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Prior Art to Pinpoint vs. Amazon, from 1980's?

Posted by timothy on from the first-person-singular dept.

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."

7 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. collaborative filtering, that seems oddly familiar by js7a · · Score: 2, Informative
    Ah -- collaborative filtering, now where else is that used?

    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?

  2. Re:8" floppy media? by cyb97 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I guess submitting it to USPTO would count as a pretty good backup...
    Patent # 5,884,282
    Patent # 5,790,426
    Both held by Gary B. Robinson aka. the poster of this story ;-)

  3. "RINGO" by js7a · · Score: 2, Informative

    s/Firefly/RINGO/

  4. Re:8" floppy media? by garyrob · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, actually I copied it to 3.5-inch mac floppies at some point as well as to DAT. And I probably have it somewhere on my hard disk on the laptop I'm typing this from as well.

  5. Re:Diligence by garyrob · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're incorrect. The diligence is required between the date of conception and the actual reduction to practice. After that, you are merely required not to "abandon" the invention. Abandonment does not occur if you even have an intention of working on it again.

  6. Re:Diligence by garyrob · · Score: 4, Informative

    One other aspect, since we're discussing these legal technicalities... if you create an actual reduction to practice, and then use the invention publicly, you have one year to file a patent application or your own public use becomes prior art. So if you want to wait years, you have to keep it totally under wraps, but have solid proof of the relevant dates.

  7. collaborative filtering and different domains by yppiz · · Score: 2, Informative
    I created one of Amazon's collaborative filtering systems (not the shopping cart one, the other big one). In my opinion, a collaborative filtering system in a domain like dating is unlikely to take away from a patent for collaborative filtering in an area like shopping.

    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