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."

Comments

Burn down the fucking US patent office.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Burn down the fucking US patent office.

[the eric conspiracy]

but then so would eliminating patents completely.

A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect

Oh great. No new pain killers. Or cures for non-fatal diseases like macroreticular degeneration. Or psychological disorders like bipolar disease.

but then so would eliminating patents completely.

So who is going to spend a billion dollars developing a new drug without patent protection? It's the most idiotic concept I have seen in a LONG time.

Re:Burn down the fucking US patent office.

[cpex]

I believe patents are needed for inovation. Why would you spend millions on R&D when someone can later copy your idea and work and sell for a fraction of the cost?

What i do think is the problem is allowing patents to be granted for ideas that are really just unique premutations of common and patented knowledge. Example:
You should be able to patent a new networking protocool which allows 1Tb transfer speed over phone lines (i know this doesnt exist) but you should not be able to patent using this technology for sending greeting cards.
I know this is a bit extreme of example and in that lies the problem where do you draw the line between new technology and new application of existing tech. But this is seen for example in one click shopping. Well this is just an application of html and some server side programming IMHO not patentable it is just a natural extension of these technologies. However if i came up with a way of allowing people to smell products through their monitor I should be able to patent that. Business plan patents are just a bad idea, and how can you prove its unqiue, like the feedback for ebay. people have been using feedback for ddealing with merchants since the beginning of time, just because its internet based doesnt make it special.

Re:Burn down the fucking US patent office.

[MarsDefenseMinister]

One of the big reasons that drugs cost so damn much is that they are developed with trial and error methods. That't right, they develop a chemical. Then they go "Is it good for disease #1. Nope. How about disease #2. nope .... (years pass) ... How about disease #65536. Nope. Oh well, let's try the whole thing again with potential drug #2."

Genetic engineering will change all that. We'll be able to do this: "Hey, this bad protein is doing this bad thing to this other thingy. And I've figured out that if I had a molecule that looked like this (pulls out a model of a molecule) I could make the bad protein stop doing the bad thing." Then the monkeys in the chemical factory would make the molecule.

Re:Burn down the fucking US patent office.

[ParadoxDruid]

If I had moderator points, I'd mod parent "Insightful".

I'm about to go to Graduate School in Bio-engineering, and this is exactly the case.

Traditional drug development methods are literally trial-and-error on a MASSIVE scale.

The new understanding of biology due to the advances in the past, hell short as a, decade are poised to change that. Already, we can use NMR and x-ray structures of enzymes and receptors to narrow the initial trial-and-error search.

Soon, we'll be able to bypass that to a greater degree, engineering potential drugs, testing their affinities in computer simulation, before any trials of any sort need to be conducted-- vastly refine the search-space.

Though I wouldn't say "genetic engineering" is the answer.. more "Molecular biology". Genetics is an important part of the revolution, but just a part.

Re:What constitues prior art?

[zonker]

umm... hate to ask this question about patenting hyperlinks and all, but uhh... do we have a link to the patent he's talking about?

kind of useless to talk about this if we don't have the full patent info to look at...

The 'obviousness' test is dead.

[Russ Nelson]

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.

Re:why prior art?

[Russ Nelson]

Alas, "painfully obvious, even to a retarded 3-year-old" isn't sufficient to break a patent. It should be, it's written into the law, but the case law is such that you can't win a patent defense using obviousness anymore.