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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."
"Patents are necessary to cure sick people" is a Republican myth. A new drug that works comes out once a decade -- these companies are making fat profits off the ones that merely didn't kill enough people to fail FDA approval. A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect, but then so would eliminating patents completely.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
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?
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.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
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
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...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
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
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.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist