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Amazon Awarded Cookie Patent
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."
I wanted to implement a cookie-driven Web site for a long time, but was clueless as for who I had to pay for using the technology.
Now I can finally download and install HTTP Cookie Library and send my license check to Amazon.
I think I'll go and patent a type of apple tree that grows apples.
wouldn't something like storing comma seperated values count as "structured"??
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
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
I don't know man, Cheech and Chong have been putting some pretty wild shit in their cookies for decades!
Geez again? TIMING you idiots April fool starts on the 1st of april. Not on 31st of march. Geez. Is it that hard to read a calendar? And a good april fools joke is funny because people are tricked into thinking something that clearly couldn't be true. USPTO passing a silly patent does not qualify.
What kind of insect could possibly not see the bloody obviousness off this one. Use a cookie to store data. Well fucking duh. What next? Patent the use of an engine to power something? A trunk to carry luggage? A shovel to dig with? Outsourcing is bad enough but hiring lower lifeforms goes to far!
This story only goes to show patent reform is impossible. Nothing will help here anymore but the old "put them against the wall" at the revolution. Going to be really crowded too. What will all the lawyers, ceo's, outsources, alcohol free beer inventors and people who talk in caps on the web.
Anyone else find it slightly odd that all the idiot patent stories come from america? Wonder why the USPTO is unable to hire any smart people. Is the USPTO banned from hiring non-americans?
Come on you weren't expecting any serious response were you? Feeble jokes for a feeble joke of an institution.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I worked at a company doing cutting-edge stuff and we were always looking for stuff to patent. Our intent was to create a defensive portfolio that would also look enticing to VCs. But we never, ever thought of pursuing patents on the patently obvious (pun intended).
One-click could be argued as a novel business practice. But crap like this is ridiculous. It's like the old joke of adding "with a computer" to anything and calling it novel. I've already moved to Powells for books, but I'll have to intensify my efforts to get others to stop shopping with Amazon.com.
You know, the US Patent Office's website uses cookies that would violate this patent.
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"All hail the glory of the Hypnotoad."
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.
Morse (the telegraph guy) was awarded a patent claim for:
"electro magnetism, however developed for marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, or letters, at any distances."
Sound a little over-broad? The Supreme Court thought so too(1853). Broad claims get through the patent office sometimes. That's what courts are for. Will Amazon get some money out of this? Probably. Would I give them any money for it? No.
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
Given that the limiting resource is server resources as opposed to customer waiting time or network bandwidth, and given how much seriously faster CPU is over disk access, it looks like a win to me.
Once your data gets larger than 8k or so, you begin to seriously annoy people on modem connections, so I'm assuming the cookie is smaller than this. Checksumming and decrypting 8kbytes of data on a modern machine really ought to be very quick indeed. For order of magnitude estimates, I'd guess the process takes about 15 clock cycles per byte of cookie as an upper bound, coming to significantly less than a milisecond on a modern CPU. This is much less than the cost of a disk access.