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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)."
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.
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