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!
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.
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?
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
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"
this is apparently "one of the first". It's an ad for AT&T from Hotwired in 1994.
Anything earlier?
Nae bother
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.
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"
which then becomes interesting as Vignette have patents which cover the personalisation and delivery of web pages and components thereof... So one fool would have just crossed the patent held by another fool... both of which there is prior art on.
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.
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.
If it was filed in October 2002 then Amazon is claiming that they didn't use the method prior to October 2001... which I find doubtful. I also question that nobody else was using it prior to October 2001. Which is what needs to be proven to invalidate it.
And while the patent is somewhat novel, I don't think it's sufficiently different from other advertising models (magazine publishing, television, radio) that select what ads to play during which shows to be considered inobvious. But, hey, neither of us are patent clerks. Thank God.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
In the off-chance that you're not kidding... when you begin your rampage, can you please start somewhere FAR AWAY from where I live?
Thanks a bunch. --Jon
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
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.