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.
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.
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!
Us, the community, should apply for patents for every good thing out there so that these predetors can't get a hold of it first. CVS is the first thing that comes to mind.
-- CodeZion
Maybe this will be the end of pop-up ads :-). Just don't go to amazon
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Yes, wishful thinking, I know.
Yea! No more banner ads! Welcome to the Internet circa 1993.
Was this filed on April 1st?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I only read the top part of the patent application, but the "advertisement" stuff actually sounds more like a typical eBay auction page (complete with the ability to take bids) than a banner ad.
I could be wrong.
I just talked with Al Gore and he said he helped Amazon place the first one on the web. Looks like they got this one.
I always thought Al Gore invented those too...
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"
Well, one could consider that those who apply for these patents on various forms of annoying web advertising could really be held responsible for those. I mean, how many times have you said to yourself, "If could only find the !#@*&er who came up with these things"? Now we have the answer. Anyone want to register the patent for spam?
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
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....
This seems *very* similar to Google's system of advertising. The rest of the patent also seems to be like ad words.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
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.
Seriously, if they get a patent on banner ads, and charge people for using the patent, everyone who uses banner ads will have to stop as I am sure they do not make enough money to cover the costs along with the patent costs. So in the end, NO MORE BANNER ADS!!! YEA!!!!!!!! CHEERS!!!!! JOY!!!!!
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Do you think that if I got a patent that covered spamming then we could all heave a sigh of relief ... ?
Quite, and isn't the Google advertising model sort of similar to this?
I.E. A system of showing ads based on companies' bid amounts??
Apparently the only thing ol' Jeff won't be able to justity getting a patent on is making an actual profit off of doing business on the internet.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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
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
There's a huge list of other online booksellers at noamazon.
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)
Superflous Patenting Patented
SEATTLE, March 20, 2004 -- Amazon, Inc. (Pink Sheets: AMZNQ) announced today that the U.S. Patent Office has granted it a patent for "a method to systematically patent all things obvious and previously discovered by others." Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, indicated that this patent places the company firmly on the path to reorganization as an intellectual property and rights management firm. "I fully expect this strategy to enable us to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection later this year," Bezos said at a press conference this morning, where he outlined his plan to an enthusiastic crowd of such totalitarian dictators as Fidel Castro and Bill Gates. The remaining points of his strategy include patenting patent infringement as well as a method to litigate patent infringement cases.
Mark
In addition to patenting "adding advertisements to web pages" Slashdot reports that in the same patent, titled "Method and system for allocating display space", Jeff Bezos is also trying to patent "adding the word 'and' to a patent application".
The Slashdot community is in outrage
"There must be prior art. I mean someone must have the word 'and' in a patent application" writes one reader.
"I never read the patent, but I can see from the other comments that this monster is really trying to patent the word 'and'!! How ridiculous. The patent office is ensuring its own doom with this one."
"No one is sure if Bezos' secret agents in the patent office will get this one approved," reports the Slashdot editor who posted the story, "but this is yet another sign of the impeding downfall of western civilization"
AOL used banner ads in its online service well before the establishment of Amazon.com.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
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.
..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.
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!
It would be nice if people read the articles that were posted here, but sometimes that isn't possible because the sites get slashdotted.
What would be even nicer is if the submitters and the editors would read the articles themselves, and not put a bunch of misleading information into the submission and the title.
You know what else would be nice? A cold beer. :-)
One out of three ain't bad.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"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.
A way to make money from banner ads!
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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.
...who initially read the title as "Amazon's Bozos Wants Web Advertising Patent"?
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
To a certain extent they don't, and that is part of the way the system is designed to work.
;-) but my patent describes a board with three legs, somebody else could patent an improvement of a stool with 4 legs. For that matter a thrid person could patent a stool with 4 legs and a back (essentially a chair).
As an example, If I had a patent on the concept of a stool (probably called an elevated sitting device
Neither of the improvment inventors could make or sell their improved sitting devices without paying me royalties for my basic patent. I however could not utilize any of their improvements without paying them royalties.
Often in cases such as these, a cross licencing contract is created to allow us both to use the other's patented ideas. This is why IBM et al. try to get patents on anything and everything; if you try to sue them, they reach into their files and find something where you infringe on one of their patents.
