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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
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
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
this ridiculous patent, may we also suggest one-click shopping?
-- This void intentionally left null.
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.
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".