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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?"
It won't end until amazon patents getting absurd patents. Then its over.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." -Voltaire
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
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
The problem is that the algorithm is obvious to anyone who understands the process, and the process is too well known to be subject to a patent. (Even so, that patent would have expired sometime well before the USPTO was created.)
I suppose if Amazon can't put well run stores out of business by taking all their customers away, they can patent the concept of good retail instead...
-JMP
"When will this stupidity end?"
Never..
What happened to prior art?
LordBodak's journal.
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 you realise that democracy is just a veneer over a system where big business writes the rules and calls the shots.
When this knowledge makes you get out of your complacent "everything for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds" attitude and makes you start organising.
When the revolution comes.
I claim ownership and patent to the entire process of human indigation of all ridiculous patents that are OBVIOUSLY based on prior fscking art.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The onus is on you (well, on anyone who wants to challenge the patent), then, to provide that prior art.
It will be difficult, I imagine, because Amazon is one of the pioneers of ecommerce, so much of what they have done has been original within the context of the Internet. Many technologies used by Amazon were mimicked by other online retailers, so it ought to be no surprise that there were various examples of it implemented while the patent was pending.
Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.
But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.
Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.
Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.
- JC
When will this stupidity end?
When you manage to coerce your elected representatives into.. I dunno... representing you?
y'know, if they're asleep at the wheel anyway, it may at last be time to submit patent proposal #7,545,763: A system in which a central authority examines claims by inventors, selects which ones are original, and then protects said inventors from others copying their artifice.
Wow, "Communist Troll" got modded up. Somebody's drinking the Stalin Kool-Aid too hard today...
You are, of course, right...
But let me pose this question.
Why should a business practice that has been around for thousands of years be deserving of a patent simply because the retailer in question operates a different type of store? Mom & Pop shops have been making suggestions to customers based on past shopping habits forever.
Why does attaching the word "Internet" suddenly make this a new and novel idea?
It may seem stupid from a programmer's point of view. This is technology that several people currently use, and it's someone a half-decent programmer can easily implement.
However, look at it from Amazon's point of view. They're trying to make their business as unique as possible, and if it takes a few of these patents for them to keep their edge over their competitors, why not?
A lot of school's don't teach this side of technology to their students. Sure we learn how to implement ideas, but rarely do we realize that something we've developed can be patented and protected. I'm not defending them or anything, but just giving their point of view. They're smart for doing it, but it's damn annoying that we have to put up with it.
A. One, against BN.com
... software patent?
why doesn't slashdot print a story for every google or transmeta or
U2 has an album called "How to build an atomic bomb". Not a smart purchase if big brother is watching.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I would think that once patent lawyers stop making more money than the patent holders, both on creating and defending/enforcing unreasonable patents, these types of scenarios would be greatly diminished.
I've done the math, I know the odds, but I'm still disappointed when I don't win the lottery.
Because the process is the same whether a computer or a person does it. If everyone is buying Gucci shoes, and you tell a customer that Gucci shoes are popular, why is involving a computer in the process "novel" when the process is exactly the same? Gucci_counter++; if Gucci_counter>popularity_threshhold then say "Gucci is popular, buy now!"
If the computer did something DIFFERENT then clearly something novel would be taking place. But because everyone who buys a PSP later buys a memory stick, you tell your next customer that most people buy a memory stick with their PSP, and they should too. But should a computer tell them this, based on the EXACT SAME PROCESS, they better be shelling out the big bucks to Amazon!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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"
When the corporate takeover of the government ends. The USPTO is acting in the interest of the technology industry, not the public. Same with the FDA. The FDA sees pharmaceutical companies as clients -- it doesn't even know it's supposed to be a regulatory agency. OSHA is basically asleep. Until public campaigns are financed by public dollars, the situation will only get worse.
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
I'm sorry but YOU'RE dead wrong.
I know that the rules read that way on paper, but it doesn't take too much intelligence to look at the patents that they've been granting lately to realize that "the rules" mean very, very little to a patent examiner.
Did Henry Ford or James Watt patent their ideas, which, even today, are far more innovative than one-click or customer history?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Don't you see, that's the genius of it! Played forward, it's ordinary Bono and such. But backwards...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Some patents filed are pretty general and can be summed up in a few words like "using customer viewing histories to generate recommendations." This particular patent, however, is not all that general and is actually very detailed, yet broad.
