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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."

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Bogus, but specific by spRed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So the patent looks silly on the face, but the opening claims are easy to work around and make it hard for them to sue:

    a method of incorporating at least one data structure from the database into a browser cookie to reduce accesses to the database

    Okay, the stuff I'm storing in the cookie isn't the same as a structure in my database. FOAD. You think it is? I say it is half a structure from my database. Or one item from each of five structures in my database.

    They could drown you in lawsuits, but they didn't need a patent to do that anyway.

    --
    .sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
  2. So by dtfinch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Their method appears to be for storing a binary copy of the entire customer record, encoded (base64 or similar), encrypted, and checksummed, into a cookie. As prior-art as the title of the patent may appear, I haven't seen it done in exactly this fashion.

    If you do it without encryption or without a checksum then you're probably not infringing. Same if you avoid binary encoding. If you save a textual representation of the record, and use a form of encryption that works on plain text, you can achieve the same effect without infringing.

    And if someone tries to patent my idea, I'll make business very hard for them.