Amazon S3 is Patent-Pending

theodp writes "If your startup is counting on a copycat service to emerge for Amazon S3 disaster recovery, you might want to start thinking about a Plan C. On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Amazon wants a patent for its Distributed storage system with web services client interface invention, aka Amazon Simple Storage Service."

Comments

Re:Obvious 75 times

[kripkenstein]

Surely someone's done a redundant db with a web services interface before? How else could they have done it than that? You see, this is what happens when non-lawyers read patents. Now, I am not a lawyer either, but I at least read what Wikipedia says about this matter. As I understand it, claim #1 that you mention is an 'independent' claim. Later claims (some of those 74) are 'dependent' claims. They refine and specify what the independent claim states.

So, yes, the independent claim #1 is very broad. It probably wouldn't hold up in a court. But since no legal precedent exists, Amazon don't know if it will or not. So they keep it as independent claim #1. If in fact prior art invalidates it, then the patent still pertains to whatever the far-more-specific dependent claims #2-#75 refer to. Presumably a very specific manner of implementing #1. Amazon actually hope to patent that specific implementation, but they write it in this notation of independent-dependent claims because that is how patents are written.

But, as I said, IANAL. So perhaps we all shouldn't speculate too much.