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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."
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.
"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?
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.
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!
One should have to prove "no prior art"!
The way it works is exactly the opposite of that. Prior art does not invalidate a patent, it just make the patent dependent on having the rights to the prior art as well.
Unless your patent is exactly what the prior art is (hardly anything is exactly something else (!)) or some subset of it, finding prior art will not prevent the granting of a patent. Also, many patents that are flaged as outrageous by armchair lawyers on slashdot are not as broad of scope as they seem due to the prior art that is listed in the patent.
The process may be broken, but not as badly as you'd think from all the postings you see around here.
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.
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.
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
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.
Patent examimers are supposed to do a check for prior art. Unfortunately, their usual body of work to check from is other patents. From their point of view, useful items are patented, so examining other patent filings is the best place to find already existing inventions.
The problem is, there patent office refused patents on software until forced to by the Supreme Court in the 1981 case Diamond v. Diehr The software industry developed without any consideration to patents, and now the patent office is missing decades of the basic building blocks needed for determing the novel from the mundane.
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.