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Amazon Patents User Viewing Histories
Chris Cleveland writes "Yet another astounding patent from the USPTO. I was browsing the patent database, and discovered that Amazon received a patent today on using customer viewing histories to generate recommendations. If a customer views product A, and then later views product B, and you use that to infer a relationship between A and B, then you've infringed on this patent. This patent is a continuation of an earlier patent (#6,317,722) on using shopping carts to generate recommendations. When will this stupidity end?"
this has been going on for years. These same ideas are used in amaroK, on Audioscrobbler, all over the place. How can they patent something that's been in use for a long time and is probably already patented?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I'm kinda on your side, except that I think software patents would make more sense if they only lasted 4 or 5 years. On a patent like this, where someone would have surely done it in short order if they hadn't done it first, a 20 year patent is rather silly.
When will this stupidity end?
When you manage to coerce your elected representatives into.. I dunno... representing you?
Because automating a process always makes it "new and novel". People can have babies pretty easily (usually), but you can bet your arse that if I figure out a way to automate it using machinery, I'm going to patent it (that way the Matrix will owe me money).
More concretely, another poster mentioned that all Ford really did was automate the manufacturing process for cars. Are you diminishing his contribution to the industry? Are you suggesting his work wasn't a contribution?
"Stumble before you crawl"
You see, the colonists hated the royalty because they were money without work, and the royalty hated the coonist because they had money buy no culture. The colonist for some reason thought that money made them equal.
So Even though the English crown had funding the Americas, at no small expense, the colonist just wanted to be rid of them. So george, who was a major in America under british rule, and with the platantion inherieted from his father, got a group of equally greedy people together to fight the british. Greed is definitely a good thing.
But when they got the country, they did not trust democracy. The president was elected by the elite of the elite. Only the elite could vote. Men of the wrong color and women, though possible human, could not vote. Too little has changed.
The freedom to persue happiness was a freedom to persue unfettered profit.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
No, of course I wouldn't be so silly as to claim that Henry Ford's work wasn't a contribution to society. His pioneering of the assembly line was, to the best of my knowledge, a new and novel approach to the production of goods.
I will, however, claim that he didn't "automate" jack shit. He didn't have machines doing the work that people used to do, he simply arranged things so that one person did the same thing over and over, all day long.
I'll also claim that your argument is irrelevant. Any way you spin it, taking an established practice and simply implementing it in the programming language of your choice is not "new", "novel", or "innovative". It's simply shifting old ideas to a new platform. Yes, it's important work, and needs to be done, but it's not deserving of a patent.
Perhaps it will end when the rest of the world decides that UPSTO has lost all credability and stops honouring its patents?
#include "std_employer_disclaimer.hpp" "Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast"-Ace Rimmer
To play the devil's advocate... keep in mind that amazon.com is only acting to protect its interests. If they don't patent all these obvious-sounding business processes, lots of little unknown startups will (1) patent them and then (2) sue deep pocketed firms such as Amazon. It already happens a lot; some nothing company sues Microsoft over some ridiculous patent having to do with hyperlinks in a browser, for example. The best defense is offense in this case. If you were in amazon.com's shoes, you'd probably conclude however relucantly that these actions are absolutely necessary.
The obvious place to end the "madness" is to fix the source of the problem, which is the Patent Office's recognition of business processes as a patentable thing, especially where implemented by software. Patenting a behavior is logically flawed; how long before someone patents making a profit? Where do you draw the line?
Originality of a product idea is one thing; for example, developing a machine which automatically flushes the toilet and does so in a unique and creative way (I'd rather not develop the details actually)--this is probably a reasonable thing to patent. But patenting abstractions like GUI-based book ordering--that's absurd and bound to fail a prior art test, but will encourage lots of frivolous lawsuits and the wasting of the PTO's precious time and resources.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Back at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution someone had patented driving machines with belts and wheels... or gears... or the ball bearing... or nuts and bolts... chances are we would still be walking everywhere and electricity would be someting crazy people created using jars of acid...
The kind of obvious stuff that is being patented today is the equivilent of the nuts and bolts kind of stuff back then...
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