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Amazon's Patent-Pending Price Checks
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that Amazon is back at the patent trough, this time for a System and method for obtaining information relating to an item of commerce using a portable imaging device. Sounds an awful lot like ScoutPal, which drew raves from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, doesn't it?"
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Prior Art: Delicious Library
chown -R us ~you/base
Did Amazon's lawyers even bother to look at the prior art here?
http://www.neom.com/Neomedia Technologies has just about every patent you could think of related to taking pictures of bar codes and getting information sent back to your phone.
Their http://paperclick.com/demo.jspPaperclick demo shows just a fraction of what they've got patented.
They enforce their patents too. In the past few months both http://www.neom.com/press_releases/2005/20050629.j spVirgin and http://www.neom.com/press_releases/2005/20050712.j spAirClic have settled by doing licensing deals. That doesn't happen with weak patents. Further, Neomedia has protection in something like 15 other countries besides http://www.neom.com/press_releases/2005/20050524.j sp.
I would be really surprised if Amazon gets anything here, though just recently (as in the last day or so) a higher court upheld a lower court's verdict http://www.mobilecents.net/juryaward.asp of $128 million to the company that holds the patent for prepaid wireless cards! (as if that wasn't obvious).
It makes you wonder if the same people that let me get through the airport security with a five inch metal corkscrew (accidentally)- the TSA - are also pulling shifts at the USPTO.
-Stitch
"there is no "I" in B-O-R-G"
There is no "I" in B-O-R-G.
BookFinder4u
You should write up your idea and submit it to the US patent office.
I believe this is defeated by Denso's QR Code which was developed in 1997. It is a 2D barcode that is typically scanned by taking a photo with your cellphone or similar handheld device, and pushing a single button. The photo is decoded by the scanner into presumably an URL, and the resulting page is accessed and displayed. Alternatively you can store arbitrary data in it to the size of the symbol, i.e. a serial number or manufacturing date. It was created in 1997 it seems. In Japan it is now common in most phones and is often seen in magazines and on billboards. I don't see how Bezos can help but be embarrassed by this sort of thing. When he started out he used to be a straightforward kind of guy..
symbol has patents that faaar precede both Amazon and scoutpal on linking scanners (various kinds including red laser based) and displays with all kinds of wireless technologies including cellphones/wifi/... DUH. back to your corners, you both lose.
"Even if you dont have the faintest idea about how to produce it you can get a patent and you can reap the benefits as soon as someone manages to make a product out of the idea, even if the idea is a century old"
For one, in order to patent an object, you have to document how to create it. In the words of current law, an expert in the field should be able to recreate your invention without undue experimentation.
And another, patents only last 20 years, so patenting an invention that will not be around for 50 years will do you no good.
Lots of people patent obvious ideas, and they may make money on them. but the law is supposed to work where only non-obvious AND novel ideas can enjoy patent protection.
In our current case, it will probably be rejected, because this is more like a recipe where obvious technology such as an online store and barcode readers are combined to form a cool system. sure, the idea is new, but that does not make the entire process novel and thus patentable.