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

small developers are the winners.

[harriet nyborg]

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.

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.

Re:small developers are the winners.

[PierceLabs]

Why this is market flamebait is a mystery to me as the author is CLEARLY correct. Patents are not inherently evil. They can be abused just like anything else, but the patents aren't the problem.