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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.
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.
Whenever you even discuss patents, you have to use obfusticated speech. How else do you patent using a laser to play with a cat, but with language like:
"directing an intense coherent beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus to produce a bright highly-focused pattern of light at the intersection of the beam and an opaque surface, said pattern being of visual interest to a cat;"?
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http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
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!
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...
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.
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.