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IBM's But-I-Only-Got-The-Soup Patent
theodp writes "In an Onion-worthy move, the USPTO has decided that IBM inventors deserve a patent for splitting a restaurant bill. Ending an 8+ year battle with the USPTO, self-anointed patent system savior IBM got a less-than-impressed USPTO Examiner's final rejection overruled in June and snagged US Patent No. 7,457,767 Tuesday for its Pay at the Table System. From the patent: 'Though US Pat. No. 5,933,812 to Meyer, et al. discussed previously provides for an entire table of patrons to pay the total bill using a credit card, including the gratuity, it does not provide an ability for the check to be split among the various patrons, and for those individual patrons to then pay their desired portion of the bill. This deficiency is addressed by the present invention.'"
In Germany the waiting staff are more than happy to split the bill with you so that each person pays for what they ate and drank separately. I suspect that this is because, unlike in the US, tips aren't expected and aren't at a more-or-less fixed percentage and instead patrons who want to tip usually round up the bill amount.
So if the waiting staff take the time to go through 10 separate payments for each person, they probably get a larger total tip than the tip on one big payment.
And the person who only had a glass of water and a starter is happy he didn't pay for the steak-guzzling alcoholic ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Really. A 20 second glance at the patent link answered this.
Should they be able to patent this. Not likely...its an obvious idea but they are making something than CAN do something very useful.
BUT, even if you ask for seperate checks up front, this approach is very attractive.
Think about being out with a large group, trying to make it somewhere by a certain time, trying to hunt down the waitstaff because everyone's ready NOW vs. when they came by 20 min ago and one person was still eating, identify who got what, how much to put on what card, wait for them to ring it up, put slips in little balck books, bring em back, hand them out, etc.
Device shows check.
You can select the items you had through the touchscreen interface.
It gives a total.
You pay your part.
You FN leave.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I thought of an idea some time ago to get rid of obvious patents, like the (not-so) Amazing One-Click. It would mean less work for the PTO (Patent/Trademark Office), too. The case of prior art might be considered a special case of "obvious" (or known) patents. See what you think:
When someone submits a patent, claiming to have found (let's say) A Wondrous Way For Customers to Order What They Want By Clicking The Mouse Only Once, the PTO would publish the claim. Not the contents of the patent, simply the claim itself, the problem that the patent claims to solve. They would give the general public some set time, say 30 days, to come up with some way to solve this problem. "We have a patent application claiming to offer A Wondrous Way For Customers to Order What They Want By Clicking The Mouse Only Once. Can anyone come up with how this might be done? If someone gets a valid submission in within 30 days, then this patent will be considered obvious."
People who would be motivated to work hard to look for a solution within the allotted time would include, besides the Slashdot crowd, firms who have a vested interest NOT to pay licensing fees every time they want to use the invention. They would have some idea what sort of patent apps might be coming down the pipeline. PTO doesn't have to figure out whether a patent is obvious (which is good seeing as how they're doing a pretty lousy job of it). As for prior art, if the public can come up with a way to solve the desired problem using prior art, then that's another sign that the patent is obvious! Of course, these submissions tbhemselves of "that patent is so obvious even I could come up with something in 30 days" would be published and be available to the public.
Some patents, including algorithmic software patents, are worth patenting. The MP3 algorithm, for example, was the result of hard work and research. If the PTO had given the public a chance to come up with "A Way to Compress Sound Files With Unnoticeable Loss", people might not have been able to produce a solution in 30 days, showing that the MP3 patent is not so obvious. Someone might have come up with a different solution (Vorbis, FLAC, etc.), and that would be okay but the MP3 patent would be granted. (Of course, then large firms might have used Vorbis instead of paying the MP3 fees.)
What do you think?
(I posted this comment before, but too late to generate any discussion. I'm reposting it to see whether you think this would be a valid test of whether a patent is "obvious".)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
About 7 or 8 years ago, I worked with a guy who talked--a bit more than idly--about opening a restaurant. One of the features/gimmicks was to be the ability to order from a computer screen at the table. We spent some time discussing how this would work, and how the customer would interact with it.
Of course we came up with the same idea as what's in this patent (pay at the table, split the bill how you like), because it's fucking obvious. We didn't think anything of it, because it hardly seemed like an "invention" of any sort: using a custom thin client POS system to order and pay? What, so exactly like the one (or ones) that waiters use?
How does simply using more of some things that already exist--without even modifying them in any meaningful way--constitute a patentable "invention"? If something like this is the very first thing someone not even in the industry thinks of, it's pretty dumb that it can be patented, IMO. In fact, I'm shocked there wasn't a ton of prior art for this, as I'm sure hundreds of people, if not thousands, had already independently thought of this solution.