Amazon Seeks '2-Click' Shopping Cart Patent

theodp writes "Looks like Amazon's really getting back in the patent game. Today, the USPTO published Amazon's patent application for conducting electronic commerce using multiple shopping carts. Using the invention, a shopper purchasing items for five relatives can set up one shopping cart for each relative, a shopper purchasing books for Johnny can name one of his shopping carts "Johnny's books", and a shopper can add items to multiple shopping carts with only two mouse clicks." This might also be a good time to point out to those who didn't see it the first time AOL's patent claims regarding "Instant Message" technology; you may be able to think of some prior art.

Comments

AOL Prior Art

[sdamberger]

On the old PLATO system there was an instant messaging called term-talk. I was using that way back in 1979 and I'm sure it's from even earlier than that.

Re:AOL Prior Art

[operagost]

PHONE has been in VMS since DECNET appeared. That would have to be the mid-1970's. It has a split screen with the caller on the top and the recipient on the bottom. Even cooler was the ability to call a third person (maybe more, never tried it). It was a lot easier than trying to set up a chat room on AIM!

I do also remember using "write" on Xenix. That was annoying, we pretty much all had "write n" in out .login.

Instant Message Patent--Zephyr

[tmhsiao]

I'm not sure how AOL's patent application is worded, but if they specifically mention a windowed environment, MIT's Zephyr system operates under X.

Re:Instant Message Patent--Zephyr

[MosesJones]

talk, wall etc were all in non-windowed. xtalk and lots of others were windows. The "unique" element is being able to see who is online before you talk to them.

We used to achieve this by use of the advanced commands

"who" which gave you a list of who was on the server. This refreshed every few minutes (sys admins didn't like the number being too low) then you could just use write. Everyone specified a write terminal and you just used that.

Now when we got TWO servers we had to modify the script to use rwho and unfortunately there wasn't an rwrite (is there now?) which was okay because we got X displays anyway.

So in X you start ONE instance of the application, and when people log-on you send a request to the main server (i.e. you send a special email) which fires up a window on your display. The email contained the name of the person, you could then do lots of things including writing to each other.

Oh and the application was called Emacs and we were trying to do a group project.

Pity we didn't realise that we could patent "Open on New Display".

So if its single server using thin clients then there is lots of prior art, if its multiple applications being aware when new people join there is, for me, and even better one.

Jini is all about joining federations, annoucing you are there, requesting services, starting conversations et al. This is surely proof that it fails the "not obvious" test as someone has written a whole environment that can do, in effect, IM between people, computers, printers, machines, PDAs etc etc etc.

I've now just decided to patent syntax highlighting.

Prior Art for Instant Messaging!

[Doodhwala]

Here is a slightly modified text of an email I sent to the author of the news.com article on AOL's patent on IM.

FYI, with regards to this article, I don't know how strong this patent is because of existing prior art. If you look at this article in MIT's Technology Review, you will see that a form of IM called zephyr with buddy lists as well as chat-room style broadcasts existed since 1988. It would be great if you could also post this information in a future update to let everyone know.

Zephyr exists till today (and we here at Carnegie Mellon as well as students at MIT) use it on a daily basis. Even emacs supports zephyr :)

Re:Prior Art for Instant Messaging!

[elmegil]

AOL was founded in 1986. They have a reasonable possibility of being able to claim that they came up with the idea before 1988. Likely true? I doubt it. But Zephyr is not obviously prior art as you seem to think.

IBM has the shopping cart patent

[Anonymous Coward]

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.h tml&r=5&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1='shopping+cart' .AB.&s2=web&OS=ABST/"shopping+cart"+AND+web&RS=ABS T/"shopping+cart"+AND+web

The invention helps an on-line shopper maintain the proper relationship between primary items in a shopping cart and secondary items in the shopping cart, where secondary items are items that normally accompany the purchase of primary items. The server that provides the on-line shopping service awaits a shopper's commands. When a command is detected that indicates a change in an attribute of a primary item, the server checks the shopper's shopping cart to identify secondary items linked to the primary item whose attribute was changed. If a secondary item linked to the primary item is identified, the server then solicits the shopper's authorization to change a corresponding attribute of the secondary item. If the shopper grants authorization, the server changes the corresponding attribute of the secondary item accordingly. An item's attribute may be the quantity of the item in a shopping cart, the size of the item, the color of the item, the texture of the item, and so forth.

Re:Covering their butts

[LostCluster]

The patent belongs to whomever invented the thing first, not whomever was the first to pay the fee to the USPTO.The problem is, proving you were first is hard.

If Amazon were to patent everything it does, and then publish the fact that they won't enforce the patents, the would would be a better place.

Hmmm...from IBM VM/CMS days...

[AWhistler]

CP SM RSCS CMD MSG

That's over BITNET.

Then there's the old CHAT system. Then came RELAY. Then came IRC.

There's a lot of prior art for instant messaging.