Losing the War on Patents

theodp writes: "Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly's once-hyped BountyQuest.com takes a beating in a Salon article today that takes note of Amazon's recent decision to license one of the few patents BountyQuest claimed to have found winning prior art for, a patent held by the InTouch Group, who had sued Amazon for infringing on the patent prior to Bezos' reported $1+ million BountyQuest investment. In the article, professional patent buster Greg Aharonian provocatively remarks that "BountyQuest was always a joke...Bezos and O'Reilly were never seriously interested in patent quality...Bezos just used O'Reilly to help Amazon...That Amazon ended up licensing the InTouch patent just shows how stupid the whole thing is.""

Comments

Re:I guess we know how Native Americans felt...

[Raindeer]

Imagine you are living next to a river, enjoying the fishing, the transportation, the community that has grown up around life on the river.

Then some @sshole finds a nugget of gold. Suddenly there's a town upstream, polluting the river, 1000s of stinky (and paranoid) prospectors pointing shotguns ("git awfa mah propertah!"), and the river is clogged with boats.

We can only hope that the gold runs dry quickly, the prospectors drown trying to run the rapids on their way to sell their sacks of gold (which they tend to tie to their bodies, thankfully), and things will get back to normal sooner or later.

Well, we all know how that story ended. It became the United States of America that we all know today. Draw your own conclusions ;-)

Amazon does not like the military!

[Martigan80]

Those bastardz wont even ship any computer related items to APO/FPO addresses! Well here will show you how bad the military takes it from them.

Sorry but overseas all we get is a Monopoly called AAFES