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Apple, Starbucks Sued Over Music Gift Cards
Trintech writes "A Utah couple acting as their own attorneys have filed a lawsuit against Apple and Starbucks over the retailers' recent Song of the Day promotion, which offers Starbucks customers an iTunes gift card for a complimentary, pre-selected song download. In a seven-page formal complaint, James and Marguerite Driessen of Lindon, Utah say they developed in 2000, and were granted a patent in February 2006 for, an Internet merchandising utility dubbed RPOS (retail point of sale). The concept, which forms the heart of the infringement lawsuit, would allow gift cards for pre-defined items that can be sold at a brick-and-mortar store but used online; customers could redeem a card for a dining room set or a DVD, for example."
If they had patented the original idea of a "gift card" that would let you buy vouchers with purchasing power, and big players picked up their idea and started making millions then I'd be a little more sympathetic. But come on, this is obviously an example of prior art, and you're right- why tack on "...on the internet" other than just to dodge the prior art bullet a bit.
In 1995, I invented a magstrip card sold at all 700 Shoppers Drug Mart convenience stores in Canada. The card was good for a pair of tickets to either a Toronto Raptors or Vancouver Grizzlies game, the 2 new NBA teams we were hired to help launch. In the SDM store was a kiosk that was a Mac with Netscape on a a private TCP/IP network identical to the Internet, but not connected to it, just to its own hosts around Canada. Some of these hosts had the webservers and DBs running the ticket dealing app. Swiping the card unlocked the kiosk, navigating the websites sold the tickets, which when printed deleted credit from the cards.
That app and those cards were precisely the same as these music gift cards, for a product that happened not to be music, but otherwise identical - a trivial difference. So this post constitutes my notification of prior art. Apple and Starbucks can pay me now to use it invalidate these Utahrds' entire patent.
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make install -not war
Seriousily... I had a former coworker who had previousily worked at the Patent Office and he strongly implied the exact opposite of your claim; they're expected to be able to either accept or reject a quota of N (for some reasonable value of N I've forgotten) patents per week and that his boss _heavily_ leaned on him to reject as many patents as possible. One of his favorite rejections was where someone had tried to patent some Windows technique (and had stolen the description of how to do it directly from a book my coworker had read and just done find-replace). Coworker also mentioned that good patent workers frequently build up a queue of rejected patents (i.e. week 1 they find a way to reject 3N patents; they then release just enough rejections each week to meet their quota and spend the rest of their time getting a patent law degree or similar or browsing the web depending on their ambition level. Also, patent office is one of the few parts of the gov't that makes a profit.