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.'"

Comments

BountyQuest was always suspect

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re:BountyQuest was always suspect

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

"He should have called "shenanigans" and admitted that the patent circus is just a game designed to make life hard for the small entrepreneur."

Except if you look at recent history, the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system - it's that small entrepreneur you mention who patents something completely obvious and then makes the big corporations pay licensing fees to him. Yeah, Amazon has a patent on 1-Click shopping, a patent that shouldn't have been awared, but have they made anyone pay a license fee? No, they haven't. Face it, the same crowd of unwashed FSF geeks who are crying over patent abuse is producing a few people who are taking advantage of the U.S. Patents Office inability to award patents based on merit.

Do a little reading and get your facts straight. Just because there's a corporation involved, doesn't mean the corporation is wrong. And just because someone is working without the benefit of a giant high rise, does not mean that person is a noble freedom fighter.

It's about time

[corebreech]

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.

BountyQuest missed the point, IMO

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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."

Re:small developers are the winners.

[D'Sphitz]

first, it should be noted, despite all efforts to the contrary, amazon's patent has been in force for a few years now and the world has not come to an end.

Yeah so? Castro has been in power for 45 years and the world has not come to an end either.

Is that the method of determining good and bad now? Anything that causes global destruction == bad, everything else == good?

Re:Method patents

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Heh. I was talking about what you do with the toilet paper when you take it off the roll, actually ...

Was the toilet paper tube patented when it first came out, do you know? If it was, I have no objection to that. I'm not saying all patents are bad; I'm saying patents on ways of doing things rather than the things themselves are bad, especially when those ways are blindingly obvious. "Business methods" are not technology, or inventions.

Neither, I would argue, are things that exist in the natural world -- thus the obscenity of, e.g., gene patents. You want to patent a drug you make as a result of research on a particular gene, fine, but not the gene itself.

Neither are algorithms. An algorithm is no more than a mathematical expression; and mathematical expressions are too damn important to be patented. Where would we be if you had to pay NewtonCorp. a royalty every time you used gravity or action-reaction? Code making use of the algorithms, BTW, already has a perfectly valid form of IP protection: it's called copyright.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The purpose of patents, and copyrights, and trademarks, is to encourage innovation, and I have no problem with that. But the instant it starts stifling innovation instead of encouraging it, then the whole system needs to be pared down drastically. And we are well past that point already.

Patents, small entrepreneurs?

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re:Patents, small entrepreneurs?

[Danse]

Did you even read those links? The first one is about Monsanto suing a small farmer, causing him to have to give up growing canola on his farm, as he's been doing for decades. The second one seems to support the original post, showing exactly how hard it can be for a small inventor to defend his claim. The guy has been broke for decades.

"On his bookshelf"

[tmark]

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.