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O'Reilly On What Happened To BountyQuest
theodp writes "In his latest Ask Tim, Tim O'Reilly suggests the failure of BountyQuest could be blamed on the inability of amateurs to penetrate the patent mess, noting that numerous people sent in what they thought was important prior art on the Amazon 1-Click patent, but the attorneys who reviewed it didn't find it useful. But in this case, the "amateurs" included two patent attorneys (one an ex-USPTO examiner), who found their 1-Click prior art rejected by BountyQuest for not being specific to the Web, an argument a Federal Court told Amazon a month earlier was an irrelevant distinction that could not be used to exclude prior art. Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"
Why the hell is he holding this "evidence" in secrecy? looking to sell it to the highest bidder on the next "lawsuit merry-go-round" ?
Such a mess:-p
Who might have the money and the balls to sue Amazon first, asking for a declaratory judgement that the one-click patent is invalid?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Slashdot subscribers who buy 'n' ad-free articles. When they click on "Read More" isn't that one-click shopping ??
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Prior art is not enough, you need commercial interests that are large and strong enough to fight the battle.
I had prior art on my ex-wife but she still took half my fortune and the two schnauzers. So what?
And O'Reilly lost some credibility for going along with it. He should have called "shenanigans" and admitted that the patent circus is just a game designed to make life hard for the small entrepreneur.
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O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf,
A TV remote control, i.e. used for pay-per-view pr0n purchases from the sofa?
Searching for prior art is too difficult, what we need is something where you can just click once to find what you need.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Bezos wants to patent the gesture, and it is so ludicrous that even Steve Jobs endorses it, and yet the rest of us have to endure this idiocy for years.
I say we issue anti-patents. If the patent you are filing is found to be dim, ridiculous, or utterly moronic, not only shouldn't you get the patent, but you should be denied access to the very "technology" you sought to control.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
This could include things like PHP or ASP or apache CGI. Or maybe it could be argued that it is specific to the delivary system of Amazon or particular types of merchandise. Possibly one could even integrate a third party service into it such as Paypal or MS Passport and claim that it is a totally different business model and therefore not covered by the patent.
The possibilities of dodging the patent are opened up much wider by the patent being able to continue. This should be exploited
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
IIRC, a patent used to be awarded for a device that it would take a master craftsman more than two to three full days to design and make.
Extending that to software patents today, exactly how many lines of C would you say a master programmer can output in two to three days? I have a feeling that it may be a lot more than what this technology is built on.
Thankfully I live in Australia, where we don't have anywhere near as many stupid software patents, but I can still foresee the day that I will have to get a patent judged invalid before I can write a program more than 100 LOC. I wonder if we will have an analogous situation to music piracy today, where everyone will write outlawed code because the big companies hold the patents on basic programming constructs and refuse to play ball.
For all the fuss over one-click... has anyone actually used it?
Personally, I find it to be the stupidest way of ordering anything.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The damn thing sounds like a merge of a paper-town company with a telco !
I wonder if they were competitive with Brawny-Verizon?
It's not individual stupid patents we should go after; it's stupid patents in general. I'd rather see O'Reilly put his money into lobbying against the idea of patents on "business methods" and other vaguely defined ideas that simply shouldn't be eligible for any kind of IP protection, ever. And please don't trot out the line about, "Well then people won't innovate!" Somehow innovation seems to have done just fine for hundreds of years without people taking out patents like "A method for folding toilet paper so as to facilitate wiping your ass from front to back."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I don't know what's more disturbing, that your wife sued you for half your fortune, or that you had two schnauzers! O'Reilly has never lost credability. They are and always will be the primo publisher of geek gank.
second, for all the /. FUD and hyperbole about the evils of software patents, the big winners in recent years have been the small independent developers like mike doyle and thomas woolston.
and it is the goliaths such as microsoft, e-bay, and barnes and noble, and soon IBM, who have had to pay.
Forget Amazon suing anyone else over one-click; what if someone else loses their senses and licenses one-click? What then?
I never understood how this "one-click" was patentable. Buttons on computers screens were around since ever, my first GUI computer in the eighties that had buttons. You clicked them once, and they did something, hence "one-click."
Also, retrieving customer information wasn't innovative, it has been done before.
In the car world, it would be akin to patenting "one punch" where in a control (pedal-button) needs to be punched,pushed, or what have you, in order to evoke a realtime response, i.e. a car's function. Whether it is retrieving more fuel to feed the pistons or apply pressure to the brakes.
