Slashdot Mirror
Patent Sought For Amazon Marketplace
theodp writes "On the same day CEO Jeff Bezos launched Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature, a 'completely new way for people to find the books they want,' the USPTO published Bezos' patent application for User interfaces and methods for facilitating user-to-user sales. Ironically, searching for 'Amazon' won't turn up Bezos' patent application--the claims are illustrated with example web pages for the hypothetical 'Store.com', as seen through the eyes of 'Sally Small', 'Larry Large', and 'Barry Buyer.' References are made to other patent applications, presumably Amazon's, that describe a way to efficiently create links to bank accounts, the use of product viewing and purchase histories to identify related products, an electronic catalog search engine, the use of a browse tree for navigating a catalog by category, a wish list service, and a service for allowing users to post product reviews for viewing by others." I've used Amazon Marketplace to buy a fair number of things - it's too bad such a cool service has to be "patented", because you know, the concept of people selling to other people is obviously a new one. *sigh*
Maybe you've been asleep since 1999 but the USPTO grants just about any patent that goes through their door. Don't believe me? What about the patent for swinging on a swing that took over a YEAR to revoke.2 .html
Here is a link to a weblog that mentioned it.
http://www.dalager.com/weblog/archives/00002
I'm not sure why the poster mentioned Amazon's searchable text, all the comment has done is serve to confuse a great many of the slashbots who have posted (not that that's hard).
This patent appears to cover Amazon's Z-Shops, not eBay's auction system, not text searching of books, and not just a business method. It covers a way to, in essence, share catalog information among small merchants in a marketplace. Having had a small online retail shop in the past, I can tell you that this is a great idea, and I wish Yahoo! Stores had had it back when I still had a shop.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
What is claimed here is a very specific system for creating a catalog of preexisting items (i.e. a "list of everything") so that people can, instead of writing up a description of their item, find it in the big catalog and say "I have one of these, anyone interested".
Perhaps there's prior art for this (though I don't know of anything that's very similar), but it's certainly not a patent application for "selling stuff over the internet".
Geez... Give the guys some credit for thinking of a cool bit of technology (even if perhaps they aren't the first to think of this one... I reserve judgment on that)...