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Amazon Patents Bad Gift Protection
theodp writes "Thanks to the inventors at Amazon.com, you needn't fear Aunt Martha any longer. On Tuesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos received a patent for a bad gift defense system that intercepts gifts you don't want and instead sends you something that you actually do want. For example, Amazon explains that its 'System and Method for Converting Gifts' would allow you to set up a rule like 'Convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred,' which would automatically convert any online gift orders from your well-meaning-but-tasteless Auntie into a gift certificate. Other examples of how the system might be used: You could convert bad gifts to something off your wish list; block specific products ('Not another XYZ comic strip calendar'); or ensure that any clothing gifts match your exact size ('Check clothes sizes first')."
Instead of trying to make an educated guess about what I would or would not want, just let me know beforehand that you might have an order coming to me that I don't want. Then let me decide if I want it in gift certificate form.
How about a bad patent protection instead?
Oh really?
Under commerce laws, a contract is signed between a consumer and a company to perform a service.
The NON-action of that service - the unwanted gift ORDERED and PAID FOR by the consumer Aunt Milly - is a direct and actionable defrauding of service and a contractual BREACH by Amazon.
I smell a massive consumer lawsuit that Amazon will lose.
Amazon enters into the contract to deliver the goods and services specified. They are the AGENT of Aunt Milly.
Anything other than a good-faith effort to fulfill that contract is an act of FRAUD.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's just like fortune cookies.
Append "in bed" and you get a laugh.
Append "with a computer" and you get a software patent.
However I believe (IMHO) it is not solving the fundamental problem.
A gift from person A to person B should be a symbol saying "I know you, and I believe that you should have this gift I am giving you". If person B is not receiving a desired gift from person A then there are at least 2 issues at stake:
So the fundamental problem is the lack of a proper relationship between Person A and Person B, and that this patent application goes to weaken all such relationships by automatically sweeping the real issues under the electronic carpet.
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You just will no longer be creating the same contract. The contract will now read this item will be offered to the recipient, which he/she can accept or exchange for credit towards another purchase.
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I see the defense for this being that Amazon is simply speeding up the return process.
Remember that gifts are sent via Amazon with a return policy for store credit, and shipping is free.
So if Aunt Mildred sent Johnny a book, Johnny can return it for a $15 credit to Grand Theft Auto: Fargo.
Amazon is just making that process faster, knowing in advance that Johnny doesn't want the book, and giving him the credit before even shipping.
It's a win for everyone except UPS.
-David
like a bad gift to cash in an envelope conversion
but bad gifts do serve a purpose, it's a free supply of crap you give to people where you have to give a gift but don't want to buy one
So in other words, Bozo^H^H^Hezos patented the ancient practice of bait and switch. His mother would be so proud...
No, just the practice of saving people the effort of returning products for store credit.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I see the defense for this being that Amazon is simply speeding up the return process.
Remember that gifts are sent via Amazon with a return policy for store credit, and shipping is free.
So if Aunt Mildred sent Johnny a book, Johnny can return it for a $15 credit to Grand Theft Auto: Fargo.
Amazon is just making that process faster, knowing in advance that Johnny doesn't want the book, and giving him the credit before even shipping.
It's a win for everyone except UPS.
Even UPS will win when Johnny uses that credit to get something he actually wants.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
So basically it's a system that allows you to be a jerk? You're automatically turning every gift into cash!
Presumably if you're such a jerk, you won't be getting many gifts anyway...
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I've always prided myself on meaningful and thoughtful gift giving. I was never perfect, but I tried very hard to think about every gift and how it matched that person. At the same time, I've always been someone who's been hard to shop for, because of my particular tastes, and because I disdain gift cards. I can understand people's desires to make gift giving easier, but let's get serious. A gift should be a well thought out and researched thing. Have we created such an incredibly greedy consumer society that a company like Amazon has to create services like "gift interception" to make up for the fact that we buy too much shit?
I mean c'mon. Consumers have this false guilt about giving money because "it's impersonal" so they feel it necessary to give a gift, or give a gift card. Forcing me to deal with your crappy gift, or forcing me to buy something from a store I don't want, is just annoying. So now, in order to deal with the fact that we have this incorrect sense that we must buy shit for each other or force each other to buy shit from a specific store, that we have to create brand spanking new processes just to deal with the fact that we as a people suck at something we shouldn't even be doing in the first place? This is why happy go lucky cheery people who think gifts are doubleplusgood and there couldn't possibly be a downside get pissed off when I point out the very real reasons why sometimes giving a gift is not as nice as you think.
