Slashdot Mirror
Prior Art to Pinpoint vs. Amazon, from 1980's?
Gary Robinson writes "I'm in a fairly unique position with regard to the Pinpoint vs. Amazon case since I built a system in the mid-1980's which is commonly regarded as the first active service based on collaborative filtering. It was a voice-mail-based dating service called 212-ROMANCE. I still have the 8-inch CP/M source code disks as insurance against CF-related patent lawsuits. Today I've posted a discussion of the Pinpoint vs. Amazon case in the context of that prior art as well other prior art from the 1980's."
This is the philisophical argument against "intellectual property". How can one say that nobody has written that exact same song, book, whatever? Have you checked everything that has ever been expressed since the beginning of time? The only logical thing to conclude is that nobody ever creates ideas. Ideas exist outside of time, so there is always "prior art".
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I hope that you made some backups. That form of media doesn't exactly have an infinite shelf life.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I hope you copied the source code off those 8" floppies onto some other media. 15+ year old floppy disks are not that reliable. You might be in for a nasty surprise.
Now, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you need to file patent suits ASAP, or you lose your ability to do so. And, Amazon has been using this tech for a while.
Hey, but he should post the source! Then we could see it!
Anyway, the Pinpoint patents are obviously not worth the paper they're printed on. The Firefly collaborative music recommendation system was widely published out of MIT in '94, and should be the easiest stick with which to L.A.R.T. the Pinpoint bozos.
But gee, a telephon date line running under CP/M from the 80's, now there's some extra points for overwhelming geekitude. Who needs Firefly when you've got 212-ROMANCE?
"That project used techniques that do not seem fundamentally not unlike some of the basic principles used in the Pinpoint patents." Do not seem fundamentally not unlike? What the fuck?
From the article:" Last fall, the head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office admitted that many business method patents had been wrongfully awarded in the past."
This line could be a slashdot story in and of itself!:)
Well you can prove a negative, like, I did not see a purple monkey fly at me in the last second. But here it is nearly impossible to actually determine everything that is expressed or even thought to determine if you are "original".
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Look, there are still things that are patent worthy. I was just watching on the news where some kid and his dad made a device that would kill mosquito larvae using sound waves through water -- no chemicals. I question the overall usefulness of such a device (getting rid of standing water around your house may be smarter, although I suppose this would be helpful if you had a small pond) but it seemed pretty unique and clever.
The process of proving prior art should be more streamlined, perhaps, and the level of interest at the patent office of yanking improperly issued patents definitely needs to be increased, but doing away with this system is only going to punish the small inventor as illustrated above.
s/Firefly/RINGO/
I got an 8" floppy. You should see my hard drive!
You act as if you're on the losing side.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Randomly generate every sentence that could be a patent summary. If someone happens upon one, then there's prior art!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
but then caldera would throw it in their kernel, and prior versions thereof, and accuse him of piracy.
If you do sorting with CP/M and don't pay them money, you're a common thief!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
1. Patent something fairly obvious but non-trivial.
2. Wait until other people do the actual work.
3. Sue one of the largest ones, settling for a license fee they can easily afford and which is far cheaper than litigation.
4. Sue the smaller ones on the strength of the first suit.
5. PROFIT!
> It is possible to keep an invention secret for
> years after an actual reduction to practice and
> before filing a patent application, and still keep
> the date of conception as the date of the
> invention, as long as the patent is applied for
> within one year of the invention becoming public.
Not true. Look up "diligence".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why did he wait so long. Hasnt Amazon and others been using this for quite a while now? He just new decides to do something about this.
If you look at the patents that reference patent 5,443,036, you'll see several people have already built upon the concept. What's sad isn't the concepts that people patent but the extents to which a corporation will go purely for extortion. Maybe they need a new department that will determine the generality of a patent and decide if it needs to be public domain/free. Yay more government. :p
The parent of your post is I think being rediculous, but this is an example of how science never "proves" laws. You cannot scientifically say that an object with mass will never move at the speed of light (expressed in hexadecimal of course), all you can say is that you have never observed it to happen yet.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
That's hardly a "basic rule of logic"; reductio ad absurdam is one of the most basic kinds of proof.
Remember geometry in high school? You probably proved that no triangle has interior angles greater than 180 degrees. Proof of a negative. Where did the ridiculous claim "you can't prove a negative" come from, anyways?
All's true that is mistrusted
Patents are not
Sorry, Mr Resistor, your posting illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of patents and how they work.
