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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Among patent lawyers, it is widely believed that Wired.com invented the banner ad, and that they lost a chance to be the gatekeepers for online publishers by failing to patent it. Even though banner ads seem like a trivial migration of advertising from paper into electronic documents, apparently the idea was novel enough to have stood a good chance of validity (by the USPTO's loose definitions)
/. when it came out.
Since then, other companies have attempted to patent more specific aspects of online advertising. Doubleclick.com's patent, for instance, was covered on
However, the new Amazon patent is (apparently) not for something as general as banner ads, or tracking the users viewing ads- but on selecting ads to run by comparing them with the shopping behavior of a customer.
As usual, that's something which hardly seems worthy of the name "invention". Let us remember: Jeff Bezos agrees that the USPTO accepts patents far too liberally- but as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
One could even argue that high-profile abuses of the patent office serve to emphasize it's shortcomings, and set the stage for eventually fixing patent law. Call it a backwards form of civil disobedience, maybe?
as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
I wish people would STOP SPOUTING THIS BULLSHIT. Hiding your lack of ethics and/or morals behind the corporate veil is no excuse for this behavior.
Why do corporations feel that they are above the rest of us? If its Bezos's job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement for as long as he can get away with it, that must make it my job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement by killing people for as long as I can get away with it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.