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 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?