You are right that patent suits can be filed anytime, but you will LOSE if you have not actively and vigorously defended your IP prior to the suit. This is to say that you cannot ignore little company X infringement for 5 years, and then sue Microsoft for infringing. Microsoft just has to show that you knew there were others infringing, and you didn't do anything about it.
There are a lot of companies and individuals that come out of the woodwork a little too late -- coming out against a giant company....it fails.
Sad but true. Look up the idea of "latches".....
Why? Because while you may have similar sources of data in both areas, namely personal profiles or "shopping" transactions, there is no guarantee that the data has the same properties in these different domains, and so there is no guarantee that the same algorithm will work in the two domains.
And without this guarantee, it is not necessarily "obvious to a practioner in the field" that one would overlap the other.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
So, poor old amazon go and patent the idea of the impulse buy on the internet and use it to screw their competitors, now we are supposed to feel sorry for them because some other moron managed to patent the idea of stacking related items on the same shelf using the internet? I am just waiting for the guy who has patented selling related items on the same website using the internet to come and roll over the lot of em. BTW, anyone else like the way this guy approached amazon to see if they would like to licence his "defensive" patent. Yeah, thats not a contradiction in terms at all.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
What I don't understand is why anyone would spend the time and money to file this patent in the first place. It's totally worthless. First, any sane judge or jury, even in our messed-up system, would probably throw it out as non-obvious. Second, and more importantly, the patent's claims (the only part that really counts) are incredibly limited. Claim 1, which all the others are based on, specifically requires a "a hand-held laser apparatus". If you build a machine to wave the laser around, you're fine. (Yes, some such devices are patented too, but the patents are so specific that it would be easy to design around them.)
And thank Jesus it took this long for it to start.
Can you imagine the state of affairs
if software patents were granted from day 1?
Holy schnikes, you'd have to pay a 1000
license fees just to ship a hello world program.
If you collaboratively filtered potential dates AND your service was successful you'd be creating a problem for yourself. The minute you got good at supporting the search and retrieval of a particular "resource" (in this case a date), the resource would no longer be available--assuming a long term, committed monogomous relationship. I guess it could work as a "swingers" service . . .
BTW, Amazon's patent works within the existing knowledge of CF, citing much of the publish work of the time. Their patent is based largely on a claim of extending the existing work in a novel way. To read some of these posts, you make it sound like they developed this in a vacuum and if only someone brought 10-15 years of work to the attention of the patent office it would be overturned. Trust me, they already know about it.
If patents on systems implemented in software were granted from day one, the software industry would be very different than it is today. Other industries, electronics for example, deal with patents and licensing on a day to day basis and the state of the art keeps advancing. One could argue whether it would be better or worse, but at least it would be consistent. What we have today is the worst of both worlds. We have a patent office accepting patents while they have no concept of the state of the art or prior art.
Personally, I feel what the patent office is missing is the idea that computers are designed to be infinitely configurable machines, and that software just sets the machine to a particular configuration. Being able to patent software is like being able to patent a particular Lego layout.
But just to let you know, if it would have been possible to patent Hello World, and if the patent to it had coincided with the publication of the first edition of the book The C Programming Language (long after string output had implemented in software), then the patent would have expired by now.
The majority of the obviousness determination process in patent trials is procedural (Graham-Deere determinations) and to be determined as a "matter of law" by the judge and not factual based (to be determined by a jury).
What happens is the jury will decide facts A, B and C. These facts are then applied in concluding matter of law determinations of obviousness.
Furthermore, the Court of Appeals could subsequently overturn any jury findings based upon a "substantial evidence" standard of review.
Such as yours. Or I suppose you claim to have "created" it?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
You're onto something:
> If patents on systems implemented in software were granted from day one,
I think your sentiments -- and those of MANY MANY others -- could intersect if only the patent office LIMITED software patents to 10 years.
Most software patents are not innovations... they are expressions of "this is how I an my competitors work... look, no patents yet on some silly bit"
You seem to be jumping to conclusions about my personal opinions or preferences about software and business process patents. By picturing an alternate reality in which software is and always has been patentable, it doesn't mean that I wished that I lived in that reality. It doesn't matter anyway, because we can't change the course of past events. We can't truly determine the effects of a world that always had software patents, and even if we could, we couldn't succeed at emulating that course.
That leads back to the problem, though. We can't go back. Neither side can. Some people may wish that Diamond v. Diehr never happened, but it did. The Supreme Court has forced the USPTO to accept patents for software. Some people may wish that the USPTO awarded software patents earlier, but they didn't and the software industry as it exists today is because the USPTO had its hands off approach.
The question is, what do we do now?