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."
Isn't Blue Mountain who started the greeting card email craze?
"As well, E-mail is not the medium of choice for the distribution of complex documents..."
But what about HTML embedded in email? For instance what you get with CNETs and Discovery channel's mailings. Those typically contain graphics, tables, etc. And what about attachments?
Now that you've thrown your reflexive anti-patent knee out of joint, try getting upset about something important for a change.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Tumbleweed applied for the pattent in early 1997. I believe US patent law allows you a year to prepare your patent application, which means that prior art would have to be before early 1996. I don't think BlueMountain was around then.
However, this is NOT what is important!
Somehow slashdot readers like to get worked up about each _specific_ case of stupid patent being granted. However, there is little discussion of the underlying legislation. People like to think that it is all just due to stupidity in the patent office. However, with many "stupid patents" the patent office does exactly what it is supposed to do according to the law, yet the result is just as ridiculous.
Does it really matter whether Tumbleweed actually was the first to document this idea? Would this condition make this patent fare or good for the society?
I think it would be good for all of us to spend less time getting excited about the specific cases and more time looking at this topic in a broader way.
Sooner or later, people are going to start ignoring patent protection on software simply because the patents become so broad and ridiculous that no one respects USPTO decisions anymore
You also have plenty of similar problems with "biotechnology" patents. When the concept of patenting was invented the issue of patent applicability to self replicating "invention" wouldn't have come up.
Fix the unworkable or unenforceable portions of IP law to become realistically applicable in a digital world, or watch the whole regime collapse in flames.
Remember that, at least in the US, patents are intended as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves.
That is the choice facing intellectual property-based corporations and organizations
Similar choices face governments. At least their legislative and judicial arms.
The irony is that most of the problems appear to stem from attemption to extend IP laws in areas they probably shouldn't have been extended into in the first place. e.g. patents into genetics, software and business methods, copyright into "useright", etc, etc.
Is it just me, or does it seem that as soon as you do something with a computer, it can suddenly be patented? This patent seems to me as stupid as if someone would patent a (secure) method for delivering postcards. Lets see.
It would involve setting up a whole bunch of special (secure) postbox where people can place their postcards within. Special certificates (called stamps) are buyable and should be placed on the post cads to identify them as valid ones. Then a system of transportation will handle the transportation of the post card to the correct recipients through a unique address that would be printed on the post card. The recipient should set up his own private post box labeled with the unique address so that the post card can be delivered to that post box. And so on.
Oh well. As soon as it is done through computers only and over the internet, suddenly one can get a patent on just about anything.
'published' IIRC just requires that >20 people have seen it, placing it beyond the circulation of a private communication, where those people have not agreed (written, verbal or via their employment contract) to an NDA.
There is an urban legend that big pharma regularly publishes relevant info in low-circulation magazines like Pig Breeders Monthly (Chinese Edition), in order to avoid going public via the patent process, but providing prior art to prevent their competitors filing patents.
In this instance, the mechanism underlying the method is glaringly obvious to anyone who looks at it - every step of the process except unique id generation and fetching of information associated with that id are seen by, and often enacted by, the user (no need to reverse engineer algorithms etc). The very existence of such a system in use by people in more than one organisation, as the guy above described, seems likely to constitute prior art.
'course, IANAL.
The wording of the claims in 6,192,407 reads on the process of session tracking using URL rewriting (appending an id part to a URL rather than using cookies) in the context of any http exchange, rather than just the case of using email:
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;
In an interaction between a web client and a server that uses URL rewriting, unique URLs are generated that point to other documents uploaded to the server, which matches all the elements of the claim.
Notice also that the phrase 'intended recipient' is not defined in the claims. So it can be interpreted to mean the visitors of a given web site. Or to make it a precise list, we can interpret it as: all the users registered at a web site.
- erzlo