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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.
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
Yes, wishful thinking, I know.
Yea! No more banner ads! Welcome to the Internet circa 1993.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.