Amazon Sued Over Recommendation Patent

PaschalNee writes "Cendant is suing Amazon for their recommendation patent saying it infringes on a "System and Method for Providing Recommendation of Goods or Services Based on Recorded Purchasing History" patent they own. "

Comments

3D Patent Info

[FienX]

Just found some stuff on that 3D patent lawsuit. Filed in Texas (Eastern District). PACER lists and complaints at here and just incase you are intrested the list of defendants is:

6:04-cv-00397-LED

Hewlett-Packard Co
Dell Computer Corporation
Gateway Inc
International Business Machines Corp
Toshiba America Inc
Sony Corporation
Acer Inc
MPC Computers LLC
Systemax, Inc
Fujitsu America, Inc
Micro Electronics Corp
Matsushita Electric Corporation of America
Averatec, Inc
Polywell Company, Inc
Sharp Electronics Corporation
Twinhead Corp
Uniwill Computer International Corp
JVC Americas Corporation
Acer America Corporation
Micro Electronics Inc.
Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation
Dell, Inc

6:04-cv-00398-LED

Electronic Arts, Inc.
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.
Activision Inc
Atari, Inc.
THQ, Inc.
Vivendi Universal Games, Inc.
Sega of American Inc.
Square Enix, Inc.
Tecmo, Inc.
Lucasarts Entertainment Co
Namco Hometek, Inc.
Ubisoft, Inc.

6:04-cv-00399-LED

Sony Corporation of America
Microsoft Corporation
Nintendo of America, Inc.

Off-topic: Amazon introduces queuing service

[Eric Giguere]

Speaking of Amazon, yesterday they unveiled their new Simple Queuing Service, their latest foray into web services. They're exposing some of their infrastructure in order to let you share data between distributed components. Free for the time being, though limited in terms of how much data you can queue at once.

Of course, someone will probably sue them over this, too.

Eric
William Shatner boldly goes like no man has gone before

Re:I See Prior art.

[meabolex]

I seriously doubt it. Republican administrations are always looking out for big business interests, and it's in the interest of large corporations to have as much control as possible over their products. If anything, patent law will become more strict.

Doesn't make sense that republicans are suppose to stand for lessening the control of government on the people (:

Re:Letterman to be sued next for Top 10 List?

[Anonymous Coward]

NBC did try to keep him from taking the Top Ten list to CBS. That and viewer mail. He did change viewer mail to the CBS Mail Bag, but they got to keep Top Ten.

NBC Tried

[SteveM]

When Letterman switched networks the NBC tried to prevent him from using top ten lists.

They were not successful.

SteveM

Re:Ordinarily I would object to this kind of paten

[Anonymous Coward]

old saying? at least quote it right...

Matthew 26:52 Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Cendant only have 3 patents...

[HavokDevNull]

All relating to the same thing just about

PAT. NO. Title 1 6,782,370 Full-Text System and method for providing recommendation of goods or services based on recorded purchasing history

2 6,076,070 Full-Text Apparatus and method for on-line price comparison of competitor's goods and/or services over a computer network

3 6,035,288 Full-Text Interactive computer-implemented system and method for negotiating sale of goods and/or services

All three

Here is the link to the patent

[nearl]

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Cendant&s2=recommend ation&OS=Cendant+AND+recommendation&RS=Cendant+AND +recommendation

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you say "prior art"?

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/shardanand95social.htm l

This is the first hit on Citeseer: a 1995 paper that describes pretty much the exact same thing. This patent is totally bogus, it should have never been awarded.

Re:That's what publishing is for

[CustomDesigned]

Wrong. Prior art does not prevent anyone from filing for and obtaining a patent. It does not prevent them from suing you. I might help you win your case in court provided you have enough money to pay the lawyers.

That is just one of the ways in which the current patent system is broken - especially for software.

This patent is yet another example of patenting something that retailers have done for 100 years (Sears Catalog customized by past orders) - "but do it on the internet!"

• The first wave of stupid patents: do something that people have done for centuries - "but do it on a computer!" (E.g. Bingo on a computer was patented.)
• The second wave: do something on a computer that people have done on computers since 1960 - "but do it on the internet!"
• The third wave: do something that people have done on the internet since 1980 - "but do it on the web!"
• The fourth wave: do something that people have done on the web since the first browser - "but do it with web services!"

Amazon's technology is cited in the application!

[TrentC]

Seriously, there's a reference in patent application to the article "Amazon.com Catapults Electronic Commerce to Next Level With Powerful New Features", dated September 23, 1997 -- barely two weeks after the patent filing date. And the odds are good that it took Amazon.com a lot longer than two weeks to develop, test, and deploy that functionality.

But wait it gets better... reading further in the PR blurb, we see that their group filtering technology was based on an existing product, called Grouplens. I assume that this is the same kind of functionality that Cendant is claiming as their own work; if so, surely Grouplens must have something to say as far as prior art goes...

Jay (=

Re:I See Prior art.

[hchaos]

Sears sent out Christmas catalogs based on past purchases; thus, it is prior art. Anything you could buy is in the catalog and anything bought at sears is in the catalog. Further more, this is a case whereby Sears provides a means of purchasing products via past purchases.

Sears isn't prior art for a couple reasons:

1. Sears catalogs are not customized to the desires of the individual shopper. This customization greatly increases the probability of an extra sale, thus satisfying the "usefulness" patent requirement.
2. The Sears process for sending out catalogs involves humans compiling data on who has made purchases into a mailing list. The Cendant process (presumably, I haven't actually read it) involves analyzing the purchase data of all its customers and using algorithms to determine that a given customer is likely to desire specific products because of similar purchasing patterns. These two processes are completely different, satisfying the "novelty" patent requirement.
3. Similarly, the algorithms for predicting which products a customer will want do not obviously derive from the Sears process, satisfying the "non-obviousness" patent requirement.

Of course, these points only apply to Sears catalogs. There may be other prior art that uses computers to run purchase-predicting algorithms (which would undermine the "useful" and "novel" claims unless Cendant's process had significant advantages over the prior art). There could even be prior art that used humans to process the same algorithms as Cendant, in which case the move to computers could be an "obvious" transition. The algorithm gives the process firm legal ground for the patent, because it's something that required effort to develop.

For more information, read this.