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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."
US Patent law traditionally offers the patent only to the first inventor -- any recorded prior art invalidates it. There are some details about the two distinct points in time the law recognizes -- the moment when you conceived of it, and the moment when you reduced it to practice, i.e., made a prototype or proof of concept. Reduction to practice before the other guy may decide the case, particularly as in many bogus patents the "inventor" never reduced it to practice.
The more bureaucratically oriented EUian law offers it to the first filer, but that is against the US Constitution because our Congress only has the authority to offer patents to inventors, not "first to filers." (Not that you can expect the Federal Judiciary to pay much attention to that -- those joyless communists are scheming to reduce our society to the point where parasites can make their living sleeping outside the doors of bureaucracies to grab a spot in line to sell to honest citizens.)
The "deal" that the grant of a patent expresses is that in exchange for sharing the invention with the public, the inventor gets exclusive use of the invention for a limited time. If the public already knows about the invention, then there is no point to granting a patent to someone as a reward/compensation for disclosing the invention. That's why prior art invalidates patents.
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In order to qualify as "prior art," public disclosure of an invention potentially doesn't have to be very public, if it was known or someone was using it in the US (I assume you are asking about US patents) before the "inventor" trying to obtain the patent invented it. See 35 USC 120. Prior art can also be public disclosure after invention but more than a year before the patent was filed.
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
(a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
(b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or
. . .
A useful basic article entitled "When is something prior art against a patent?" can be found at
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/.
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?
You made me really curious, so while typing this up, I pulled up one of my old archives. My page was last updated on Aug 28 1995. The first link on it was to the GNA (Globalwide Network Academy) Project at MIT. I remember this project, because at the time I was responsible for going through schools request and accepting/denying them. You might consider contacting them about this issue, as I was receiving emails telling me to go on and check the status of this or that -- I am sure the schools did as well.
Hope that helps.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
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.