What they are really patenting is the delivery of those services in a secure manner with billing and tracking for the customer.
I think Hallmark (and others) gave in cause they charge for thier services, so it falls more in line with the patent. Free/unsecure services seemingly would not apply to this patent
.
Also when you read it they try to ruse you into what they want you to think those services are used for. Like email is plain text only and http is a search and pull technology only.
I find it ammusing that people are so desperate for a money making idea that they now patent the idea of using already existing technologies in a certain fashion.
This would be no differnt then patenting a process that asked you questoins via the world wide web and stored them to an electronic media for later review. It's not inovative or an original idea, so it never deserved a patent.