Amazon Takes Pikachu To The Patent Office

theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon was awarded a patent for Search Query Autocompletion. From the Summary of the Invention--'For example, if Pokemon toys are currently the best selling or most-frequently-searched-for items within the database, the term POKEMON may be suggested whenever a user enters the letters "PO," even though many hundreds of other items in the database may start with "PO.'" See, Amazon practices the mantra "Gotta catch 'em all" with patents.

Comments

Prior Art?

[dejaffa]

There has got to be prior art on this. Didn't Yahoo do this before 2000 (when the patent was filed)?

Re:Prior Art?

[willtsmith]

Actually,

It's the job of the patent holder to challenge those who allegedly infringe upon it.

The patent process seriously needs a stage when concerned parties can challenge BEFORE the patent is granted.

Actually, the whole system needs to be re-done with different forms of patents for different types of inventions:

* Traditional - physical devices, unchanged
* Software - much higher constraints should be applied here. It has to be mind-blowing and not an obvious one-off from a known algorithm (as Mr Bezos' latest patent is simply an indexing method).
* Application - People who come up with novel applications for existing inventions or combinations of inventions deserve protection from the goliaths ready to swoop in, replicate, and annihalate any competition. The patents could be business related of software related.
Basically, I would propose a 3 year head start against infringement for truly unique applications and methodologies (software, business, or otherwise).

* Research Derived Applications
- Physical Law/Fact, derived applications
All those folks patenting gene X or gene Y are pretty perverse. Gene's aren't inventions, nor is discovery of a gene an invention. However, they do have a point that they plow a LOT of money into these things and have an inherent right to a cut of profits from products developed exploiting their research. This type of patent would be strictly licensing based since you cannot OWN knowledge. 15 years is still fair.
- New application. There are plenty of existing things (especially in pharma) that have new applications. However, a significant amount of research is required to prove it (as in prove it to the FDA). It's reasonable that a entity that does research that gives new life to an existing invention, even one thats passed into the public domain. For example, proving that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack. In that case, an researching entity could be granted royalties on sales of such products paid by manufacturers provided that the discovery boosts overall sales (determined by a judge). I would suggest a 7 year window between the time the royalties are granted and the time they expire.

* Pharmacy - These guys are WAY out of line in that they apply for patents on LOTS and LOTS of substances that are similar to the one's they work on. They have no idea whether these things are actually usable inventions. They do it to prevent others from doing similar research and marketing a competitor. I would propose that if you can't prove a medical efficacy or chemical effect, no patent. Plus all Pharma patents should be inherently license based effectively splitting up big Pharma into Intellectual Property/Research firms and just plain manufacturers (similar to current generic producers).

Google

[dj_paulgibbs]

Does this make Google liable (or indeed, most search engines in general) if you type in an incorrectly spelt search, and it suggests an alternate?

hmmm... prior art?

[pngwen]

Well I'd have to say that there is a pretty good case for prior art on this one. I mean this is not too dissimilar from what web browsers have been doing for a few years now in the location tab (autocompletion of URLs)

Also, in mozilla you can define macros that can be accessed via the location bar. So I can type google foo to search google for foo. The next time I come along I will probably just have to get as far as google fo and it will complete my search parameter!

So there you go, mozilla has done it for at least a year. It even gives you suggestions, most popular at the top.

Another app that does it is my check tender on my palm pilot. It does this for payees...

Too bad most people will be scared off by court costs to argue the obvious. Oh well.

Re:hmmm... prior art?

[Zemran]

Autocompletion is all over the place, typing a url to text messaging on a mobile. This is so similar to all the others that I think it is about time to start charging fines for the waste of time that these applicants inflict on the gov and therefore the US tax system.

Re:hmmm... prior art?

[watzinaneihm]

No that wont be the topic of the patent filing.In this case mozilla is running on your machine and it is completing the form with data on your machine.
The patent seems to cover data being sent from server to client for autocompletion. For example on my phone I type "po" and then the based on the keystrokes the server searches the database and fills in the rest (Kinda useful when u only have 10 keys). Any prior art would be found I think in the PDA,cell phone market.(What does DoCoMo think?) Or some really fancy HTML/Script combos.
IANAL!IANAL!!

The words "prior" and "art" spring to mind...

[MrFenty]

My DOS (Clipper based) databases were doing this about 15yrs ago, and I think one or two of them are still running. Yet Another Unbelieveable Patent.

