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Amazon S3 is Patent-Pending

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the seriously-we-got-patent-pending-on-that dept.

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."

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Unlikely to hold up by acidrain · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If this is the simple combination of existing technologies it shouldn't be enforceable. "Distributed storage system..." check. "Web services client interface..." yeah we have that too. Sorry no patent, that is specifically excluded. Then again American law seems to be for sale, and Amazon has a history of bullying the patent office.

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    1. Re:Unlikely to hold up by eli+pabst · · Score: 4, Insightful

      O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk. How does the ability to perform some service well make it patentable? I could see if they came up with some novel way of making it scalable, but just being good at something doesn't make it patentable. I'd guess that someone had already combined a web interface with something like an NFS/AFS share long before S3.
  2. It's a crazy patent world after all... by RuBLed · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the Abstract:

    A system may include a web services interface configured to receive, according to a web services protocol, a given client request for access to a given data object, the request including a key value corresponding to the object...


    Hey, we're doing this everyday right? I had used webservices to send and receive all sorts of objects before, text, images, passwords in plain text and stores/reads them from a storage where I use a key value to access it...