It details not only the weighting system used to generate the recommendations (recently purchased + highly rated = higher weight), in the same category, but in other store areas as well. It weights differently based upon whether an item is placed in the cart, searched for, placed on the wish list, bid on in online auction(?), purchased as a gift, or merely favorably reviewed.
So, Amazon is basically saving their customer's viewing/browsing tendencies as data. Now, they've patented the usage of this data to generate more sales. It seems like a good idea to me.
and now back to the fallout shelter...
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.
OK, fine. I'll bite. You're the expert.
Please explain to me how the process of "making product suggestions based on the prior purchasing habits of the customer" is not covered by prior art.
Why all the fuss? Maybe because people like my mother (totally computer illiterate) came up with the same concept merely by wishing it existed, and because it's a relatively trivial concept (which should cause it to fail the obvious test, which I mention again later on).
Without even looking at the patent, I imagine it covers this basic idea:
Person A looks at Product 1, Product 2, and Product 3.
Person B looks at Product 2, Product 3, and Product 4.
Person C looks at Product 2 and Product 3.
Along comes Person D, who looks at Product 3. The program then goes and dredges up the viewing history of everyone that looked at Product 3 and noticed that (in this contrived example) all of them also looked at Product 2. It therefore offers Product 2 as a suggestion.
Now obviously with a much larger dataset some statistical analysis will need to be done to try to determine relavence, but that of course would be unpatentable since it's plain old math.
Seriously, this concept is ridiculous in its simplicity and obviousness, and when laid out this way, it should be crystal clear that it is in fact not a new concept at all, but has been in use, either consciously or subconsciously, for probably about as long as the concept of commerce has been around.
So what are they actually left with to patent? An idea that has been around for as long as commerce? Obviously not. Math? Again, obviously not. What exactly was patented? The idea that a machine can do that for us? How is that not obvious given the past 20-30 years, and the rapid push to have computers do everything for us?
Yeah! And a fax machine is just an envelope that goes through the telephone!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I actually have a direct example of prior art that pre-dates this patent by over 2 years. Back in 1999, whilst working with Broadvision in both the UK and US, I was involved in a number of projects that implemented the exact method described in the patent.
Getting this absurd patent overthrown would be absolute child's play for anyone familiar with mapping taxonomy systems to observation logging and user ratings, which were common practice for anyone using systems such as Broadvision back in the late 90s.
So, if Amazon files a stupid patent A, and then later files another stupid patent B, USPTO can recommend Amazon to file yet another stupid patent C.
At the time the patent was filed, it was extremely uncommon for systems to make automatic recommendations based solely on the behavior of users. When I did my work at Alexa Internet (which was acquired by Amazon) in the late 90s, I had to solve a number of issues which had not been dealt with, both from an engineering perspective and from a quality of results perspective -- few companies, and no academic researchers that I am aware of -- had both the amount of data and the technical talent required to process it in order to test and refine recommendation systems based on transactional information.
My work in this area became Amazon's "customers who shopped for X also shopped for Y feature." Greg Linden, the first name on this patent, is now doing interesting recommendation work with his site Findory.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu / blog / pics.
Prior art, as defined by the patent office, is previous patents. Oh and obvious things like rocks and wheels. So if it hasn't been patented yet, and the examiner doesn't use one in his daily life, you can patent.
That's great for physical things, but it doens't really work for intangibles like software and business practices.
It also doesn't work where you're starting the patenting process after you start the technology process. I'm sure, back in the 1700s when they created patents, someone tried to patent attaching a horse to a buggy, but the examiners understood horses and buggies enough to disallow that.
Until 10 years ago or so, software or business practices weren't patented. Software was copyrighted and business practices were trade secrets. The examiners understand neither software nor business practices, but we're letting them rule on the right to patent them.
-markr If one just keeps walking, everything will be all right. - Kierkegaard
Welcome to the real world and the economic engine that is capitalism.
The world you live in has nothing to do with capitalism anymore.
Capitalism was, MAYBE, present during 1950-60's, but what people are experiencing now is something so deformed it needs a new name.
