Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Bezos Wants Web Advertising Patent
theodp writes "Just published today by the USPTO--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' patent application for adding advertisements to web pages. Sure would be ironic if those 50,000 online banner impressions on oreillynet.com Amazon receives as a Platinum Sponsor of the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference turn out to constitute patent infringement." Someone *has* to have prior art on this - GEnie/Prodigy/BBSes embedding ads for memberships.
There's always ebates.com's 4% money back deal for buying from barnes and nobles' website (and they have a long-running special, buy two or more items and get free shipping). Yeah, Amazon, you're not making it any easier on me.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is not a patent for all advertising on web pages. It is for a method of allocating display space to advertisers based on a bidding system.
NOT "all web advertising"
No.
I believe the first people to have banner Adverts was happypuppy.com, tho I could be wrong.
no
I worked for Prodigy in the early 90's and we used to run banner ads on our old proprietary service back as early as 1991.
If you google it, Prodigy is often regarded as the first.
--Jon
It mostly deals with the interactive nature of selecting which ads to present based on the requesting website visitor and the pool of bids for advertising space. This would be novel and worthwhile if it was an older patent, but it says it was filed in October of 2002!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
this is apparently "one of the first". It's an ad for AT&T from Hotwired in 1994.
Anything earlier?
Nae bother
Hall, J Storrs, Louis Steinberg and Brian D Davison (1998) "Combining agoric and genetic methods in stochastic design" Nanotechnology 9 No 3 (September 1998) 274-284
the paper can be found here
You are indeed wrong. Slightly. It's not a patent on all web advertising. Nor is it a patent on ebay style auctions.
It is a patent on web advertisements that take up real estate on a web page, which would exclude pop ups, and flash flyouts would be gray area. Specifically when selling those advertisements based on bids. So you will be able to sell ad space on your site for a fixed rate, or a scaled rate, but not to the highest bidder. If this goes through, then techically and legally Amazon will be the only site that can sell banner ads, text ads, etc. to the highest bidder.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
There's a huge list of other online booksellers at noamazon.
I work as a patent agent. THe claims are what determines the area that the patent covers. Let's take a look at claim 1, which should be the broadest, most encompassing claim in the patent:
1. A method in a computer system for allocating display space on a web page, the method comprising:
receiving multiple bids indicating a bid amount and an advertisement;
receiving a request to provide the web page to a user;
selecting, based at least in part on review of bid amounts, a received bid;
and adding the advertisement of the selected bid to the web page.
>>>
It's clear that the "advertisement" is an advertisement of an item up for bids on an online auction, such as ebay. Therefore, this patent does not deal with online advertisements such as banner ads, etc.
However, this patent attempts to claim online auctions. Period. In that sense, it is very broad and all-encompassing. If Bezos gets this claim, he gets the rights to a monopoly on online auctions, in many senses.
I believe you're thinking of Borders, not BN. BN and Amazon are still bitter enemies, AFAIK. Amazon has taken over Borders, We Be Toys 'N Shit, and a few others. BN is still separate, but a sad shadow of Amazon.com.
If you really want to Fight the Man(TM), you might want to check out Powell's City of Books
It's not an application for a patent on online advertising. Rather, it's a patent application for how one gets one's advert/banner on a target webpage through a bidding system. i.e. you bid for what's called in the patent claim as "display space" the more you bid the more chances your ad will get placed on the page, thereby increasing visibility.
Either way, I am sure there is prior art for this.
Way to go Jeff!!! Rack up those patent claims. One day when your company eventually fails to become profitable, you can use those patents to sue other companies for $$$!
I have read the abstract, and everyone who has their nipples in a twist should actually read the abstract. He's not patenting web advertising per se, but advertising relating to bids in auctions. I would have thought that the word "bid" in the patent application would have given this away.
BTW, I hate dumb patents.
The patent application is for a system allowing advertisers to bid for advertising space available on a website and the plumbing to make that all work without human intervention. It is not for advertisements in and of themselves.
However, I really question the non-obviousness of the implementation. Any practitioner of the art would be able to easily create this...there's no value in its disclosure to the IT community, and so the value of the "invention" as an advancement of the arts and sciences is pretty well worthless.
And for cheap computer books, a phrase I predict to be quite popular on this site ;), you can take a look at Bookpool. Cheap prices, nice interface, quick shipping, and great service. What's not to like? With bookpool, I haven't bought a single computer book from Amazon in years...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
It's about determining *which* ad to put on a web page based on bidders for that space. If a web page doesn't use a bidding system like Amazon's, they won't be infringing on this patent simply by placing ads on a web page. I really love /. articles about patents - they're always so content-free, or at least factual-content-free.