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Amazon Goes Web 2.0 Wild to Defend 1-Click Patent
theodp writes "Six years ago, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly urged the masses to give-patent-reform-a-chance as Richard Stallman called for an Amazon boycott. On Monday, the pair will reunite to kick off O'Reilly's new Amazon-sponsored Web 2.0 Expo with A Conversation with Jeff Bezos. Be interesting if the conversation turned to Amazon's ongoing battle against an actor's effort to topple Bezos' 1-Click patent, which The Register notes included dumping 58 lbs. of paperwork on the patent examiner, including dozens of articles from the oh-so-Web-2.0 Wikipedia, which the USPTO had already deemed an un acceptable source of information ('From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian)."
I got "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
/. is disabling their one-click "Read More" links.
I guess
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What is toilet paper?
Will code for new sig.
The headline directly says that Amazon plans to use the Web 2.0 Expo to defend the one-click patent.
The summary speculates that Bezos might get called out over the one-click patent.
The article says... wait... this isn't summarizing any article.
So what's happened? Nothing new. What's going to happen? Very possibly nothing new.
(IANAL)
"The problem with Wikipedia is that it's constantly changing,"
Just click on "Permanent link" and you will have a version that won't change. Or click on Cite this article.
The news news is that Jeff Bezos is giving a speech at an O'Reilly-sponsored conference about something having nothing to do with patents, and everything else in the blurb, from the title on down, is randomly thrown in by the submitter, correct?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
of the lawsuit? I thought the One-click was a good example of silly patents. Having it overturned is important now just so other people can "use similiar concepts" but in software in general. If to many of these silly patents get pushed through it will be impossible for any non-big-firm programmer to develop anything, else they'll be infringing on the "while() {}" patent.
From the FTA:
O'Reilly has the money and the influence to help strike out this dumb patent, but he chooses not to do so. It would be a nice irony if the USPTO threw it out because Tim's chum Jeff used Wikipedia. I'd laugh my fricking ass off.A wiki page is great if it is timestamped. A wiki page is a publication and can be used to establish prior art.
The "patent expert" might as well have said The journal of machine intelligence and pattern recognition is toilet paper because the pages change from issue to issue.
If archive.org could take an examiner, or anyone else, to a wiki version dated before the filing date of a patent, then I think it can be used to establish prior art.
Even if the USPTO says it won't accept the wiki, a court could over rule them.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian.
:-)
:-)
And from any sane person's point of view, 99% of comments from patent experts are toilet paper, which is why we're in such a mess today.
So, it's beautifully symmetric. Patent lawyers and Wikipedia were made for each other.
Although in Wikipedia's defence, it gets it right ***far*** more often.
In any case, Wikipedia can always be corrected, and very easily, that's the power of it. Whereas the only way of correcting a patent lawyer is with a lobotomy.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I don't think it's a good assumption that website citations are generally to be trusted for academic purposes. Wikipedia has requirements that citations from more trusted sources are included in articles - the lawyers in this case really should have known enough to go to those original sources and cite from there instead. You would think they would teach this sort of stuff in law school.
If the articles in question DIDN'T contain citations from other sources, then how could any of the information be trusted at all, given that it was written by one or many basically anonymous users?
Personally, I find Wikipedia to be really useful, but the problem with it from an academic standpoint is that any conclusions arrived at in its articles without citation tend to arise out of the consensus of the user community, and there is really no reason to trust information simply because the majority agrees it is the truth, especially in matters like this one.
I was just reading the book "On the Edge", which is about Commodore's rise and fall. The silly "Xor cursor" patent lawsuit may be what finished them off. Commodore survived a slump in 1986 and may have also survived its 1993 slump if not for the Xor patent suit. Although the issues were complicated, the Xor lawsuit may have been what put it over the edge. If Commodore survived a few years longer to about 1996, then the shere money wave of the web boom may have kept them alive to try again with more products and an updated Amiga that was on the drawing boards.
Table-ized A.I.
Greg Aharonian is actually not a lawyer but a searcher that specializes in busting patents and exposing corruption and incompetence at the U.S. Patent Office. So, he is exactly the type of person /. should like. Greg's site is www.bustpatents.com.
