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Third Anniversary of Bezos-Backed Patent Reform
theodp writes "With IE, IM and Linux all threatened by patent infringement lawsuits, it's worth noting that Saturday marks what would have been the third anniversary of BountyQuest. With $1+ million of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' money and an Amazon VP on its Board, BountyQuest vowed to reform the patent system through its prior art contests. While BountyQuest raised eyebrows when it found winning prior art right off the bat for a patent Amazon was sued for infringing on, it surprisingly drew little heat when it announced no winning prior art could be found for Bezos' own 1-Click patent. 'There was no Bounty winner, mainly because the 1-Click patent is specific to the Web,' explained BountyQuest. 'This was a tough one to win because the Amazon 1-Click patent is so specific to the Web,' added BountyQuest investor Tim O'Reilly. Amazon's claim that the contest outcome vindicated Bezos' 1-Click patent went unchallenged by the New York Times, who instead took contestants to task for submitting prior art that 'failed to mention the Internet.' But legal documents have surfaced revealing that a month before these arguments were made, Amazon was told by a Federal Court that 'This distinction is irrelevant, since none of the [Bezos 1-Click patent] claims mention either the Internet or the World Wide Web.' If it was 'in everyone's interest to get all relevant prior art out into the open,' as Bezos said, then what happened?"
Thats confusing!!
Who do I send my $699 to?
liqbase
If it was 'in everyone's interest to get all relevant prior art out into the open,' as Bezos said, then what happened?
Money changed hands?
Could you back that up with some links please?
Oh come on, it mentions patents, Amazon, Linux, and has lots of links! What more do you want???
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Amazon set up us the bomb.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Tomorrow is the 3rd aniversity of a dead company that was involved in things we don't like.
Slow news day?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
How about granting patents to companies that ACTUALLY invent something that is of real intellectual value instead of the user tripe of, "here is a widget, it does something, it come in multiple colours and was developed by doo-dacky incorporated at their R&D facility located out in the sticks where donkeys dig for day light".
Just look at the eloas patent, it is so open ended, one has to place it in the "how long is a piece of string" pile of questions which hopefully can be answered by some divine intervention when the second coming occurs (if ever?).
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
I remember when I first heard of Bountyquest. I checked it out, and actually did some searching to see if there was any low-hanging fruit. Unfortunately, if someone is offering a few $1000s to find prior art, usually it's hard to find. However, I thought the idea was a very good one. The whole point is to attract people who have worked in the field of the patent in question, because they would be the ones who would know about the prior art. Say if someone had a patent on "hypersonic oil pumps". Well, most people don't pay much attention to the hypersonic pump field, and most patent attorneys don't either. But if you are someone with 20 years of experience in that field, and you remember back in '78 when those guys in Minnesota were working on the Fido project, well, provide some proof and you just pocketed $20k. (Example completely hypothetical: I'd be surprised if there actually were hypersonic oil pumps) For the system to work, Bountyquest had to have experts from various fields drop by to see if there was anything from their particular field. It also benefits the experts in that field, by not only giving them money, but by keeping bad patents from cluttering the technological landscape in that field. Programmers, see the advantages of this?
I hope that a successor to Bountyquest appears soon. There is no reason that someone else cannot offer rewards for proof of prior art - even in the Amazon case! Although the Amazon case is really more about whether doing something already done, but claiming it is new because it is on the internet, is valid as an invention. I think most slashdotters would agree that it shouldn't be (otherwise we basically have a 20 year moratorium on internet innovation).
