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Prior Art for Hyperlink Order Tracking in Email?
Davesbud asks: "I'm trying to invalidate a patent that claims to have invented 'placing a hyperlink in an email which in turn provides the recipient with order status or tracking information.' I am searching for any web pages, articles, newsgroup/forum discussions, brochures or the like, published before December of 1997, that describes this idea. You've seen this if you've ordered almost anything online or shipped by FedEx or UPS. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks."
Are they good or are they wack?
This is answering a question with a question... but how public does a work need to be in order to constitute prior art?
/. discussions before where I was using the patented process, but only within an academic environment, or on a company intranet.
I can't help with this one, but there've been a few
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
This is absolutely retarded.
Nothing in the history of commerce has posed such a threat to technological progress as the patent system. It's outlived it's usefulness - and is doing nothing but hampering innovation while being abused by those who want to make a quick buck. It deserves to be killed.
How about:
SELECT order_number FROM order WHERE customer_email = thepatentofficeisretarded@uspto.gov
Seriously, this can't be defensible. It's a database lookup. I mean I know USPTO is fucked, but this is ridiculous.
My first online purchase was Lollapalooza tickets in June of 1996. I seem to remember such a link in the confirmation email. I remember that the Lollapalooza.com site was one of the first big shockwave sites I had ever seen and we ordered the tickets from the site but I can't remeber if it was ticketmaster or the promoters themselves. Either way check ticketmaster or the wayback machine for Lollapalooza.com
I remember ordering some stuff from them for the first time in early 1998 and them emailling me UPS tracking info, they may have been doing it prior to 1998 obviously. You may want to ask them?
I'm sure there will be hordes of Slashtrolls repeating this, but doesn't this pretty much qualify as obvious? You'll probably not find a paper written about it because it's too dumb to actually write a paper about. Since URLs are plain text, it's pretty obvious to send URLs in any plain text transmission medium, like e-mail, fax, instant message, text file via FTP, dial-up BBS, etc. (I didn't say it wouldn't be dumb, just obvious.) Once you've established that sending a URL via e-mail is obvious, the purpose of the transmission should be rather irrelevant, I think.
At any rate, you might also check that sending a telephone number with an electronic reciept is either obvious or published, then you can make the arugment that an URL and a telephone number in this case serve analogous functions, so the application of an URL instead of a telephone number (or fax-back number for that matter) is likewise obvious or otherwise unpatentable.
Wil
wiki
I seem to remember that it was quite common for an email to include a link to track the status of online submissions (adding yourself to a group, posting something, or creating a webring).
Also, shouldn't any old Bug Tracking system that would email you a link to watch the status count?
Then again, what about all those URL-watchers that would email you whenever a link changed? Those, I know, I was using back in 94 or 95.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
You can't include a link in a plaintext email. Some mail readers turn URLs into links, but the message itself doesn't contain links. This might let you sidestep the issue entirely.
You can include links if you're using HTML mail, so the patent would still be a problem in that case.
I worked at a ComputerLand store in the mid 1980s, they used a computer-based order tracking system. It ran on early IBM PCs, running dumb terminal software that connected to a DBASE system at the CL Headquarters.
The way the system worked was unique, as far as I know. CL HQ was essentially a freight aggregator. Computer and parts shipments from vendors were warehoused at HQ. Every day orders were placed to HQ, and you could dial in and check your order status, and receive detailed information on stock/backordered/backorder ETA/being picked from the warehouse/etc, as well as information on shipping status and ETA at the local store. All products were shipped via Yellow Freight.
After a few years, the system became more automated. Small Novell networks were set up at our franchises, our local server automatically connected to the HQ computers twice a day. Order info and status was automatically exchanged. You could still dial into HQ on a dumb terminal if you needed up-to-the-minute status. It was a completely awesome system and nobody else had anything like it, until it got copied by competitors like BusinessLand (they even copied the damn NAME).
As I recall it, each order item was on a separate line and you could move the cursor to it and hit a key to check the status (there were no mice on PCs when this system started up). Orders were sent through modems, which is sufficiently close to email for your purposes. I think this would establish sufficient prior art. I might be able to locate some old docs on the system, but it would take days of rifling through old paper file storage, so if you need this, it better be worth my while. You should probably look for a more easily obtained prior art that is more convincing.
In the meantime, whi not side step the issue and provide a link to a page that provides a link to a status page?
Or provide a link to a page that provides links to lots of status pages (past orders).
Then you can examine the patent at your leisure.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
DId you even read the post? He's talking about when companies send you a link to the UPS tracking page of a package you ordered, not any sort of e-mail tracking.
To me (as with most of the other people that replied), it does seem very obvious. From e-mailing you a tracking number to type into a website, to giving you a direct link to that website, is really not a giant leap.
Then again, somebody did try and trademark Linux.
This sig no verb.
They have higher AD COSTS then they have R&D costs. The drug cos also get quite a lot of 'free' research that the US taxpayers fund.
Really, what does 'hyperlink' and 'email' add to the claim? People doing phone orders have been using 'confirmation numbers' since the beginning of time. Does doing such a straightforward adaptation of a standard business practice to a new medium really warrant a patent?
Prior art is definately useful, but it seems to me that once you've made the jump to selling things on the web, anyone with half a brain would come to the conclusion that some sort of confirmation/tracking be implemented. Last I checked "painfully obvious, even to a retarded 3-year-old" was a justification for invalidating patents as well...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Sad to say, but the 'obviousness' test is no longer considered. In order to prove that something was obvious, you have to show prior art. In other words, it has to have already been invented. THIS is the main breakage of the patent system today. That's why everybody is patenting everything no matter how obvious. It's cheaper to get the patent than to litigate it after somebody else has been granted the patent.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist