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Amazon Patents Getting Numbers Off a Check
theodp writes "After two rejections, Amazon was granted a patent Tuesday for the Extraction of bank routing number from information entered by a user, which covers the process of obtaining a routing and checking account number
from information entered by a user from the face of a check. The patent application was filed in the week preceding Amazon's Call for Patent Reform."
A means of doing the same thing without infringing on this patent (which should never have been granted) would be to check to see which 9 digits are in a list of all known RTNs. In case Amazon was going to patent that to, mark the time of this post as prior art.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
From what I can tell, Bezos' statements can be summarized as "Don't hate the player, hate the game"--the same line that all the big players use--but it seems that AMZN in particular has gone far off the wrong end of the stupid-patent-o-meter way more than anyone else. (I have no actual data to back up this claim.)
I have heard that IBM alone files 10 patent applications a day. And yet it's Amazon that is the poster child for frivilous patents. I like to think a responsible tech industry giant like Amazon should be able to amass a defensive patent arsenal without stooping as low as they have.
Man, I *seriously* need to start patenting all the shit I come up with. Not because I want to sue people, but because one of these days I'm going to *get* sued.
I can't believe this is patentable. I do this stuff in my UI code all the time. It's a basic part of the "be liberal in what you accept" philosophy. Accept whatever is easiest for the user to type (or cut and paste), then pluck out what you need.
Here's stuff I've done in programs, I'm sure anybody writing UI code has come up with this kind of stuff:
* extract USA zip code from an address by searching for numbers backwards from the end and comparing result against the USPS database
* extract dollar amounts from text by searching for numbers and dollar signs
* extract email ID's from cut/pasted or forwarded emails by searching for headers: newline or start of string, string, colon before a double newline
* extract eBay item numbers from emails based on length of digit string
* extract URLs from emails based on heuristics (there is even a perl module to do this)
Yeah, I've never had to code something to find check routing numbers, but damn, this would be the first thing I'd come up with! Tell me some identifiable property of the data, and I'll come up with a way to pluck it out. A couple regexes and a function to calculate the checksum or whatever it is.
Cripes. This is no longer funny. All self-employed programmers, start patenting your shit!!!!
I mean, your inventions!! I think Bezos has already patented defecation!!!
I'm assuming their version of patent reform would be "Everyone else has to give up their bad patents, but we get to keep them."
Maybe, maybe not. Bezos' comment does sorta imply that he understands the idiocy of the situation but is trying to "fight it within the system" by forcing it to an absurd extreme. There is precedent for this approach.
OTOH, it's entirely possible that his understanding is that absurdities like this will have the effect of eliminating all those pesky little competitors, while leaving his bigger company intact. This would happen if the legislators can't be persuaded to improve the mess they've made.
There is some history of business leaders pushing for legislation that would outlaw their own business practices. There were interesting articles about a case several decades back, when the state of Oregon was considering the legislation that would eliminate most of the pollution from the waters of the Willamette River system. A number of the biggest polluters were publicly pushing for the legislation. Their reasoning was straightforward: "We can't stop our own pollution as long as our competitors are allowed to continue polluting; we'd be out of business. Our only choice is to push for laws that will force everyone to stop polluting." It worked, and the Willamette River is now a lot cleaner than it was back then. It helped a lot that the entire drainage basin was controlled by a single state government.
The corporate world does have a few leaders who are socially responsible. There's a good chance that Bezos is one of them. We'll have to watch him and see. I wonder how much real evidence we have now?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.