Let me clarify:
theodp:With IE, IM and Linux all threatened by patent infringement lawsuits, it's worth noting that Saturday marks what would have been the third anniversary of BountyQuest.
translation:Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense!
theodp:With $1+ million of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' money and an Amazon VP on its Board, BountyQuest vowed to reform the patent system through its prior art contests.
translation:Why would a Wookiee -- an eight foot tall Wookiee -- want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
theodp:While BountyQuest raised eyebrows when it found winning prior art right off the bat for a patent Amazon was sued for infringing on, it surprisingly drew little heat when it announced no winning prior art could be found for Bezos' own 1-Click patent.
translation:But more importantly, you have to ask yourself: what does that have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
theodp:'There was no Bounty winner, mainly because the 1-Click patent is specific to the Web,' explained BountyQuest. 'This was a tough one to win because the Amazon 1-Click patent is so specific to the Web,' added BountyQuest investor Tim O'Reilly.
translation:Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.
theodp:Amazon's claim that the contest outcome vindicated Bezos' 1-Click patent went unchallenged by the New York Times, who instead took contestants to task for submitting prior art that 'failed to mention the Internet.'
translation:And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
theodp:But legal documents have surfaced revealing that a month before these arguments were made, Amazon was told by a Federal Court that 'This distinction is irrelevant, since none of the [Bezos 1-Click patent] claims mention either the Internet or the World Wide Web.' If it was 'in everyone's interest to get all relevant prior art out into the open,' as Bezos said, then what happened?"
translation:If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
If you believe in patents, what matters is not if it has been done before, but if it is worthy of patent protection, i.e. it must be non trivial and not something that is so logical that the "invention" is unavoidable.
The problem with prior art is that you do not reward a patent based on a objective judgement if it is a true invention or not, but based on luck: If the first one who happens to think of a new but trivial idea (probably a lot of people think of it in parallel, but one of them writes a bit faster than the others so to say) is a bastard then the rest is out of luck and has to live with a patent situation.
For me, law must not be based on luck or chance, but on objective judgement.
A further problem of course is, how to determine what is trivial and what is not.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
I mean patenting methods of swinging? (#6,368,227) Get real.
My impression is that this was done as a satirical gesture, using the system itself to show how outrageous it really is.
Guess how much of my money Amazon has gotten...exactly NONE. Same goes for the RIAA. How many others here can say the same?
I was glad to see that the moderator at least labeled the "dept" correctly -- but I wish that slashdot wasn't reduced to posting flamebait in order to drive traffic.
Theodp did indeed submit what he thought was prior art to the bountyquest 1-click competition -- he sent in a huge binder of IBM mainframe documentation without any comment about what part of it he considered prior art. When pressed for details, he gave some section numbers, but for the life of me I couldn't see its relevance, and neither could any of the bountyquest patent attorneys. It basically described a system in which you issued commands, and the computer responded! I think we all know a few of those. I gave him far more time and consideration than the actual merit of his submission required -- it seemed to me to be one of the most useless and irrelevant of all the submissions, yet he keeps claiming it as if it were the answer. Spending time answering his assertions seems only to have whetted his appetite for attention.
Theodp's accusations of malfeasance are particularly irritating because I did in fact pay out $10,000 of my own money for the three pieces of prior art that seemed most relevant. None of them were a slam dunk, though. (However, after the contest ended and BountyQuest went on the rocks, someone did send me a killer piece of prior art, which I still have in my possession in the event that Amazon ever sues anyone else over 1-click. I never used it because in the interim, Amazon settled with Barnes & Noble, and the case was put to bed. Meanwhile, I had become convinced that Amazon had seen the light (and the pressure -- suing B&N was a PR disaster for them) and would not again choose to use patents offensively.
As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them. Amazon is no worse in this regard than anyone else, and I believe that because of their bad experience, they are likely a lot better. They understand in a way they never did before that they are part of a technology ecosystem, and owe a lot to the open source and open standards developer community who created their opportunity. The Amazon web services interface is a direct outcome of what they learned through their mistakes over the offensive use of the 1-click patent, and the conversations about "giving back" that ensued.
The fact that BountyQuest failed was a big disappointment both to me and to Jeff -- it seemed like a good idea. But like many other startups in the dotcom era, it didn't make it over the hump.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com
So why was prior art submitted by others ruled out for not being specific to the web (e.g., "Unfortunately it doesn't say anything about the use of HTML, the Web, and such, so it wasn't a winner.")? Didn't anyone inform you or the BountyQuest lawyers that a Federal Court had rejected a similar argument made by Amazon just a month earlier?