I am happy to say I have never once bought a single thing from Amazon.com. Their patent bullshittery is the reason. Fine, eBay/Half.com isn't necessarily run by angels, but they aren't going ape-shit on patents either. I do reference Amazon quite a bit, if I could find a better place that has tech specs and info on nearly any product I would use it, but epinions doesn't quite reach that level, at least I don't send them money.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The Amazon one-click patent is not a bad patent for the the following reasons:
1. It was filed in 1997, and its subject matter may have been invented even a while before then. When you look at whether at patent is obvious or not, you have to look at it at the time of invention. Of course it's obvious, after it's been used for a decade. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 1997? Was it obvious in 1997? Probably not.
2. It does not claim every single kind of e-commerce involving single-clicking. Here's what it actually claims:
"under control of a client system,
displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model."
It is *not* a patent on "Anytime somebody clicks the mouse in e-commerce." It actually is a pretty specific invention. Other methods of e-commerce would have to do *all* of those steps do be infringing. If they left any one of them out, or if there were any other material differences than what's claimed, they'd not be infringing. For example, the sentence "whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model" means that any other one-click system that use a shopping cart model is NOT infringing.
Disclaimer: I can understand which reasons may justifiy a text contained in a wiki not being considered useful or acceptable from a legal (positivist) point of view. [Although I try to disagree with such a point of view. And it is hard, for we live in a quite positivist world...]
Nevertheless...
Why are they toilet paper? Because they come from a wiki? Or because their author and his credentials cannot be identified?
Arguing that all texts contained in wikis toilet paper is sort of an ad hominem fallacy:
The thing is that we aren't able of immediately ascertaining the quality or truth of practically all texts we read because of our own ignorance.
A text in a wiki sure can be toilet paper. But only if toilet paper it is. I.e. irrespective of which support contains the text and irrespective of who it's author is and which are his credentials.
Accepting texts or discarding them based solely on the identity and credentials of the author is logically fallacious (ad verecundiam or ad hominem), because truth is a matter which we can accept or not as a choice either based on faith, incredulity or critical thinking.
But the point here isn't a matter of faith or critical thinking, because it is a matter of lack of identity or credentials.
Therefore, what about the text itself? What do the credentials of the author tell about the text? Appealing to the credentials reveals a lack of ability (or time, or willingness etc) of ascertaining the quality of hte text itself. And that may be all right depending on the case. But a generalisation in such matters can be greatly misleading being a fallacy in itself:
I think citations should exist so that we can reference other's works, so we do not have to redo it, so we do not have to reproduce it in it's entirety, so we can attribute proper authorship, so arguments can be traced to the reasoning which lead to such assertions etc. Not as a means to discourage critical thinking or induce uncritical acceptance.
<Digression on> As a Masters student, I think citations are used to much as a way to rebuke or discourage criticism. Texts with insufficient citations are regarded as being of low quality, irrespective of their content. While texts filled with citations are regarded at least as well made texts. Sometimes it seems to me as fear of independent thought and possible criticism, which is solved by appealing to authority, and happens to mute creativity... and turns much of academic work in to bureaucratic mimetism, as a means to gaining entrance in the academic world and gain the necessary credentials to stay in. </Digression>
Cheers,
Who exactly would do that?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
One things i really, really, really like about Amazon are the comments. For the most part, good and bad are there. Censoring is left to inappropiate or off-topic remarks. B&N, however, remove all negative remarks.
If Amazon messes up here and there, i don't care much. They offer an excellent service.
Have you read my journal today?
In a browser or vendor-specific client software, which every ecommerce site is.
In any online catalogue or item showcase, in other words on a web page that has any thing to do with the item.
In response to an interaction by the user.
Sending a cookie to the ecommerce server.
Using server software that doesn't require a dozen verification steps.
After matching the cookie with your account on their site.
Ordering the item without asking you to go to a page unrelated to the individual item.
Thus, whenever you log in to a site that has your CC number stored and there's a "buy" button (god forbid there's an AJAX confirmation!), the site is infringing this patent.