I'm sick of people using obscure language to get a patent on stupidly obvious shit! Everytime one of these asses go out and sue someone, they should be liable for full legal costs, damages, and jail time. It's just a big drag on everyone else who is actually 'innovative.'
If I buy the O'Reilly Unix CD Bookshelf through Amazon, a) Do I get a free copy of the prior art with the bookshelf, and b) Will O'Reilly's head explode from the irony?
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The courts explicitedly stated that this was NOT a loophole. The links specifically point to a similar system on Compuserve that could be prior art.
What Mr O'Reilly has as prior art is the following
1) Own publishers
2) Put all of your books on one shelf
3) Remove from shelf
This can be made online by sending an IM to his secretary in one click to get the book.
Sincerly
Jeff Bozos Lawyers
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If we didn't have such patent protections, we WOULD still be folding toilet paper as you describe - however, some bright soul invented the 'wrap it around a tube that is easy to load into a dispenser' and now we have ROLLS of toilet paper instead of STACKS!
*Insert BIG smiley here*
on my laptop...
which was stolen...
and from the look of my CC bill, they used it more than me...
things like this are setup to steal ideas from the little man...
fsck em all i keep my ideas to myself...
My thesis work was patented by another company. However, no one, myself, my school or my current company wants to fight it because the lawyers fees would be at least $50K. They would only fight it if it would have broguht them more than mount of profit.
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.
Would he step in if Amazon sued, say Microsoft?
the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system - it's that small entrepreneur...
WTF? What the fuckity-fuckity-flying-fuck? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING? OK, must... get... control... again.
Sorry, pal, but you are wrong. Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them. The "small entrepreneurs" you are thinking about are firms with good financial backing and a speciality in what amounts to legal extortion. They find a single patent and exploit it. Any realistic small business trying this will soon face the fact that for every one patent they try to enforce, larger and richer companies will come back with five or ten that they have suddenly found.
The patent process claims to be about protecting innovation and invention but in fact it does exactly the opposite - it rewards those who have deep pockets and dedicated lawyers, and punishes those who spend their time really inventing.
This is simple to demonstrate: the companies that exploit "obvious patents" are never small businesses who make other products, they are either huge businesses, or shell companies that do nothing else at all.
And your insulting remarks about "unwashed FSF geeks" are just amazingly rude. You are either just trolling, or truly pathetic and uneducated.
I'll settle for troll.
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I realize that the one-click deal became a big money focus, but I recall that the site was about all kinds of prior art and many of them were more interesting than that one issue. I still don't quite understand why it wasn't kept going. It seems the bandwidth and hosting costs are minimal these days and it's a good cause. I would assume that just on ad revenue alone it would be a sustainable site. Their FAQ was excellent. I was going to write a book on patents at one point and after reading thier FAQ I felt what I had to say was redundant.
I very highly recommend the BQ History of Patents FAQ by the way for anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's still available at archive.org and I still refer to it regularly when I forget some of the terms. The part about Xerox is something that clearly a lot of younger people don't understand when they talk about the glories of unrestrained capitalism as the source of their beloved PCs.
Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'
In related news, Tim O'Reilly was shot dead when coming out of his appartment building this morning. Witnesses described the shooter as a middle-aged, bald guy with a wide grin who ramsacked the bookshelves before escaping on foot.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I always thought that the dude that started amazon is the same dude that started BountyQuest.
:)
If so, it kinda explains... well.. everything
I don't know if they were "forced" but they took the safe route.
I used to work for a company that was trying, and hugely succeeding, to apply a patent of theirs from 1986 that involved selecting construction materials from a hierarchal list to the web. Sites like Dell and Gateway that allowed custom configuration based on a hierarchal list were the targets...and they paid up based on this patent, which was never really challenged as being "non-web."
Please read this webpage on how valuable IBM considers its patents to be and why. IBM holds more patents than anyone else. When they say cross-licensing is an order of magnitude more valuable than infringement lawsuits, everyone had better listen. Cross-licensing takes away all of the exclusive power patents were invented to bestow upon the patent holder. Cross-licensing is only for the biggest patent holders, so it by definition does not serve the majority of patent holders well. The public is also not served well by it either. Your view of the matter is incorrect and your post is horribly overrated.
