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."

Comments

One should have to prove "no prior art"!

[Thinkit3]

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".

Re:One should have to prove "no prior art"!

[73939133]

The process may be broken, but not as badly as you'd think from all the postings you see around here.

The process is, however, very badly broken from the perspective of the people actually having to spend enormous amounts of money on filing the patents in order to make their patent portfolio sufficiently thick for trading, or getting sued over bogus patents on decades old technology. And plenty of people on Slashdot have been in either or both situations (myself included). For that, it doesn't take "armchair lawyering", or any kind of legal opinion at all, the drain on one's bank account is obvious enough.

The whole thing is a complete racket that has nothing to do with innovation anymore and everything with big companies keeping little companies out of the market, while patent laywers are making a pretty penny.

Re:One should have to prove "no prior art"!

[ivan256]

Can you be close to the prior art but add something that goes the extra mile? If so, patentable. If not, you're in the dustbin.

I've read this a few times now, and it seems like you're saying the same thing I said.

Prior art by definition isn't secret stuff- that comment would imply

I don't understand how I could be implying that prior art is secret when I specifically say it's disclosed right in the application...

Prior art is used to prove that an 'invention' has not taken an inventive step, meaning someone skilled in the relevant art could reasonably be expected to think of the same invention upon reading the public 'prior art,' without any particular inspiration.

Sure, that's one use for prior art, but there's more to it than that. A novel extension of prior art, or even a novel implementation of prior art can be patentable. In those cases prior art is a building block for the new patent, which is exactly the opposite proving the invention unpatentable.

Also, there's more to obviousness that somebody skilled in the art being able to easily come up with the same solution. The problem being solved has to be obvious too. Somebody skilled in the associated art would never come up with the "obvious" solution without realising the solution needed o be found in the first place. It's easy to call something obvious in hindsight.

Patents still serve a purpose

[Meat Blaster]

Obtaining a patent is already a lengthy and expensive process. Door-to-door inquiries are only going to make it costlier.

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.

Business Plan

[serutan]

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!

Re:Business Plan

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Actually I think you got steps 3 and 4 mixed up. Lots of people who do the kind of thing you have outlined in your "business plan" go after small companies first. Since they can't afford to fight it (in most cases) they just settle. Then they go after the big companies and use those other cases as precidence.

Re:Huh?

[cyb97]

In the old days, the patent office used to be staffed with various engineers that between themselves knew "everything" and could decide whether a patent was in conflict with "prior art" or if it was too general/generally known...
Today patenting is a legal business and therefore putting things in legalese would stop the engineers form seeing straight through the patent and stamping REFUSED on things like "using a laser to play with a cat" before even reading the patentapplication... Putting it in legalese would make anything seem "new" and radically different from everything...

Re:unrelated tangent

[Monkelectric]

No, you can't even prove that. The basic supposition of logic is that facts will tend to point to a correct answer. This is why you can't prove a negative, because your non-event has no facts associated with it. Your monkey doesn't exist, therefore there are no facts that lead to the conclusion that he doesn't exist, therefore there is nothing to base a decision on.

I realize that is a bit theoretical in this absurd case, but, goto Mexico and prove you *didn't* commit a crime you're charged with, and you'll understand the difference.

Why has he waited so long?

[kleine18]

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.

Urban legend

[Theatetus]

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?

Re:Urban legend

[Monkelectric]

actually, Reductio ad Absurdum is a method of indirect proof where one seeks to prove a statement by proving that accepting or rejecting the statement is absurd. Now we both agree that flying monkeys are absurd. But can you prove that there has been no prior art for a patent with the same logic?

Re:And thank Jesus it took this long for it to sta

[alangmead]

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.