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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.'"
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.
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.'
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.