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Regifting Not Just A Seinfeld Gag -- It's Patented

Posted by timothy on from the no-blushing-'cause-there's-no-shame dept.

theodp writes "While the jury's still out on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' gifting patent, the USPTO has given thumbs-up to a patent for regifting. The electronic regifting patent, which cites a Seinfeld episode and Bezos' pending patent application as prior art, was awarded to an individual who also holds a patent for exchanging online gifts."

2 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Citing prior art to get your patent? by kaltkalt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "The electronic regifting patent, which cites a Seinfeld episode and Bezos' pending patent application as prior art"

    So now citing prior art in your patent application actually helps you GET the patent? Or did they just cite to all this prior art and then say "we're doing that, but just add the word 'internet' to it." I'd think citing prior art to your own idea in a patent application would be the one way to actually get them to stamp 'denied' on the application. That, of course, presumes that they actually still do have the 'denied' stamp. Chances are they lost it sometime in the early 1990's and never bothered to order a new one (would be a waste of taxpayers money to do so).

    --

    Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
  2. an idea for preventing more of this by Slash.ter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems that prior art doesn't matter much in this case but it certainly helped in the Eolas case.

    Has anybody thought about creating competition to USPTO? Imagine a site (like freshmeat) accepting ideas with a prototype implementation (perl, python, Lisp, etc.) - nothing general (other than the description of the idea). This would constitute a library of prior art for trivial ideas - The Prior Art Library (TPAL).

    Here are some quick thoughts about TPAL:

    • reinforcement would come from whoever wants to make money on it: if company A wants to charge company B for IP, B hires lawyers and references prior art (that assumes that A filed for patent after there was an entry in the TPAL)
    • whenever a developer thinks of an idea that would be granted a patent (= any idea), an entry is submitted to TPAL with a 20-line hack. No worries to get sued later if somebody decides to take it to USPTO.
    • Since trivial stuff ends up in TPAL, USPTO gets worthy patents for a change.
    • Ideas would not die with companies or retire with people that had them.