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Amazon Awarded Cookie Patent

Posted by timothy on from the making-unfriendly-behavior-rational dept.

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Amazon.com a patent for the Use of browser cookies to store structured data, which covers the storing of data structures and non-character data within browser cookies. In a February SEC filing (pdf), Amazon reiterated that they expect that they may license certain patents to third parties in the future."

1 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So by greppling · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you do it without encryption or without a checksum then you're probably not infringing. Same if you avoid binary encoding.

    That's not how I read the claims. The basic claims are 1, 10, 18, 26, 35, 40. Adding encryption or checksums to storing the data structures as cookies are covered by separate claims, always listed in addition to the basic claims.

    The whole point of this patent is IMO what they call "schema data". By this they mean having a separate file that describes the data structure used in the cookies, so that the way the data structures can be changed without changing the code en/de-crypting the cookie. (Claim 1.) Unless someone is using such a metafile describing the data structure, and has written a generic cookie parser that is controlled by this metafile, I am pretty sure he will not be infringing the patent. This is, of course, not revolutionary, but it's definitely much better software design than the typical PHP/MySQL web site.

    Adding versioning of the data structures is claim 7. Claim 26 is then about using this data to generate personalized web pages from the cookie data without any database lookups.

    So, IMHO this patent isn't that silly. You most likely don't have to "work around" it just because you are storing some structured user data in cookies, it is to the contrary very unlikely that you are infringing it. Definitely, all posts here have missed the "schema data" aspect so far. Maybe there is prior art for this, but if there is, noone has pointed out any so far.

    I think the only good reason to be against this patent is to be against software patents in general. Which I am, btw:)