You don't believe that accomplishing the same thing faster isn't worthy of a patent? Before Visicalc, an account would create a large spreadsheet by hand. Then his boss would say, "what if we sold 3000 units instead of 2800" and the accountant would have to recalculate everything. With a spreadsheet, he enters in one figure and everything is re-calculated in an instant. Why isn't that useful and novel?
Think of the legal system as like Professional Wrestling.
When the bell rings, the big company lawyer steps in to shake hands, grapple, and decide if he's facing another professional heavyweight.
If so, they go seventeen rounds, make money, and provide entertainment.
When you go to work for a company and they hand you a contract full of boilerplate taking ownership of any idea you have now or ever afterward, it's one of those events.
When a company gets one of these obvious patents, it's another of those events.
IF NOBODY FIGHTS BACK, the big company wins by default.
THAT is our legal system. They claim whatever they can imagine -- and wait to see if there is a comparably entertaining and well paid legal team on the other side.
If you sign their first draft employment agreement, you lose.
If you don't fight their patent, you lose.
What y'all are missing is the fact that the referee does NOT work to protect you in this kind of event.
The referee is there to keep the entertainment going.
The big companies expect to win some of their absurd essays in taking everything, because nobody objects.
The Patent Examiner is part of the show, folks, part of the illusion that keeps people watching the show instead of saying, hey, this is just a big bully stomping people. Oh, no, it's a refereed match.
Those of us in the field, on the ground, so to speak, will decide whether the USPTO is on crack or not for a particular patent. We will ignore stupid patents approved by idiot government officials, and pay attention to the ones that make sense. This way, the industry can progress at an efficient pace, and we will send a message that the government doesn't own us.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Blockbuster was printing "If you liked this, you might also enjoy" on the back of their video tapes years before Amazon existed, which I'm sure was based on the same kind of statistical data. Amazon has no claim here!
Did anyone bother to ask the customers what they want?
I'm sorry, but if it was so obvious then why wasn't it on some other site before? It's just silly to say that something is obvious after the fact. The truely innovative thing about Amazon's mechanism for recommending things is that they show you items that people who bought the item you are currently looking at also bought. Again, that's obvious, but no-one else did it before Amazon did and as soon as Amazon starting doing it everyone else starting copying it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Your enemy gets the stupid patents, you ignore them, then they sue the crap out of you and your business goes under. (Or, incurs millions of dollars in costs in a multi-year legal battle to prove the patent(s) are invalid).
It's a lose-lose situation. The best thing we can do is organize and fight for reform of the patent system. Software patents fuck everything up and have no useful characteristics for society whatsoever. All they do is give huge corporations an anti-competitive weapon. They do nothing whatsoever to promote progress or innovation.
First off, patents are not innately evil. Whether we like or not, there is a sound economic argument defending the purpose of patents; to promote R&D and innovation by offering financial protection and rewards for the investment of time and resources necessary to innovate.
Remember, on the one hand, patents can discourage competition when large companies patent items that prevent small companies from legitimately competing with them, and this is bad. But on the other hand, small companies can both enter and capture a new market and sustain themselves against assault from larger companies with exponentially greater resources, merely because of owning an innovative patent; this is good. Without protecting their intellectual property through the all-important barriers-to-entry of owning a patent, most small companies would never make it out of the gate.
Also, as much as most forward-thinking companies would like to change the way of the world, the fact generally remains that they still need to play by the same rules of the game as everyone else (i.e. the competition) while they are still the rules. If they fail to do so, they probably won't last long waiting for another company to come in, receive the relevant patent, and sue the pants off the new-world company. This might not be the idealistic approach, but it seems to be fairly realistic.
Nevertheless, the crux of the issue still remains; the USPTO needs to undergo substantial reform to focus their issuance of new patents on appropriate items.
I have YET to purchase a single thing from Amason. Their prices (especially on nerd-type books) aren't that good anyway. I get mine from Nerdbooks.com. The services is always very good, and prices are outstanding.
Prices aside, I will NOT support a company that continues to rape the meaning of the word "innovation" by patenting rediculously obvious methods.
"Would you like fries with that?"
When some company patents not buying their product!
this ridiculous patent, may we also suggest one-click shopping?
-- This void intentionally left null.
