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

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, 2003 @08:08AM 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."

1 of 139 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Business Plan by serutan · 2003-07-19 08:39 · 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!