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

Difficult

[TheFlu]

Searching for prior art is too difficult, what we need is something where you can just click once to find what you need.

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?