Digital Citizen
O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"
I don't understand this. He starts this whole bounty program to fight bad patents, we know he thinks the Amazon 1-click patent is bad, and he has this "killer" prior art which is apparently lethal to the Amazon patent in question, and yet he won't reveal what it is ?? Wouldn't we all be better served by seeing what is NOW, so that people who want to roll out 1-click type sites can do so without worrying about possible litigation and whether or not O'Reilly really has such killer prior-art ? I'm sorry, but if all I have to rely on is O'Reilly's say-so that he has the prior art that will protect ME from getting sued, I'm probably not going to test the waters.
It sounds to me like either: 1) he doesn't have squat, and is bluffing (poorly), or 2) he just doesn't want to pay out an earned bounty. Either way, it's fishy.
No they just have a patent on the wheel. Issued in 2001.
More interestingly -- their patent search site, starts with "Don't reinvent the wheel."
My prior art can be found right here between my legs. Seen it before? If so, you can't patent your ideas. This whole thing is just plain retarded.
-Where there is blue screen, there is OWNAGE
This may seem extreme, I know, but I really think that a lot of things that are currently screwed up in this world are so because of our increasingly complex and impenetrable legal system. See the book "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard for more on this subject. This excellent book talks about how our legal system of rules has become increasingly specific ("rationalistic") over time, to the point where it is like a huge, dysfunctional computer program (my analogy) that attempts to anticipate every scenario that might occur - all in the name of taking human discretion out of the equation. As a result, just the opposite effect is achieved, with small minded bureaucrats being able to pick and choose arbitrarily from the morass of rules as it suits them. In the old days, laws were more broadly written, to allow real people to use their own judgement ("common sense") in applying the rules to real world situations. Since the rationalistic approach assumes a finite number of rules can model a world with an infinite number of possible situations, it will only get more and more complex, with more and more loopholes.
But specifically regarding patents - one of the biggest reasons given for patents these days is that without them innovation would cease, since it would no longer be in any company's interest to bear the initial research and development costs. The reasoning is that if anyone else can immediately copy your new ideas (which cost you a lot of money to develop) then you are at a disadvantage, and thus won't do it.
Well, how about the Personal Computer? If IBM had made the PC architecture closed, would the industry have exploded in the way it has? Probably not - witness Apple's failure to grab much of the market due to their own architecture not being clonable. In the beginning, Apple was certainly in a good position to dominate the new market, but instead the cheap "PC clones" dictated the direction, and the industry expanded rapidly. Much innovation followed (in the hardware sense, if not in the operating system sense). Did IBM, the originator of the PC architecture, suffer as a result of all this? Perhaps in the short term, but in the longer term the company has thrived from the byproducts of the PC industry - and, more importantly, so has the whole computer industry. When the greater world benefits, then so does IBM, albeit in a more subtle and indirect way.
Another example: The Internet. Open standards, open source software. Would TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, CGI, and all those other foundation blocks of computing today have taken off if they were patented? I think not. Would anyone have believed that Open Source could work at all if it hadn't done so already? Obviously people are willing to produce innovative stuff just for its own sake. In the short term, perhaps, there is no direct profit to be seen - but it comes further down the road, to everyone. The whole world benefits.
So what about things like drugs? They don't work in the same way as computers, surely... but really, they do. If companies shared their "secrets" then the whole field would leap ahead so much faster than now, and there would be enough for everyone to thrive. Think of all the things that could be done with shared knowledge instead of hoarded secrets! Also, with a more open research community, research and development wouldn't cost as much as it does now anyway.
The whole IP industry is one based on fear, rather than sharing. Fear that I won't make enough money, and everyone else will steal my idea. But history shows that people innovate quite happily without the millstone of patents and IP law hanging around their necks. We have lived through most of history without patents and IP - why is it suddenly essential now? Answer: Greed and fear.
Patents these days stifle the small inventor and favor instead huge corporations who can afford to employ armies of attorneys for the sole purpose of getting "defensive" patents. The system has grown so complex that it simply doesn't do that it was originally
How much could O'reily really know about computers? I mean he's all fair and balanced but he's really not. I don't trust him.
What is so special about software that the legal system allows it to be simultaneously protected in three major ways - trade secrets, patents, *and* copyright?
You can patent software without supplying the source code to the public or the patent office, so it gets patented yet remains a trade secret. On top of that, copyright gives it the life+70 years protection.
Other creations are only allowed to simultaneously use one out of the three protections, maybe two in a few cases. But it is ridiculous that software is given the three-pronged protection when it needs it less than most other fields.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.