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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.
Weren't they the first to have banner adds?
Haven't read the application, but I assume they have some "novel" way of including advertisements.
Thin this may actually be a bid to make Amazon a profitable entity?
:-)
I have not been paying much attention to thier profit reports of late, but it seems that royalties, even very small royalties, on this would put them over the top.
Either that or do away with banner ads altogether, which I cannot really complain about
You say you want a revolution....
As much as I try to like Amazon.com, they keep pissing me off with their patents. What's next? Patenting buying books on the internet? Patenting online sales that are available 24 hours a day?
Stuff like this will only serve to stifle competition on the internet (which is probably the intent) and generally muck up internet commerce in general.
In a capitalistic society, greed is good, But Mr. Bezos is taking it a bit too far, I think.
Time to start boycotting them.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Do you think that if I got a patent that covered spamming then we could all heave a sigh of relief ... ?
This is /. - of course nobody read it. They were all posting desperately in the hope they'd get the low hanging karma-fruits.
And those half dozen or so, the ones who answer spam, the ones who believe everything that they see on the TV ads for Ebay, are now the targets for a whole new realm of name-awareness advertising... Patent lawsuits, class action lawsuits, and so on. The whole McDonald's thing- that's one in reverse. People say, 'oh, look at the dumb class-action lawsuit' (regardless of its validity or silliness, these people are only going to hear about it in the media, where it's been given the general spin already) and will recite, 'people who can't control their eating habits-' then go on to discount the lawsuit altogether, and the "McDonald's" logo has gotten one more creep into their brains. So they go have a Bic Mac. Yeah, i know that this might get a lot of nasty responses from clever people who have something to pick at with all this ramblimng, but how bout it? Are lawsuits becoming a whole new marketing venue?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
No it wouldn't, because this is not an application for a patent on online advertising. For goodness' sake, actually go and read the application (linked in the story, even!) instead of writing knee-jerk reaction posts based on what you think it might be.
As for the moderator who thought this was "insightful", you should be ashamed of yourself.
that being said, i hate stupid patents.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
You know, I really wonder what is going through Bezos' mind. I think most people in the tech field are going to scoff at this, and he's just damaging his reputation by blatantly trying to patent something that everyone uses.
Sometimes these tech lords really don't help their case.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
..and auctions in general have been around since caveman days probably. Just another corporate abuse of the system.
I am starting to get the "impression" pun intended that any company composed of more than two people should be suspect of being crooked and just generally lame.
And any governments of more than ONE person.
I think it's time to just scrap patents all together and scrap copyrights, or at most make them for a very short period, like two years max. And I don't care about the temporary economic models, it will change to whatever it needs to change to, because humans want stuff more than they don't want stuff, so stuff will still get invented and built and sold.
I'd also like to see an end to corporations being "persons", where the profits are protected and accumulated and spent by HUMANS, but the liabilities always seem to go to this fictititous "person".
This stuff is just completely out to lunch outta control.
Wanna party like it's 1993? Just: Use mozilla to disable pop-ups and nosy cookies. Use the proximitron or filterproxy, depending on your OS. Use a big-ass hosts file and edexter (or eDexterJavaDog for non-windows users) if you want.
I use nt at work, linux at home, and I don't do ads. Bottom line, WE control what happens on our computers. Let's not forget that we have this power, or that we're going to have to fight to keep it.
Most of the older BBS's, Major BBS, WildCat, etc.. before the web was around, offered many of services now being patented, e-commerce, advertising, classified ads, forums, ratings, files sharing, online games, and on and on, AOL and Prodigy were BBS's before web. Anybody got an old Boardwatch Mag, look at some of the advertisments for these software packages, BEFORE software patents were available!!
A thought just occurred to me reading the Slashdot write-up for this. Inevitably when someone patents something stupid under the USPTO there is a comment about prior art in the Slashdot write-up, the tone of which seems to be "if someone has prior art, then the bad patent will go away", but is this *really* the case? Suppose I have the ultimate prior art on a bogus US patent but hadn't applied for a patent because I thought it was so obvious, could I produce the prior art, overturning the patent, then apply for a patent of my own and sue the ass off the original patent applicant for licensing fees, since they would now be infringing on *my* patent?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"this is not an application for a patent on online advertising"
Correct, although it appears to be based on every search engine's system of allowing paid links, which I believe goes back to Yahoo and AltaVista circa 1998.
Bezos has just sunk to a new low in terms of the crowd of idiots trying to patent things after the fact. For shame.
OD
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
Is it just me, or does anyone else remember Yahoo making money with advertising before there even was an Amazon?
It's clear that the "advertisement" is an advertisement of an item up for bids on an online auction, such as ebay.
You read it wrong. The patent is on a system for allowing advertisers to bid on ad avails, and has nothing to do with the content of the advertisements.
If you really are a patent agent, thank you for proving to Slashdot that patent agents do indeed lack the comprehension skills necessary to evaluate technical patent applications.
Just curious about peoples thoughts...
Why is it that this one clearly stupid slip of the tongue has become a major character flaw in what is clearly a man with above average inteligence (even if you think his ideas are wrong this must be admitted), while all the inane verbal blunders our current prez says seem to be classified as a quirky endearment?
Is this just a VP thing? Remember the Dan Quayle potato - potatoe thing!
Personally I couldn't care less about Gore (and even less about Qualye) but I am just concerned that our inability to let go of things like this will just cause our politians to become even more carefully coordinated and remote. If someone fears that any stupid, misspoken utterance is going to have such a price, then the result is that will be less candid, more rehersed and less available.
Why can't we just drop stupid things like this? I mean, I am sure Dan Qualye has the spell checker turned on when he writes, and I really doubt that even Gore thinks he really invented the internet.
Just a thought... Am I wrong? I'm sure you will tell me if I am!
Peace, or Not?
Can you tell me why having a clerk answering a sales line would not be covered by this?
Yes. The first sentence of the first paragraph of the patent is "A method and system for allocating display space on web page."
The more people who refuse to help cover the costs of web-sites passivly by viewing ads, the more sites that are going to force people to pay actively with subscriptions or whatnot.
Speaking from experience, subscriptions work really well, even for a not so major web-site like IcarusIndie.com
Currently I just use banner ads for intersite advertising (my site is huge), to allow other game development sites to get some free exposure and to plug web-sites I'm a fan of. I still have a number of text ads you'd never notice unless you clicked on them to get statistics on how well they work (at least for exposure). I've yet to make a dime on them.
As a result of using subscriptions I have a lot more bandwidth available to offer more free stuff.
Like this Survey on who people think the US should attack and tons of material including video on the war
So, block all you want. It's a very simple thing to go to a subscription model. For sites that are struggling with bandwidth usage and costs, I highly recommend it.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Look at the pure logic of it. No other site would use the ads, so it would only be amazon. Then no customers would go to Amazon because they were too commercialized because of all the adds they have.
Go Amazon.