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USPTO Lets Amazon Patent the "Social Networking System"
theodp writes "After shelling out a reported $90 million to buy PlanetAll in 1998, Amazon shuttered the site in 2000, explaining that 'it seemed really superfluous to have it running beside Friends and Favorites.' But years later in a 2008 patent filing, Amazon described the acquired PlanetAll technology to the USPTO in very Facebook-like terms. And on Tuesday, the USPTO issued US Patent No. 7,739,139 to Amazon for its invention, the Social Networking System, which Amazon describes thusly: 'A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.' So, should Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg worry about Amazon opening a can of patent whup-ass?"
Anonymous Coward likes this
1) Buy company that "invents" un-patented technology everyone is using.
2) Patent said technology yourself, because the USPTO can't be bothered to actually think about what they are doing.
3) Wait for the other users of "your" technology to make a substantial amount of money.
4) Profit!
Ignorance is Bliss -- And the Opposite is True -- Genius is Madness
My company in the mid 90's had an online resume system for internal postings that allowed people to post resumes anonymously, and hiring managers could share postings and information selectively based on whatever criteria they wanted, effectively filtering job seekers.
This is prior art.
it appears that the declining quality of education in this country is reaching all the way to the patent registrars themselves. What a fine example of stupidity and.. dare I say.. incredible ignorance we have here. Honestly, who the hell hasn't heard of Facebook? Where do they find these people?
I love this, I hope Amazon tries to sue every Social Networking like site out there! Then we can watch it crash and burn. Most likely, they'll just hold on to it and claim it's value. Possible go after small dogs to gain a few pennies. But I'd love to see them try to hit up Microsoft/Google/MySpace/Facebook and probably several dozen other sites.
I don't even completely fault Amazon for this, the system is so broken that a company needs its own patent arsenal to defend itself from trolls. This one is really egregious, though.
Prior Art can be found going back as early as the 1970s:
***grabbed this from wikipedia**
The first public dial-up Bulletin Board System was developed by Ward Christensen. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Chicago, Christensen along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. CBBS went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. [2]
**
If he's talking about the Internet, though, that award goes to VMS Notes - (don't have exact date - early to mid 1980s), which functioned similar to a stripped-down version of Usenet, but in a live chat manner.
The part of the patent posted in the article looks like the end. That's like patenting a Bicycle by saying it's a device with two wheels and some pedels which you can power to transport you places. Obviously that kind of patent would make not sense and there can be an infinite amount of bicycle designs which acheive the same goal but don't copy each other or rip each other off. In this case I highly doubt that Facebook actually took any code or even any major functionality from PlanetAll. I mean that's giving Facebook way too much credit. Basically Facebook was a dead technology until they went and merged a hack of Twitter's timeline in with their social networking system. Until they did that they didn't stand out from the pack at all.
Even the USPTO has its own Facebook page. Bizarre!
http://www.facebook.com/uspto.gov
Why does the USPTO need that when their own website is sufficient for posting information...
Or is social networking how the USPTO decides applications now ... get enough "Likes" and you're approved ;)
Ron
agree with most patents like these, as long as it was awarded I personally would not at all mind seeing some cash rich entity open a can of whup-ass on Zuckerberg, at the very least it would be some form of karmic payback for stealing ( as is alleged) the Facebook idea from the students who hired him to help them. Cheating is one way to win at business, but not at life and I will never applaud a cheat, regardless of apparent success.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
The time limit for patenting after public sale or disclosure is one year. A judge would declare the patent invalid and throw this case out in five minutes. Minimal attorney fees will be involved.
IANAL, but I have seen a similar case thrown out where the patent was filed one year and three days after first sale.
How long is it going to take before they stop allowing software and business practice patents? This is just getting silly.
Software patents are clearly a huge mistake. The US should never have allowed them. They are costing business in the US a fortune and do nothing to protect the little guy inventor with the next idea that will change the world. They are simply a tax on innovation and must be stopped immediately.
This is a continuing application claiming priority to an application originally filed in 1997.
A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users.
How long has 411 been using a networked computer system?
Couple things:
- The date to beat is Nov. 2, 1997, not the 2008 filing date. That is, art after Nov. 2, 1997 is not prior art.
From the patent: This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/022,089, filed Dec. 22, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,386,464 which is a division of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/780,486, filed Feb. 17, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,194,419 which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/348,355, filed Jul. 7, 1999 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,916), which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/962,997, filed Nov. 2, 1997 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,369).
- The abstract of the patent, quoted above, is not the critical part. The claims are what determine infringement. Here, the claims are pretty broad and do seem to cover facebook.
-- Patent Attorney
Second, even if Planetall used a unique and patentable invention in 1998, it cannot be patented with an application filed in 2008. Here's a descriptive quote from the MIT Technology Licensing Office:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm very pro-patents. I think they are necessary to spur new innovations in technology and, more importantly, share innovations with everyone as quickly as possible. Without patents, almost all manufacturing would be a trade secret, instead of the knowledge being spread world-wide as soon as a new invention arises. This, I think, is vital to our society.
However, the more I think about the nature of software the more I think software patents are unnecessary, even for the true innovations out there, and therefore actually harmful to progress. With traditional patents, what you get is a machine design, which by necessity must give you the "secret" to the innovation. That secret can be small, so long as it's new and non-obvious it's still worth copying. But with the current state of software patents, even if you read the patent you must still either re-create the patented idea from scratch, using the patent as nothing more than a direction (with no "secret" revealed at all), or you must reverse engineer the product to discover the secret for yourself. That doesn't spread the knowledge of the innovation at all, and does nothing to add incentive to the creators of a new innovation. In fact, thanks to patent trolls, it actually inhibits innovation in a lot of cases.
In my opinion, software patents need to either start coming with pseudo-code or be dismissed out of hand. All this bullshit of just listing a bunch of claims without any actual code behind it that can be applied by a software engineer is worthless. If the patent doesn't need any code for a competent engineer to re-create the product, then it's obviously not novel and should have been dismissed in the first place. Given the speed with which the software industry moves and strength of the open source movement, I think there is also strong evidence to suggest they are entirely unnecessary to promote innovation (which is what they exist to do).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I for one applaud amazon's efforts at destroying the patent system by demonstrating the extent of its absurdity.
When a process runs amok and takes down the host OS, we don't blame the process. We blame the OS. The OS's job is to protect the host (and other processes) from errant processes.
While it's certainly unethical behavior, I don't think we should rush to blame Amazon for this and any of its future actions. It's like putting candy in front of a baby and getting upset when the baby reaches for it.
The patent system should be dismantled. It is obsolete.
Failing that, software patents should be unquestionably and finally ruled invalid.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classmates.com
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
(Sorry for the double-post, but perhaps this can help some smart lawyer to help get this inane patent revoked)
A more in-depth explanation of VMS Net and VMS is required:
- The original intent was to create a version of an early Internet by linking VMS machines/clusters together like a super BBS. Eventually that fell away to where by the mid 80s or so, standard Internet/TCP IP/etc protocols had taken over and were being used. What it meant was that any university or major corporation that allowed access could link their machines to others and create a "web" of sites. These universities and corporations/government sites were the major original backbone of the Internet, so by definition it "used the Internet".
- How this worked in practice when I was at college in 1991 and first saw it(it had been implemented a year or two earlier, IIRC) was that each user had a space where they could program and make their own home page/space to use. Almost everyone had ASCII BBS type front-ends, complete with links, menus, and personal areas. This was a few years before the first web browsers came out, but functionally identical.
- The VMS link/Notes system usually was organized by areas, so that it was common to see a smaller discussion area devoted to each person. (in addition to the normal BBS/board type chat areas. So this was where everyone talked about their life, and so on, a lot like Facebook. You usually linked to your account's main page so that others could see and go there as well. (It was less thread driven and more topic driven by nature) ie - Ed's Corner/Life with Sandy/and so on... The admin found it easier to keep personal stuff limited to each main person/give them their own thread.
- There also was a live chat option as well. I remember getting online, checking out people's "pages" and so on when I was in Northern California for people who were in San Diego. And then logging into their local chat area and talking to them. In 1991.
Nothing really like it existed until much later, though, and so it's highly likely that nobody at these newer companies realized that a nearly identical thing to Facebook/etc existed that long ago on the Internet.(and of course BBS systems, but those technically didn't use the "Internet" until much later.(still early 90s - way before this patent's time-frame.)
The original patent filing date looks like 1997 though, so is that prior art
No, I don't think so.
Exactly what I was thinking. Friends and Foes infringes on this patent. Having said that, the fact that they only applied for a patent after these types of systems were already built should stop it from being enforceable right? Prior art?
Cheers, Chris
First there was the Who program that let you see who was logged on. Then Les Earnest wrote the Finger program which displayed their .plan file. This enabled them to share personal information like which high school they went to. Then you could send them E-mail or ttymsgs and talk about it. The Name/Finger protocol makes it work over the network. Social networking in a nutshell.
Assholes.
I piss off bigots.
Thanks for asking! Most people just go ahead and comment...
You are in violation of a patent if you violate any single claim - but!
Typically, you can describe claims as "independent" or "dependent" - in this case Claims 1 and 13 are the independent claims: they don't refer to any other claims.
These are the most important claims. To work out if you're in violation of a patent, read these first. If you aren't covered by either of these, then you aren't violating the patent.
The dependent claims (all the others) build on the independent claims by adding detail of some sort. You can't be in violation just by having the same detail in your implementation: you have to be violating this claim and the independent claim it refers to together.
By the way, most discussions on patents on Slashdot are usually the result of an accumulation of misinterpretations of the way patents work. It's really *only* the claims that matter, and when the other parts seem broad, it doesn't matter at all. Don't get riled up by the background text or the abstract - as people so often do. However, to my eyes, (IANAL) this patent actually is absurd, for once.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
RELATED APPLICATIONS This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/022,089, filed Dec. 22, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,386,464 which is a division of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/780,486, filed Feb. 17, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,194,419 which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/348,355, filed Jul. 7, 1999 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,916), which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/962,997, filed Nov. 2, 1997 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,369).
That last one is the prior art date - November 2, 1997. This predates Facebook, Friendster, and all that jazz by half a decade.
Which is, BTW, the real problem: you can file a patent application and keep rewriting it for a decade or more until somebody comes up with the same idea. Then you tweak the language to match perfectly and collect big-ass cash money. Software patents may be stupid, but the rules that allow this are Sarah-Palin-retarded.
Slashdot is fond of finding patents that describe an invention in very broad terms and then say someone else did that. Whoever does that doesn't understand patents. Before complaining go to the section labeled Claims. A claim will contain a number of elements. If previous literature does every single one of those elements then the patent should not have been granted. Otherwise the patent holder can go after someone who does every single one of those things. If someone doesn't do even a single thing listed, then the patent is useless against them. There are many patents that should not be granted but only a small percent of what Slashdot complains about have anything to do with the real patent issue and needlessly inflame people.
Here's the claim for this patent:
What is claimed is:
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving and storing personal data of a first user of a computer-based service, said computer-based service accessible to users over a network, said personal data specified by the first user; providing a user interface for users to establish contact relationships with other users of the service such that each user can have one or more contacts, said user interface enabling a user to identify other users of the service, and to selectively initiate the generation of requests to establish contact relationships with the identified users; receiving a request from a second user of the service to establish a contact relationship with the first user, said request submitted to the service over a network via said user interface; sending a notification of the request to the first user over a network; providing an option, in connection with said request, for the first user to grant permission for the second user to view at least some of the personal data of the first user; and in response to the first user granting said permission, providing the second user access to at least some of the personal data of the first user via a contact information user interface of the service, such that the second user is provided access to data that would not otherwise be accessible to the second user via the service; wherein the method, including receiving and storing the personal data, providing the user interface, receiving the request, sending the notification, providing said option, and providing the second user access, is performed by a server computer system.
Here's an interesting article on patent continuation abuse, hot off a google. No idea how accurate it is, but worth reading.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.