This is the difficulty in the patent examiner's job. He has to decide whether an application is essentially the same as an existing item, or is an improvement on the prior art. Often, the examiner may ask the applicant to remove one or more claims (which the examiner thinks are duplicative of the prior art) leaving only the claims that represent the improvement.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
I contracted to a company called Narrowline in 1994-1995. They were an early competitor to Doubleclick. The important difference was that they attempted to be a neutral market for advertising, matching buyers and sellers.
The system was exactly what what described here.
Now I need to hunt down the folks who used to work there...
I forget what 8 was for.
I bet he's not going to try to patent anything like crashing your helicopter in Texas.
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.
instead of writing knee-jerk reaction posts
<humor>
Given that it's Amazon that filed the patent application, I think these knee-jerk reactions are justified. I looked up "frivolous patent" in the dictionary and it said "see Amazon". You just can't argue against that.
</humor>
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Is it just me, or does anyone else remember Yahoo making money with advertising before there even was an Amazon?
Very odd.... In 1993, after I switch from Gopher to a pre-release of Mosaic, I saw a few banner ads. In fact, I designed one for my ISP and put it on my main page and got free ISP access for 6 years. Don't remember seeing Amazon back then. When did they go online?
And yeah, even if it wasn't for people like Prodigy, Genie, and (there was a third, wasn't there?) -- didn't AOL have advertisements all along?
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I think there really should be a criminal penalty for attempting to patent something for which you know prior art exists. A common sense standard could be applied. People get convicted of criminal negligence because they did something (or failed to not do something) that was contrary to common sense and as a result hurt someone. Applying for a patent that you are pretty sure you will get (even though anyone with any common sense knows prior art exists) because the PTO is overwhelmed and you have lots of money should be criminal negligence. Put Bezos in jail (general lockup) for 3 days and see how many more bogus patents he applies for in the future. Use the fines he pays to help fund the PTO.
The Practice Guidelines under the SPLT are available at http://www.wipo.int/scp/en/documents/session_9/pdf /scp9_4.pdf. The relevant section is 76 d on pages 19/20.
This information is useful not only for defending against patent claims like this, but where OpenSource developers have been discussing concepts and ideas on mailing lists open to the public. The document above is also a good read (really!) on the subject of prior art.
It appears that WIPO are taking a stand against Intellectual Piracy.
Phil
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."
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
Living in Portland, Powell's management is seen as "The Man." They've been exploiting their workers for 10+ years and severely punished former employees at attempting to form a labor union.
l
http://www.nwlaborpress.org/12-18-98Powells.htm
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
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
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.
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.
How much more proof do we need, before we realize that the entire patent system is corrupted beyond repair and needs to be rebuild from the ground up?
Firstly, business models or other general "methods" -- like this auction method -- should never be patentable. Patents should cover inventions. You've found a good business model -- fine. Doesn't mean that just because you're the first one to utilize that business model or method, that no one else should be able to.
Patents should, at the very least, consider independent discovery. Furthermore, simply coming up with the idea a few days before someone else hardly means that you're entitled to sole ownership.
Another thing -- life should not be patentable. Living organisms should not be patentable. It is absurd to treat living organisms as if they are "property". This poses innate problems, because living organisms tend to spread. See the Canada case where a greedy multinational corporation decided to bankrupt a farmer for growing what was in his own yard.
Finally, corporations should not be allowed to patent inventions that they did not actually develop. A disgusting category in this case is biopiracy, where corporations are given the rights to profit off of an invention which they in no way invented, but simply extracted from indigenous peoples. Anyone who pursues these kind of patents is an immoral crook.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
As numerous people have pointed out, this is an *application* only. Which means there is a huge chance that the claims, as issued, will look nothing like the original submitted claims. Not only that, if the slashdot readers all know of prior art out there that anticipates or renders obvious the claims in the current form, they should just send those prior art references into the patent office! The whole point of the process of publishing patent applications before issuance is so that the public can contribute to the prosecution process by submitting relevant prior art. Instead of sitting on your collective butts complaining, why not take positive action and do something? Just remember that the references submitted must be in a clean form, i.e., no notation, highlighting, comments written on margins, etc. The patent office will remove all extraneous comments, and if there are too many extraneous comments, the PTO will definitely chuck out the reference. Of course, we don't want that to happen now, do we.