It's a recession, and people are hurting for money. Instead of buying little timmy the latest power ranger or little sally the latest pillow pet, give them each $20 and open a saving account and teach them how to save. Or knit them a sweater. Or something equally unique or helpful. Last year for Christmas, my mother promised to make me about a dozen home cooked meals over the next year that I could take home with me. Best gift EVAR. Let's stop giving Amazon reasons to come up with ways to buy more shit.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Right, so she can order you the pattern from Amazon, and you can knit it yourself!
Couldn't this also have the opposite effect? It allows me to take a risk and give you a personalized, non-bland gift, secure in the knowledge that if I guess wrong you'll be able to convert it without any inconvenience, and you'll *still* get "the thought that counts".
Now if they can patent some defense against Aunt Milly visiting in the spring and being hurt that her crappy-ass gift isn't on prominent display in the middle of the living room. Perhaps they could intercept her airline ticket and send her to El Salvidor, instead...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not (really) obvious
Uhm... it's a series of chained if-then-else statements. It's essentially the same as a firewall: does this packet match this rule? no? Then go to next rule (default: deliver).
The only non-obvious part (IMNSHO) is the insight---which we haven't, AFAICT, tested and verified, so the jury is still out---that there is a _market_ for this as a user-facing feature. This insight is a marketing insight, not a software insight.
if we're going to allow them at all, then this seems like one we should allow.
Again, I disagree. To explain why, I need us to take a step back and look at the point of having a patent system---it's a legal tool similar to (physical) property rights which is used to make us as materially prosperous as can be.
Having property rights and subsequently having cops and courts to catch bad guys who would steal our stuff lets us _not_ spend steel making locks and _not_ spend our time guarding our stuff. The steel and time can be converted to consumer goods; those goods would be lost without property rights.
Some ideas are expensive to have but cheap to copy and turn into products (or product features). The financial return one can expect from investing in the process of trying to have ideas might be negative (or less than one, depending on whether you have an additive or multiplicative wallet). The patent system is an attempt to fix this: by giving out temporary monopolies, they increase the return on the particular investment of trying to have (certain kinds of) ideas.
When a field contains both ideas that are cheap to have and ideas that are expensive to have, giving patents to all ideas in that field means one player gets to exclude other players from using the cheap ideas---or at least the cheap ideas that player got to have first. With enough big players, you get cross-licensing and the ability of the big players to shut out all the small players.
Ask any economist and they'll say (I think) that having small and medium-sized players in any sector of the economy is vital.
Software is a field with both cheap and expensive ideas. Software-wise, this patent is an idea that's cheap to have. Knowing that it's an idea people want to use is not a kind of ideas I'm familiar with, so I can't comment on whether it's a cheap or expensive idea to have.
Some of my local pizza shops put their menu on-line. This sounds like a good idea; if I'm going to order a pizza, I want to know (and decide!) what's on it, and I don't store menus (I'm a bad enough pack rat without them). But no pizza shop I know of has a patent on putting a menu on-line. The first pizza shop to do is has of course discovered a novel use of HTML, which is bound to be profitable: you'll out-compete those who don't do it. Should pizza shops be able to take out a patent on publishing their menus on the web?
I think this idea is similar. I think an economy without patents contains enough incentives to come up with this idea. It takes time imitating (reimplementing) your competitors' ideas. The first-to-market gap might be enough time to earn back what was spent discovering this idea---which I'm sure is a team of market analysts, two senior developers and a UI design comittee, sitting around for years going "how could we make our web site better? Hm..." /sarcasm
TL;DR: this patent is bullshit. Listen to Michele Boldrin for an explanation of why, at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html. You can read his book there as well (for free!) and I can recommend EconTalk if your podcatcher is hungry for feed(s).
What's cool about a database containing information I voluntarily input into it? Nothing, I suppose. The database better do that.
The patent is for some sort of function that uses the information in the database.
It shouldn't be necessary to make something like this. My aunt Nellie should know I don't want a bunch of "Mad About You" DVDs. But, gosh darn it, some people don't listen and this keeps people from a Christmastime shouting match about crappy presents.
If it's not a useful idea, then I'm sure Amazon will scrap the project because it isn't making them any money.
But nobody has been able to dig up prior art, and the rebuttal for this being an actual invention seems to be "yeah, but instead of the automatic step this would perform, you could just do the manual steps instead, DUH!!" which ignores the reason any invention is invented, ever.
People are just wary because of Amazon's history of pretty awful patent abuse. People should be wary of any patent, and any big company. But on this one here, I don't see the big deal (again, if we allow for software patents at all, which I'm not really a big fan of).
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