Amazon Gets Patent on Consumer Reviews

theodp writes "Review your local dry cleaner, pay $10 million? Among the three new patents awarded to Amazon.com this week is one that covers collecting reviews by letting visitors to a Web site fill out a form. Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said he couldn't speculate on whether the company would attempt to license its new intellectual property." From the article: "In one embodiment of the patent, the system sends consumers a message inviting them to write a review in a predetermined amount of time after the purchase. It's a method widely used by online retailers, including Yahoo Shopping. The patent also covers the method of tracking who returns to rate products by asking them to click on a unique link in an e-mail. But the patent even covers collecting reviews by letting visitors to a Web site fill out a form. "

Comments

MAD and it's close tie to proliferation

[ReformedExCon]

It's not necessarily that these are ridiculous patents on things that have been around for a long time. It's that the granting of these patents forces all other companies to start protecting themselves by filing for patents on things that they never would have thought to patent before. Only in this way are they safe from the so-called "submarine patents" of competitors.

However, this mutually assured destruction style of research does little to progress the state of the art. It does a good job of cementing the current technology as an ad hoc standard, but it acts as a chilling effect on new technologies.

Not that I blame any company for doing this. It is the rules of the government that created this situation. Companies must learn to play by those rules or face elimination by competitors who understand the system and manipulate it successfully.

And this is *why* it's getting stupid

[Christian Engstrom]

So why does the patent office keep on granting so many obviously stupid patents?

It is not primarily because the patent examiners are incompetent, as is often suggested. Instead it is the economics of running a patent office that make sure that it becomes like this.

Nowadays most patent offices around the world are "self funded", which means that they are funded by the fees that the collect from the patent applicants. This may perhaps seem like a sensible idea at first sight, but unfortunately it invariably leads to lower and lower standards for what is patentable.

A look at the USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.

The initial application fee for a patent is $300. In order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.

But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.

In order to keep his patent valid, the proprietor has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.

For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the maintenance fees add up to $7,000, compared to the $300 for the initial application.

And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.

The result can be seen at a patent office near you.