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."

Comments

Re:Prior art from the stone age.

[base3]

Not that it should be patentable, but that's not what the patent is about. What it describes is a means of guessing which 9 digits are the Federal Reserve RTN by seeing which are the first 9 consecutive digits to pass the check digit test.

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.