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

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."

Comments

an idea for preventing more of this

[Slash.ter]

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.