Google Patents Its Home Page

theodp writes "A week after new USPTO Director David Kappos pooh-poohed the idea that a lower patent allowance rate equals higher quality, Google was granted a patent on its Home Page. Subject to how the design patent is enforced, Google now owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. And you doubted Google's commitment to patent reform, didn't you?"

Comments

Evil.

[DoofusOfDeath]

That is all.

Re:Evil.

[DoofusOfDeath]

Or... it's a cunning ploy to show how idiotic Patents are in this day-and-age.

I hope so, but I doubt it. It's less-obviously idiotic than a lot of other software patents out there. If Google wanted to make that point, I think that would/could have been more effective.

Re:Evil.

[noundi]

Or it's Googles way to cover their asses in case somebody else wanted to patent it, rendering them forced to change the coined "Google look". This doesn't mean that Google embraces patenting. What it does mean is that Google, regardless of being for or against patents, is smart enough to play along until things change.

Re:Evil.

[eldavojohn]

That is all.

Or it's to prevent scammers and phishers from making Google-like homepages. Think for a minute how awesome that would be if you got a rube to show up at your www.google.eldavo.com and it looked just like the Google homepage. They do a search for Bank of America and it takes them to www.bankofamerica.eldavo.com which looks just like bank of america. You could potentially do a lot of damage if you had the patience to go around scraping major sites and just making static HTML pages that sent username and password back to a database. And if you could get like three or four sites to correlate your identity theft ...

With domain name poisoning or the actions of some viruses on the hosts file in Windows, is it so hard to imagine an entrepreneurial scammer getting naive people to download and install a virus that simple takes them to www.google.eldavo.com instead of google's real homepage? Perhaps with this design patent (as everyone and their dog has pointed out already), their intent is to make prosecuting these scammers a possibility for them instead of having to wait for the feds to come up with some identity theft charges. After all, were I stealing your info, I'd just be selling it. Not directly doing the identity theft, mind you.

You can spin this both ways. Is it possible for Google to start attacking everyone with simple centered search boxes and links across the top? Maybe. I doubt they'd get far but if you can point me to a case of that, I'll conceded vileness.

Re:Evil.

[vandit2k6]

Or they could also just be covering their own ass up. There is a history of smaller companies suing larger companies just for the $$. I think Google doesn't want the hassle. That's just my opinion!

Re:Evil.

[mdwh2]

What about chilling effects? You're telling me that you're happily invest your life savings into a business venture that includes something covered by a patent, merely on the hope that they won't care?

And what about when you're trying to find an investor or a loan, and the person points out the patent problem - are you going to be arguing "Oh that doesn't matter, Google are really really nice, they'd never do anything like taking someone to court. Oh go on, lend me the money, please?"

And besides... what if some malevolent entity decided to patent this before Google did?

Then there'd be obvious prior art such that the patent wouldn't be valid. Plus I can play that game too - "What if some nicer-than-Google entity wanted to patent it?"

Believe it or not, bad patents should not be dished out because we think a company has been "nice".

Re:Evil.

[andymadigan]

Google's home page would be such an obvious piece of prior art that any such patent would be thrown out instantly. No, they did this to stifle competition.

Re:Evil.

[Mr. Slippery]

Or it's to prevent scammers and phishers from making Google-like homepages

Which is the purpose of trademark law -- to protect the customer by allowing them to distinguish with whom they're doing business.

Google's homepage has this big Google logo on it, which is (I presume) a registered trademark of Google. If you put a Google logo, or something that looks like it, on your page, the trademark cops will crush you. No design patent is necessary.

This is more like Apple's evil "look-and-feel" lawsuits from the early 90s.

Design patent != Normal Patent...

[nweaver]

Design patents are for very distinctive but not functional items.

EG, Apple has tons, TONS of design patents on the iMac, as they had on the NeXT cube and pizza boxes, as so on and so forth...

That google did NOT already have a design patent on their home page is strange and noteworthy, not that they just got one now.

Re:Design patent != Normal Patent...

[hamburger lady]

don't bother. /.ers see 'patent' and flip out. never mind that a design patent is non-functional, it doesn't matter. it's the "P" word.

Re:Design patent != Normal Patent...

[mdwh2]

Thank you, we know what a design patent is. How does that make it different such that the objections people have put forward here are not valid?

