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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. "
I would comment on the news article but it might be classed as a review and me or /. might get sued for patent infringement.
AT&ROFLMAO
Whenever I call for an end to copyright and IP, people ask for the theory behind a copyopen world. They say the world isn't black and white, that we just need more laws to balance copyright and copy rights.
What is a patent? It is lending government's monopoly on the use of force. It is completely incompatible with freedom. When some law is made giving 1 person in 10,000 the unique power of force, there is a problem. This patent hells ezos and the top shareholders, not the average employee of Amazon.
If I tell you that you can't eat an orange, you'll tell me to shove it. Rather than explain why eating an orange is bad and convincing you, I'm going to use government to force you to stop. If you don't, you go to court. If you refuse the court, out come the guns.
To those who believe their livelihood depends on copyright and patent, I call shens. I've written two books that are "freely" copyable. In both I request $20 to acquire my official version and help motivate me to write more. Guess what? I get the money. Often. With the web, it is even easier to make money this way.
Patents and copyright are dead. Use your talents to build and convince, not build and coerce. What you invent likely came from seeing the inventions of others and making a new or better way to do something. If you want to cut off others from bettering your idea, then make another, better version.
BTW, I stopped using Amazon years ago. I prefer buying local, and promoting my own businesses while I do. Local store owners, managers and employees then hire me rather than going online. It is a nice circle of barter and trade rather than padding UPS' and Bezos' pockets. I have no shortage of work for myself and any of my employees, who also refuse Amazon as they know their lives depend on our neighbors.
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I'm pretty unhappy with this patent and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I give it 0 out of 5 stars.
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come get me, Amazon.
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.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
Now, I'm not an IP lawyer, but I do pay attention when IP lawyers talk, and I get thoroughly annoyed when people believe the article summaries and ignore the readily accessible primary documents.
h tml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l= 50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=6963848.WKU.&OS=PN/6963848&RS=PN/ 6963848
Despite what Slashdot groupthink might have you believe, it is not relevant whether their is similar art *now*. It IS relevant as to whether there was similar art before the patent was filed -- which is years before the patent is ever granted. Furthermore, objectives are NOT patented; methods are. Thus, unlike what the summary might have you believe, Amazon has not patented a generic method for getting product reviews.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/neta
Amazon, for instance, obtained US Patent 6,963,848. This was granted on November 8, 2005. It was *filed* March 2, 2000. PriceGrabber only started grabbing reviews in May of that year, and that by partnering with ConsumerReview.COM -- which may or may not have used methods specified in the patent. Amazon's VERY FIRST CLAIM, for instance, specifies that the covered system must do the receiving of the order AND the later solicitation of a review AFTER a reasonable period of time to allow for an initial experience. Unless ConsumerReview or PriceGrabber itself TAKES THE ORDERS, they would not appear to constitute prior art that would invalidate the first claim.
In fact, ALL TWENTY-EIGHT CLAIMS have this stipulation -- that the system itself takes the order for which a review occurs. Does Epinions take the order, or merely send you to someone else? Does NexTag? Does PriceGrabber? Did you read the freaking patent AT ALL?
Go vomit at your own laziness, and at the Moderator that would declare you Insightful.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.