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FFII vs. Amazon Gift Ordering Patent
Elektroschock writes "The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure fights in court against Amazon.com's Gift ordering patent. It is about ordering gifts via email and phone communication. Amazon's gift ordering patent is seen as a danger for webdesigners and E-Commerce in Europe. It is derived from the well-known Amazon.com's 1-click patent. The flowers distributor Fleurop and Germany's Computer Acience Association "Gesellschaft fur Informatik" untertake similar legal action against Amazon's trivial patent. FFII's Hartmut Pilch said the fight against patents was not over. It is a cheap opportunity to get some exercise in patent litigation."
...who parsed that as "Final Fantasy 2 vs. Amazon Gift Ordering Patent"?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Surely it is.
What next? Patenting the act of selling?
Someone patent searching for '*' and '%', which between them will cover all other searches! ...
Profit!
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Can't people at least patent something that seems halfway visionary? Some of the things the lawyers are patenting these days are so ridiculously miniscule. Its like, I'm going to patent "clicking with the left mouse button here and then double-clicking over here." And then they give it a fancy "management buzzword" sort of name - and there you go you have the next great innovation that will syndicate back-end relationships, brand scalable metrics, and recontextualize vertical experiences.
I'm not defending Amazon or the patent process by any stretch of the imagination. I worked for an online calendaring company, and somehow got my name on the patent for the ability to search metadata online. Which of course was silly. I and the developers pointed out that it was silly and revolted against the filing of the patent.
The lawyers convinced us that filing the patent is the only way to prevent someone else from filing a patent, covering your technology, and then suing you, forcing you to PROVE to a court (always a chancy thing) that you had created prior art. And quite frankly every innovation we made to our online calendar showed up 3 months later in someone elses calendar. In fact we even found instances where people had literally cut and pasted our code, comments and all!
So we knew that there were unscrupulous bastards out there, willing to completely rip us off. So bearing that in mind, we agreed to file for patents, not so much to enforce them, but to protect ourselves from future suits. I agree, if the system was healthy and working, we wouldn't need to have done that, but the system is already full of sharks -- I don't blame people for getting shark repellant. Applying for the patent HAS to be done nowadays. Enforcing the patents is when I start to get mad. I know it's a fine line, but scruples and business operate in different realities.
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As somebody else pointed out, software is the only "creation" that can be both copyrighted and patented. Doesn't this seem, well, a bit ridiculous?
If you want to prove to the court that you created prior art, why not just copyright the code? It's a lot cheaper, it shows prior art definitively, and it's not abusing the system by "patenting the obvious".
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
If Newton had invented calculus in the 21st century he would have patented it.
I could have swore I saw this very post a long time ago in another patent stort here.. so I went back to a few patent stories and what did I find?
The very same post