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Amazon's Lawyers Jerking USPTO Around?
theodp writes "Reacting to an actor's do-it-yourself legal effort that triggered a reexam of Amazon.com's 1-Click patent, attorneys for Amazon have fired back, deluging the USPTO with documents to review, including Wikipedia articles. With the latest batch, Amazon's high-priced law firm even requested that USTPO examiners review an archived page of Norm Quotes (yes, Norm from Cheers) and rule that it does not invalidate CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent."
Can anyone provide a link to ideas that haven't been patented yet?
Patent applicants and their attorneys are under a legal obligation to cite ANY documents that a Patent Examiner may consider "material" to tbe patentability of the invention. If the applicant fails to cite anything that the Examiner might have found material, the patent can be held invalid by a court. But if they cite "too much," people complain that they're "burying" the patent office. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Obviously US patent law is up the creek, but it's not Amazon's fault. If anything Bezos should be fired if he were not to use every tool and weapon available to him.
The people who should be slapped are those that have allowed this to happen: the lawmakers, which these days seems to include the judiciary.
Amazon's one-click patent was good for one reason: it prevented other retailers from creating such an inane system!
I once accidentally hit the one-click purchase button shortly before I had to leave my computer for the day. I couldn't cancel the order before I left, because the system hadn't processed it yet. By the time I got back later that evening, the order had already reached the point I couldn't cancel it! I had to wait for the merchandise to arrive, and then return it under a false reason.
A good lesson in human computer interfaces: the complexity of executing a task should be proportional to the complexity of undoing it.
Former US House candidate, TN-5
I've read the small portion of the application that the submitter linked to, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why that Norm page would ever be relevant to Amazon's patent. However, I also can't figure out how including a bunch of irrelevant items on a patent application is supposed to "bury relevant prior art". I highly doubt the examiner is going to think "Holy shit, 9 pages, I'll just check one or two per page and totally ignore the rest." Even if he just skims over the rest, he's likely to notice that some if it is relevant, and dismiss things like pages on Norm quotes and Wikipedia articles on Object Pascal as having nothing to do with the patent. It's more work than the examiner should probably have to do, but I don't see any reason why it'd result in a radically different end verdict than if those entries were omitted.*
In fact, I can't see how including it would have any kind of beneficial effect on their patent at all. If I was Jeff Bezos right now, I'd be calling my law firm and politely requesting that whoever decided to just dump their bookmarks file into the patent application be thrown out a 10th floor window.
I have about as much faith in the US patent system as most people around here, I rather strongly believe Amazon's patent should be revoked, but I just don't see a point for Amazon in putting "fluff" items in their prior art declarations. If anything, I think it'll be ruled valid simply because the USPTO won't check ANY of the prior art, not because some of it was irrelevant.
Karma: Contrapositive
Yes, indeed, we should bitchslap the lawmakers. Maybe have Hulk Hogan teach them a few new moves, preferably painful ones that leave bruises.
I disagree that corporations should be given a free pass on unethical or illegal behavior just because it's in the interests of the stockholders. If you think about it, it is just that attitude that has brought corporate America to it's knees. "Go ahead, Mr. CEO, use every weapon available to you so long as the stock price doesn't drop, and don't worry about that 'ethics' thing, because if you get too concerned about wrongdoing we'll just fire your ass and bring in someone less scrupulous." How is that beneficial to anyone but the stockholder? In fact, long term, it's not beneficial to anyone, including the stockholders. Well, other than upper management, that is, who are generally so insulated from the effects of their actions that it doesn't much matter to them.
Worse yet, the reason that U.S. patent law is up the creek is Amazon's fault! Amazon and all the rest of the corporations that went to Washington and bought changes to patent law, and the funding changes to the USPTO itself. Those were things that Congress would never have thought up on its own: they were pushed into it by corporations that wanted to gain even more control over America's intellectual capital.
So far as I'm concerned, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and all the other companies run by sociopaths can go to Hell. Create, invent, and compete on your merits: if you can't do that you don't deserve to be in business. The granting of, and enforcement of, utterly baseless patents doesn't do anything but force the transfer of our wealth to people that have no right to it.
Jeff Bezos should be fired for being an antisocial jackass with criminal tendencies. He, and those like him, are running the United States into the ground, because they aren't leaving any room in their thought processes for anyone but themselves.
Look up the term "enlightened capitalism" sometime, look at the positive effects that it brought to Western civilization, and think for yourself how little it applies to Bezos and people of his caliber.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So buy some of the books online, and sell them to your fellow students at half the bookstore price. There's money to be made, son.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I disagree that corporations should be given a free pass on unethical or illegal behavior just because it's in the interests of the stockholders.
I never said anything about illegal behaviour. As far as ethics is concerned it's fraught with difficulty since one mans ethical is another's monstrousness (ie. stem cells, the nazis, abortion; to name a few obvious ones etc). Pointing fingers is a very tricky business.
I agree there is a problem but I think it is with uncontained competitiveness, a problem that afflicts some modern forms of capitalism, but that's a different issue. In the meantime the arena is as it is, and Bezos better fight hard.
Those were things that Congress would never have thought up on its own: they were pushed into it by corporations that wanted to gain even more control over America's intellectual capital.
How were they pushed in to it? Don't they have wills of their own? But you are partly right if we are talking corruption.
But apart from coruption it's down to the law-maker to resist and over-come bad influence. That's part of the job: to be noble. that's why there is a real case for adulterous or criminal law-makers to resign since they have demonstrated a weak will in a critical area of their own lives: sticking to vows - and making good decisions in the first place. It's the weak willed that allow this kind of nonsense. So it is still the lawmakers fault for not doing his own (very important) job properly.
Bezos and the like have the status of children in comaprison to a law-maker : "Daddy, please give me this really tasty looking [but actually long-term poisonous] sweety". There are plenty of parents who give in, but it isn't the child's fault, not in my opinion.
They aren't patenting the general concept of automatic identification and charging of a customer based on a pre-shared secret, which would include any kind of bar tab system, as well as many other kinds of financial transactions. They're patenting the specific method of using a web browser that supports cookies to provide customer identification information along with the HTTP request representing clicking the "Order now!" button, allowing the server to automatically look up the billing info associated with that customer and fulfill the order without any further customer action.
It's a very broad patent that covers any pretty much any online store that uses cookies to identify customers, but it doesn't cover anything not involving the a web browser, web server and cookies. That's why (according to XLawyer's logic) Amazon included the Norm quotes page, as an example of a system that, while similar in concept, is different enough to not invalidate Amazon's claim to originality. It's a bit of a long shot, but out of all the theories I've read today, I think it's the one that makes the most sense. The purpose of Amazon listing prior art on their paperwork isn't to try to invalidate their own patent, it's to clarify the scope and show that their idea is different enough from previous implementations to merit a patent. It's Amazon saying "These are things that may have influenced our concept, but are different enough to be unique."
That said, I don't think Amazon's patent should be ruled valid, and I hope that the USPTO recognizes that the patent is overly broad and covers many situations that have been happening since browsers started supporting cookies.
Karma: Contrapositive