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Amazon Slaps Orbitz and Avis With Patent Lawsuit
theodp writes "Amazon has sued Cendant for allegedly infringing four patents covering electronic commerce at its Orbitz, Avis and other Web sites. Cendant, the biggest U.S. provider of travel and real-estate services, knew 'or should have known' it infringed when using the tools to secure credit-card transactions, handle customer referrals and manage data, according to the lawsuit filed June 22 in federal court in Seattle. Amazon itself was sued by Cendant last year for patent infringement over its recommendation technology. So much for five years of Amazon patent reform."
My first thought was that this seems like a classic case of defensive patent action, and is fair game in my book. Cendant was the company that fired first when they hauled Amazon into court, so it's only fair that Amazon return the favor.
However, it appears that Cendent withdrew its lawsuit in February, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I suppose that if someone draws a gun on you, and then says, "heh heh...just kidding", you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to stop reaching for your own gun. So I can't say that I can muster a lot of pity for Cendant.
Cendant essentially forced Amazon to look in their patent portfolio to find what they could nail Cendant to the wall with. After having done all of the expensive homework, it seems that Amazon needed to at least recoup those costs.
Rob
So many things point to Amazon that it seems like a lot of hassle to buy anywhere else, but it's not.
Get yourself a copy of Book Burro; it will automatically annotate any Amazon page you go to with a list of other bookstores you can buy the book at, as well as the prices (often lower than Amazon).
Patent registrants like Amazon's Bezos say things like "we only register these patents to protect our own right to do things this way, not to prevent others from doing so". Then they turn around and, as is their right under the patent, prevent others from doing things that way. There ought to be a "defensive only" form of patent, or a standard, binding statement that a company can assert, which states they will waive the right to become plaintiffs in a lawsuit (or threaten to do so) claiming rights under the patent. Then, when they say they're benign, we will have a reason to believe them. They won't be able to say "we're protecting our ability to work this way by stopping the competition from working this way, and taking our business", which is just weasel words to use their patents like a weapon, not just a shield.
--
make install -not war
I'm seeing various posts saying, "boycott Amazon" -- they are evil IP mofos. That is pretty silly! Micro$oft and Apple are doing similarly (or more) reprehensible things, and boycotts of them are not popular enough to make any difference in their behavior.
Amazon is really huge these days -- $600 billion or so a year in sales. That revenue is coming from non-ideologically motivated schmucks, not geeks who think and care about IP issues. A geek boycott will be about as successful as Jesse Jackson's boycott of Nike (he couldn't get blacks to do it).
Try it again, this time with feeling.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
It's not just Amazon. Every large company that does research churns out absurd patents.
I work at a corporate computer science research wing of an extremely large company (which I won't name, but isn't much different from my previous employer, and is probably not much different from any other large company in the same position). At the moment, the work I'm doing is not research, but software development. Our group has a requirement to turn out N invention disclosures a year, even though we aren't doing research. Naturally, this results in plenty of grumbling and people just grabbing something handy to "disclose" as an invention. There are people Googling for random things online, and submitting them as "inventions" to get upstream management off their back. Thus, the poison seed enters the system as a result of a poor goal/reward structure around research.
To keep *their* bosses happy, research management has to convert some number of these into patents.
The USPTO, which does not have the incredible amount of funding that it would require to block all stupid patents (you would literally have to hire the best researchers in every field and give them a long time to mull over each patent), might send these patents back a time or two, but sooner or later they will get through.
This is where stupid patents come from. Sometime down the road, lawyers will use these as clubs.
I am not on the financial side, but as far as I can tell, existing players in a market generally just cross-license. AMD and Intel will never duke it out over patents, because neither one would be able to produce chips.
What happens is that nobody new is able to enter the market, by virtue of a steady stream of patents existing covering all kinds of basic-but-crucial ideas. The idea, from the standpoint of existing players, seems to be to convert a free market into an ogliopoly, in which there is much more profit to be made from consumers, and in which the continuous push to commoditize products can be stopped. And every now and then, existing players merge or go bankrupt, and the market gets ever richer for the existing ones.
The problem (well, the problem that pisses off a lot of open source programmers) comes in in that open source projects generally don't have any money (certainly not enough to take on a large company in patent litigation). So, instead of being able to do what other large companies do (cross-license, just dump a bunch of money on the other company, whatever is necessary to continue doing their work), open source projects simply cannot do things for fear of being sued (or just having all their hard work thrown out). So we have stupid things like lower quality font rendering (because the FreeType people cannot legally support the TrueType hinting data) and so forth.
I have fond memories of one meeting at my previous employer where a bunch of researchers and an extremely key (i.e. essentially nonfireable) software developer was. The meeting was to encourage the project to produce more IP, and was being conducted by one of our in-house corporate lawyers. Halfway through the meeting, the software developer (who felt that the whole thing was a waste of his time in the first place, and clearly disliked software patents) stood up and started railing on software patents. The research folks just stood there. Talking privately after the meeting, I discovered most of the researchers agreed with the guy, but saw any complaints as politically incorrect and simply likely to get them fired or research funding (always a popular target for funding cuts) cut.
The very root issue is twofold: (a) that it's not easy for people to make money on research (in the US, I've been told by people who are more interested in the business side of research that many corporate research labs have gone away or been closed down), and (b) that it is *exceedingly* difficult to effectively judge how well someone is doing research. Everyone will try to present their research as the next gro
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think this is one of the patents refered to in the article - it seems a pretty obvious "invention" to me - gotta wonder about some of these patents. ------ Secure method and system for communicating a list of credit card numbers over a non-secure network Abstract A method and system for securely indicating to a customer one or more credit card numbers that a merchant has on file for the customer when communicating with the customer over a non-secure network. The merchant sends a message to the customer that contains only a portion of each of the credit card numbers that are on file with the merchant. The message may also contain a notation explaining which portion of each of the credit card numbers has been extracted. A computer (38) retrieves the credit card numbers on file for the customer in a database (40), constructs the message, and transits the message to a customer location (10) over the Internet network (30) or other non-secure network. The customer can then confirm in a return message that a specific one of the credit card numbers on file with the merchant should be used in charging a transaction. Since only a portion of the credit card number(s) are included in any message transmitted, a third party cannot discover the customer's complete credit card number(s). http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5715399.WKU.&OS=PN/5715399&RS=PN/ 5715399
According to documents filed in the case by Preston Gates & Ellis (yep, Bill G's dad!), Amazon is joined in the lawsuit by A9.com in demanding injunctive relief and unspecified triple damages for "irreparable injury and damages" as a result of Cendant's infringement of the following patents:
Secure method and system for communicating a list of credit card numbers over a non-secure network (5,715,399), which is held by Bezos and covers displaying "the last N digits of the credit card number, where N is an integer,"
Internet-based customer referral system (6,029,141), which is also held by Bezos and covers Amazon's affiliate program,
Electronic commerce using multiple roles (6,629,079), which covers the use of "multiple electronic shopping carts," and
Navigating within a body of data using one of a number of alternative browse graphs (6,625,609), which describes how one might sell "a Pez candy dispenser in the shape of the Marvin the Martian."
BTW, Bezos' '399 patent was the subject of a curious 2001 Prior Art contest run by the Bezos-funded BountyQuest - ties to Bezos were never disclosed and the contest results were never revealed.