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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."

3 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Patents still serve a purpose by Meat+Blaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

  2. Business Plan by serutan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. Re:Huh? by cyb97 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...