E.g., does that mean other people are free to design a similar interface? Of course not. In which case, they share the same property of other kinds of patents that people disagree with.

Put it another way - why does putting the word "design" in front make it okay? ("Don't bother, hamburger lady sees the 'd' word, and flips out, there's obviously no valid argument here." - see how invalid that argument is?)

And they are not "non-functional", rather, they cover non-functional designs. The patent itself certainly functions.

Before everyone jumps on this

[BeardsmoreA]

It is of course perfectly possible that they have no intention of abusing this in any way, and merely wanted to make sure they didn't end up fighting any stupid law suits from some bright spark who had the idea of filing something similar and going after them with it.
Time will tell how 'evil' this is.

defensive patenting

[rackeer]

Let me defend google. One thing is wanting to reform the status quo, another having to live with it. They are pragmatic. It doesn't make sense to close your eyes to reality. Google has been fighting off patent trolls for a long time. They have to be careful.

Re:Please read the patent

[julesh]

There must be some functionality that is patented, so I doubt the patent is just "a search box with a couple buttons".

It's a design patent, not a patent. That is, a patent on visual arrangement of elements.

Has Google been losing its luster, lately?

[MoralHazard]

First, there's the outages. Google NEVER used to go down, it was part of their "mystique"--their engineering was SOOO amazing, and so well designed. The Cloud could NEVER go down!

Second, there's the Evil. I feel like I saw this one coming, years ago, having spent a good portion of my career in the advertising industry. It's a simple equation, right? Google is a publicly-traded company, and their core business is selling advertisements, which means their REAL business is selling your eyeballs+buying habits to anybody and everybody with cash. Eventually, there had to be some visible, significant conflicts between the basic reality and their high-concept, geek-chic PR fantasy.

Finally, and this is more personal, there's the lack of responsiveness from developers, and the perception of a "one-way street". Go look up the API for Google Tasks, and you'll see what I mean: Not only doesn't it exist, despite a lot of begging from interested users/developers, but Google keeps responding (when they do respond, which isn't often) that they have a corporate policy of not discussing pending release schedules. I understand that they have finite resources and have to make their own development roadmap, but their attitude seems to be "we're not going to acknowledge the gripes of our base". Which basically is the same attitude that any Big Software Company takes.

So, I'm not saying that Google is a crap company, or that I'm going to stop using Gmail, or that they're the new Evil Empire. But they're not really fundamentally different from every other Evil Corporation that we like to villify, here on Slashdot. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys"--there's just an open field of self-interested actors, each with a shitload more money, engineers, and lawyers than you.

Re:Has Google been losing its luster, lately?

[Twinbee]

Or maybe something in between. Why do you need to polarize like this?

You still get good companies, and you still get bad ones, and everything in between. And I don't just mean in terms of efficiency or how much profit they make. I for one believe that the people in charge at Google have more 'moral' business ethics than most.

Appear to not do Evil!

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Let me get this straight.

Google goes to a library and begins to scan every book they can get their hands on for the "Altruistic" reason of making the book available for a wider audience. This is without asking the author's permission, and to make things appear fair they make a scheme that authors have to follow to "opt-out". This is basically changing the enforcement of the current copyright law for Google's benefit.

While at the same time they are defending their right to copy the contents of a book without the author's permission in court, they patent their home page so other's can't copy it without Google's permission. Bizarre. Pot meet Kettle...

So much for "Do no evil"

[HikingStick]

I'm sorry, in advance, for ranting and raving, but this is absolute lunacy. A web page design is copyright protected at best. What makes the central search box and a couple of buttons and nearby links a unique business process? Google's structure of algorithims, cache servers, and distributed search processing are (IMO) a patentable business process. In fact, I'd argue that there's an abundance of prior art out there against this patent. Does anyone remember the early Webcrawler page? It might not have been centered (but that's just formatting), but it had a very basic search box, a search button, and a list of category links below (from October 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/19961023234707/http://www.webcrawler.com/).

Google might have a relaxed and hip work environment, but some people in their legal and/or IP departments must be (IMO) taking some really bad trips. This is downright stupidity that does nothing to help promote meaningful patent reform unless Google uses this patent as an example of the type of schlock that is getting approved, and makes it the 'poster boy' for patent reform.