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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 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
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?
I am sure there is prior art all over the place. For example, most online retailers have blurbs saying "customers who bought this product also bought these..." and give a list. This is the exact same thing done in aggregate, and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
What happened to prior art?
LordBodak's journal.
When will this stupidity end?
When you manage to coerce your elected representatives into.. I dunno... representing you?
Using your scenario,any solution at which a bunch of programmers could independently arrive would, under most circumstances, be "obvious" and therefore not patentable. The problem is not the patent laws, it is the implementation.
There aren't sufficient examiners skilled in the art of software programming to determine in most cases when something is obvious. Those examiners who are skilled are overwhelmed and can only do a very cursory job of searching in the time alloted to examine every application. Most of the time, the only search done is of patent prior art which in the field of software is sparse.
As much as I hate saying this, this is one of those problems that does require money being thrown at it in order to solve. We need to hire more and better examiners. We need to pay the skilled examiners better to retain them.
That is not to say that the USPTO does not have other problems. But lack of funding is certainly one of the biggest. Of course, the reason for this is that nobody in aposition to do something about this really has any incentive to do so.
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.