I have to concur about their service. I recently mistyped the address on an order for a book that I wanted delivered to an office where I was doing some work at the time. The delivery failed ofcourse. They didn't ask me anything, just told me the address was incorrect and refunded me the full amount INCLUDING postage. Amazon might not be the greatest place on earth but to me that was better service then I'm used to.
:-(
I mostly deal with Amazon.co.uk, and I over the past few years found that their prices are almost always among the lowest I can find. One thing that bugs me is that they haven't set up shop in The Netherlands yet so no free shipping for me
beauty is only a light switch away
If a method/action has been used in real life for hundreds of years then you are free to patent that method/action in the context of computing with purely theoretical speculation. So for example:
"A method of encoding information or data into structurally organised units, visually represented by a set of symbols which can be laid out to form a mentally recognisable concept. Such a method would is not limited to one set of symbols or organisational rules. Storage of encoded information can be achieved through the use of look-up tables to produce a short binary code for each symbol. In addition to the aforementioned method of symbol layout or 'text', the use of space between symbols will denote separation of symbol units henceforth known as 'words' and additional symbols to support the separation of related 'words' into logically coherent blocks or 'sentences'. Symbols or 'characters' will be given phonetic properties to aid audible transmission."
I think you should all be aware that my patent passed this morning, please cease and desist.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The original purpose of patents was to protect inventions and thus provide incentives to innovate. This would improve productivity, as what is the point of working if someone is going to steal your idea? Patents were a good idea at the time, and for many things still are a good idea.
... I accept some and not others). The actual idea, however? Has K-Mart patented the layout of their shelves? No! And they'd probably be laughed at if they even tried. So what's with this "business methods" nonsense? Just another way for businesses to be inefficient.
Software patents are an example of the protectionist mentality that seems to abound in many first-world countries. Business: "We can't compete with country X, we're going to have to fire people." Government: "Uh oh, can't have that, here's lots of money." or "We'll tax the imports so much that you can charge more and get away with it." Such behaviour is the opposite of the original purpose of patents. Further, it's bad for the consumer as (for example) US sugar is a lot more expensive than Australian sugar. If we were truly productive we wouldn't need a Free Trade Agreement - international competition would be the norm. Most of our primary industries would probably relocate to third-world countries, I don't deny that, but there are plenty of tertiary (services) industry jobs out there and that is where the first world should focus. Instead, we protect our "rights" to be inefficient and to take money from our own pockets to put into the pockets of the corporations. It's crazy!
I can actually understand this patent, though. There are worse ones out there (and don't even get me started on the extension of copyright). In this case, Amazon has come up with a way to encourage you to buy more stuff, by basically doing targeted advertising. It's really rather clever, and the algorithm they use probably should be patented (assuming you accept the idea of software patents
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...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
That's just stupid.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
When will it end?
Hmmm. People use the address bar to type in Amazon.com - therefore we now patent the use of browsers, keyboards, and monitors.
But wait! In order to effectively type our patented brand into our patented browser using our patented technology, users have to send electrical nerve signals from their brain to their fingertips, to cause muscular movement. All of these cells are supported by a system that continuously pulls oxygen from the blood, and transports waste carbon dioxide to the lungs.
Therefor we request a patent on all biomechanical movement, electricity, and oxygen.
We also patent the millions of years of evolution including all single-celled organisms that were the starting point of the development of the Amazon.com brand.
God? You're next.
Single? Canadian? We can help. Visit http://www.l
Go into any store (we'll use electronics as an example).
Look at a small television.
Look at some RCA cables.
Watch as salespeople try to sell you a huge plasma tv and/or component cables.
[ profit? ]
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
It would seem that the entire field of machine learning is prior art...
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
My meet-cute-girl-in-bookstore process...
I am browsing in the bookstore. I see a really cute girl pick up a book that I have read. So I walk over and say, "If you like that book, I think you will like this one".
Fortunately this is a patent, not a copyright. It will expire in ~20 years. (I can never recall the rules, but it is 17-20 years depending on a bunch of factors) Most of us are likely to live that long. There is no long history of increasing the length of patent terms over time to keep things patented.
Compare that to copyright. They will last longer than any of us have any hope of living. Everytime they are about to expire they increase the terms, so even things that are "close" to the end of their term are unlikely to get out in our lifetime.
This might or might not be bogus, but at least it will expire and be used by everyone in 20 years.