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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
How is this not an obvious use of apache mod_rewrite??
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
I recommend that Kim, Chong H be fired.
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.