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Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon search subsidiary A9.com was awarded U.S. patent no. 7,287,042 for 'including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.' In the Summary of the Invention, it's explained that 'a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.' Here's the flowchart that helped cinch the deal."
I'm not sure they even LOOK at patent applications anymore.
Shinma
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
Having said that, is it innovative? I certainly never thought of doing it before I saw others do it. I was always happy with having it after a ? and typically formatted it so it was easier to get the information out of it. When I first saw it I thought to myself "Huh, that's pretty nifty, I wonder how they did it?"
As terrible as their one-click patent was, I think this might be a valid patent (as valid as any software patent can be anyway).
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
How is this not an obvious use of apache mod_rewrite??
While in some ways this story is a dupe of the , "Some fuckwit given exclusive right to picking noses in an obvious way" story that seems to run every second day, the US does need to do something about this in the short to medium term as it is having the opposite effect to that intended by the framers of the original patent legislation through being inappropriately applied to things wich are either not original or not inventions.
I fully expect to see a large contingent of genuinely innovative tech companies moving HQ over to Europe and refusing to offer patent indemnity for their USian users in the medium term if this sort of crap continues.
Stop this madness now as they say.
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
The only way to get a reaction from boorish behavior in this industry is to hit someone in the wallet.
Don't like this seeming madness? Easy: don't shop at Amazon or any of its affilates.
Maybe they'll stop filing these things.
Perhaps there should be additional legislation that says that patent trolls, having been outed by prior art, should be forced into receivership. There's no spanking these satanic IP holders.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It doesn't appear to have been granted yet. I imagine it's probably at "search" stage wherein the search examiner has issued their preliminary report with citations.
... anyone want to cite documentary evidence from before 3 March 2004.
Anyhow Google URLs are acknowledged prior art. The idea is to use simply a free-form string of 1 or more words to perform a search. Wikipedia isn't a spot on citation (though it would help to refine the main claims) as, for example, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/write an article" simply leads to a page which allows a search to be performed. Granted that's not a huge inventive step but in such a well worked field it is significant.
What I'd be considering is for example the use of mod_rewrite (or similar) to perform a "search" in alternate directories if a file is not found with the specified name. At least the claims would need to be more specific as to what constitutes a "search".
So wikipedia isn't a spot on citation
It's a given that big corporate entities like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all the others are going to try to patent everything they can. It's been discussed here before, and it's just a cold war effect -- if you're the only company NOT trying to patent everything, you lose. It's a dumb way to run a world, but there you go.
...
But the USPTO is the problem. Granting a patent like this just reinforces the grabby, greedy behavior of the big companies and creates an environment where companies are pitted against each other not in services or products but in ownership of intellectual property. If my company can get the edge in my industry by patenting something my competition uses (prior art be damned), there are going to be a bunch of businesspeople and attorneys within my company (not to mention shareholders) who are going to insist I file the patent. It's up to the USPTO to call bullshit on these things, and it's not doing it.
Not to mention that the big companies seem to get these things to go through while little guys seem to come up empty when they try to do it. If you have enough attorneys, you can pretty much do anything anymore. But that's a rant for another day
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Filed: August 23, 2004
Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.
So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.
This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The issuance of a patent only provides a presumption of validity. If Amazon decides to sue someone for running afoul of this patent, the defendant in such a case will be able to marshall all kinds of evidence that the patent was at the very least, precluded by prior art and was obvious.
Remember that issuance of a bad patent isn't the end of the world. The patent system was designed to be fault-tolerant. If Amazon wants to sue on the basis of their bad patent, they'll face difficulties in court, not to mention in the court of public opinion.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
good point and similar to the fact that software patents hurt the big software companies more than the little ones - because the big guys are plenty happy to just wait and watch the best competitor products come to market and then copy-paste those ideas into their already established products and push out a new update/patch/version and wipe out the little guy.
I recommend that Kim, Chong H be fired.
there, I've said it.
there's no place like ~
You cannot fix procedural problems by simply blaming the unfortunate person who was executing the procedure. The entire patent system is flawed - it is not a random failure, it is just an outcome of an incorrect system.
Unless it was supposed to work that way - but then why pay anyone for examining the patents before they are filed? Maybe the Patent Office should just be a kind of notary who only records when someone came up with the idea, just to give him or her the legal basis for later defending his or her rights, but does not examine whether the idea is original.
While I agree this is a silly patent, I also agree - it doesn't quite work the same as wiki or cgi-bin searches, but it isn't exactly doing an additional step, it's really avoiding a step and assuming search, unless a token is present. It checks the URL string during string URL parsing and if a token is *not present*, it searches for whatever is specified by stripping off the website location instead of following the string - the default action is search, not go to the URL specified as per a normal web action. To me this seems obvious for a store, since most of the time you're not going to have an exact URL to an item anyway, and if you do, you will likely have the entire link.
/-), e.g.
In layman's terms, here's the idea
A URL http://www.amazon.com/Van Helsing
means search for "Van Helsing"
if the user entered the page indicator (in this case,
"http://www.amazon.com/-Van Helsing" means go to the literal page http://www.amazon.com/-Van%20Helsing (even if one doesn't exist) - note that I've added %20, which is an automatic character translation for space in a URL, and retaining that character is essential for a URL to be valid).
NOTE: this does not currently work on Amazon's site, so don't bother trying it.
basically, it's like cgi-bin based search engine in reverse - if you don't get a '?' equivalent, then you automatically search. Yes, it seems incredibly obvious, and I (and many others) have written code that does something similar (if a page doesn't exist, pass the chunk of the URI after the ? into a search), but that isn't exactly the same.