*sigh*

Bye bye Amazon

[Illserve]

Implement this feature and I will stop using your service so fast it'll.... well it'll cause a .0000001% drop in your revenue.

Seriously though, what a terrible idea. I'm already going out of my mind in a righteous fury when Excel converts 2/24 into a date without asking me.

I'm going to see about getting a class action lawsuit together on the ground of increased blood pressure due to "frustrating features". Microsoft has deep pockets and there's all kinds of medical literature on the problems of stress to flood the court with.

what I really don't understand

[newsdee]

is how companies get patents on things that everybody is already doing. Shouldn't a patent be done *first* (or at least, be pending),before they start doing/producing something? As it stands, IMHO it seems to be something else: i.e. "let's see what's not patented yet and patent it". Insane...

Check out USPTO #6,232,002

[Anonymous Coward]

I stumbled across this patent when I was doing a research project on the history of software patents for my Intellectual Property Law class. It's a software patent written by (I'm guesssing) a porn site operator that automatically writes unique lewd descriptions for the hundreds of images on a porn site. Basically, the software asks basic questions about the image (how many people, what type of penetration, hair color, positions, etc.) and then it generates a racy text description. Don't know how well it works, but it's amazing what some people do with their time.

I think I did that

[Anonymous Coward]

In my introductory class on elementary search analysis, the search listed other possibilities based on the first set of characters input then found set of matches and returned as possiblities in the order based on the number of entries listed per search, everyone whoever took that class should have prior art.

patents

[ajs318]

Just imagine if personal injury lawyers started offering a service whereby they will patent your injury! Not only do you get compensation when you hurt yourself, you get royalty fees the next time someone hurts themself the same way!

I can think of a possible antidote to all this court mania, though. Has a retailer the right to refuse payment, even if it is made in pound notes, if it believes the money was obtained by some means it feels objectionable? I.E. can some methodist-run establishment legally refuse money won on the horses? By extension it would mean NO LAWSUIT MONEY signs in shops and restaurants ..... wouldn't be much good if they could get taken to court over it, though!

Re:Fine for some things...

[flippet]

Great for entering URLs you've visited before or text messaging, but suh-ucks in word processing. Thanks, I can write a sentence (or in this case, 1 word) for myself.

I disagree... when writing technical stuff with irritatingly long terms repeated many times I find autocomplete useful. It was the main reason why I did my degree project in OpenOffice.org rather than MS Word...

Phil

Re:What a waste of bandwidth

[houstonbofh]

I can see it getting better than that. You type "po" and it querries the database, returns "pokemon" and updates your window, completely overtypeing "police stories." Or, flooding with searches to make "interesting" things come up, like the association of an Oral Roberts book with "The anal sex guide for men" covered in the register last year.

Re:A few more moderate points

[stanmann]

I would be content if IE or Netscape would not autocomplete to the last time I typo'd to a DNS not found like yahooc.om or slashdo.torg.

"during the query ENTRY process"

[ReadParse]

I think there's a big misunderstanding here about what the patent is. It's not just taking "po" and putting that into an SQL "like" statement, oh no. Much more than that. They say "during the query entry process", which means that they'll be using JavaScript or some other client-side code to autocomplete the search term for the user.

Something like this.... if somebody goes to the DVD page, they could load the Top 50 DVDs into a JavaScript Array. And every time the user adds a character to the search field, it would look to that array and see how many titles match what the user has typed so far. When they're down to only one match, they pop the rest of the title into the search box and, in a perfect world, they would auto-select the autocompleted portion so that, if the user continues typing, it will erase the autocompleted portion.

For example, let's say (as a really lame, quick example) that you have two titles in the array:

• The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
• The Hand That Rolls the Dice

The user enters...

"The Hand That Ro"...

and nothing shows up yet, because the "system" (ha!) doesn't know what title you're going to enter. But as soon as you enter the "c" in the word "Rocks", it only has one left and it autocompletes "ks the Cradle".

It's a reasonably good idea (not a great idea, but decent), and it DEFINITELY shouldn't be patentable, because it will become the SECOND thing (that I know of) that I, as a web developer, am prohibited from doing for my customers by law (the first is One-Click, Amazon's first silly little software patent).

Just my USD 0.02

Oh ! The irony...

[isdfnmo]

Weirdly, Microsoft themselves may have prior art on Amazon's predictive auto-complete in their Visual Studio .NET programming environment. As you start to type a line of code, it pops up a select list of potential matches. You can then use the cursor keys or mouse to pick the one that you want and hit TAB to auto-complete your line...