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

Good! Bittter sweet irony.

[rainman_bc]

After the BS around one-click shopping, Amazon gets exactly what they deserve.

If it was anyone else being sued, I'd think this is getting really stupid. I mean, why not patent line-ups? Where does this crap end?

Re:I See Prior art.

[isometrick]

So, does anyone think the newly elected Senate or the soon to be appointed Supreme Court justice(s) will do anything about the rampant abuse of the patent system?

I really hope so. I've never heard anything conclusive, though.

Talked about this yesterday.

[blanks]

This deals with something that use used by thousands of websites, I even wrote a web application about 5 years ago that did this, and if I remember this patent is only about a year old? (could be wrong). Basically they say they own the idea of listing other customers opinions or recamendations of different products. For example, if you were looking at a pc, you would have things suchs as Members to ordered this product also ordered this monitor, or feedback about the pc from customers who did buy the item etc. This is totally a prior art situation, I dont know why this company didnt go after smaller companies, but if they get their trial by jury that would be a very very bad thing...

Well...

[nightgrave]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I find Amazon to be an amazing tool to find other bands that I might like. I would really hate to see this go. If I have some extra cash laying around, I'll search for some bands that I like, look at the other recommendations, read the reviews and then I'll buy the cd if I like what I read. This is an extremely helpful tool that I will hate to see go just because some company decided to patent this common idea.

Bezos Told You So...

[lousyd]

When Amazon first got their infamous 1-Click patent, the response Jeff Bezos gave to the people who were up in arms over the patent issue was that it was defensive patenting. He said Amazon was patenting it just so that somebody else wouldn't and then sue them. It appears this story is a case of "I told you so", for Bezos.

Re:Bezos Told You So...

[Rashkae]

And of course, that must be why he "defensively" sued B&N? Jeff's definition of defensive means to defend against competitors competing, not against lawsuits.

USPTO Link

[cOle2]

This seems to be the patent: System and method for providing recommendation of goods or services based on recorded purchasing history

Someone should sue the patent office

[davidwr]

Someone should sue the patent office to publicly announce that all patents granted in the last 10-20 years are suspect on the grounds that the patent examiners were understaffed and could not have known about much of the prior art.

The net effect of this would be to overturn the "presumption of validity" on prior-art challenges.

Re:I See Prior art.

[ppz003]

I know several online retailers (like Newegg) that show a "May we suggest" bar or a "Also purchased with this item" bar on the side of any product detail page. How is this anything new? And if they do win, how many other targets could they sue? It's just crazy.

Re:I See Prior art.

[NoMercy]

Which is totally false, and my opinion of law should be that every single digital thing has a real world law which already exists to cover the problem.

I'm still not totally sure why we need new laws to make copyright protection systems illegal to bypass, or to make the sale of machines which have the soul purpose of copyright infringement illegal.

After all if you write something and sign it at the bottom, if someone modifies that signature, it's fraud, and selling something to someone knowing there going to commit a crime with it is conspiricy to commit that crime.

Why did they need a new law?

Why do they press for new laws, is it impossible to simply relate modern practicaces to those which have been going on for hundreds of years, or do they want a clean slate, no case history so they can fight the same battles all over again?

Re:Good! Bittter sweet irony.

[zoips]

Of course, the lawyers have already figured this out. They merely buy up patents and swing them around with impudence because they do nothing but litigate, therefore they have no fear of patent infringment. It's a win-win situation for law firms, which guarantees this will situation will be repeated ad infinitum.

Forget revenge and irony.

[buddhaseviltwin]

Enough of these sort of headlines, and they begin to grab the attention of people that can have the biggest political impact on patent reform: INVESTORS.

Stories like these send investors a clear message about investing money in the software industry:

RUNAWAY PATENT SYSTEM = LEGAL LIABILITY FOR THEIR INVESTMENTS = BIG RISK

Whether that could translate into patent reform that aims to protect the little guy as much as it protects the big guy is another story. I would hope investors would recognize that it was the lack of software patents and regulation that helped incubate an industry that created some of the best investment opportunities in history. I also hope they will eventually realize that while software patents have helped a number of companies dominate market share, it's impeded much of the industry from adding value to the industry and the economy as a whole.

If I wanted to send Wall St. a message it would be this:

A patent is not a deed to the monopoly of idea; it's a license to subject your competitors to huge financial risk, but if you get too creative and ambitious it's a great way to subject yourself to that same looming financial risk.

I can't imagine why anybody would volunteer to subject their investments to a volatile atmosphere of severe legal liability.

Re:I See Prior art.

[bleckywelcky]

Other forms of prior art:

Early 1900s hardware store ...
Shopper: *Buying some cast iron pipe for plumbing*
Shopkeep: Ah, I see you are buying some cast iron pipe for plumbing, would you also like a ball of twine and some lead to melt down and form the connections?
Shopper: Sure, thanks.
Shopkeep: You're welcome, that lead gets pretty hot when you make the connections, would you like some gloves to protect your hands too?
Shopper: Yeh, that sounds like a good idea.
Shopkeep: And just in case you get a little parched, there's a boy selling lemonade outside the door.
Shopper: Hot damn! That sounds dandy!

I'm going to patent having sex to make babies

[theolein]

And sue every single motherfucker from George Bush across to Bill Gates through to Chairman Mao.

Jesus fucking Christ, where will this fucking bullshit end? When some dickwad patents methods of political manipulation and then sues whichever party is in power as owing him money?

I think I'm going to test the fucking patent system. I'm going to patent taking a dump and see if it goes through. Given the current level of crap, it might very well do so.

PRIOR ART, WITH FRIES

[tod_miller]

I walked into my local gyros shop, and after my usually geeky rss sync of his menu, and then hand coding a remot procedure call over a serial cable to his antiquainted register (which i had to write my own assembly language for) I successfully ordered a nice nourishing treat to feed my brain.

Of course, he wasn;t allowed to ask me 'the usual' which I have ordered 23590285094 times in my life at that place, because some people are using anticompetative measures to throw companies off with patents.

I have no money by myself to sue the US patent office for fraud, or all fruadulent patent holders, but I bet the computing community as a whole should feel obliugated to stop this shenanegans right now

Despite opening up an amazon package last night, I am totally pissed off with thier patent portfolio, but they might feel it is necessary to have dud patents to conteract other dud patents.

can we stop this madness soon

Anyone thinking of a new startup had better forget it, it is impossible to do anything now, because virtually everything we do on the internet is in violation of a patent or other.

JOIN ME SUE THE US PATENT OFFICE TODAY

Better yet, find some us patent people who downloaded MP3's, and some RIAA people downloading movies, and a movie industry giant writing software that infringes SCO (giggle) patents - THEN they can all sue themselves into insanity, and all the lawyers will die of heart attacks from eating too much from being so stinking rich, or yachting accidents, or ferrari accidents, and then the world shall be ok again.