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USPTO Gives Google Patent For Doodles
theodp writes "After a 10-year struggle, the USPTO was convinced to issue Google a patent Tuesday for Systems and Methods for Enticing Users to Access a Web Site, aka Google Doodles. Among other things, Google explains that the invention of co-founder Sergey Brin covers modifying a company logo with 'a turkey for Thanksgiving' and 'a leprechaun's pot of gold for Saint Patrick's Day.' To help drive home its point, Google included an illustration showing the USPTO that hearts could be displayed on the Google home page for Valentine's, which would be deja-vu-all-over-again for the 394 lovers who used the UIUC PLATO system on Feb. 14th, 1975."
10000BC, caves.
very heavy sigh.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Just ridiculous.
Aren't patents supposed to be for ideas that aren't obvious?
Isn't is funny how the computer doodles are rarely about computer people though?
I've been requesting Alan Turing for a long time, and it would be nice if they finally did one for his birthday or something.
Have hyper-litigious, like Microsoft, created an environment where every silly idea must be patented just out of self defence?
If Google did not patent this, Microsoft would have; then Microsoft would have sued Google over it's use.
They can have the patent. Can they enforce it though? Google wasn't the first website I've seen to customize their logo based on events.
Then again, I don't think they're patenting the changing of the logo. I think they're more patenting customizing search results based on the event if you read the patent. Again though, can they enforce this? Seems to me they'd have to prove that the site is using the functionality to entice users to visit? What if I wanted to do this just for fun?
A method to leave people speechless.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
what about the random quotes that slashdot has? maybe i'm enticed to return to slashdot in order to see what the latest quote says. how does this not include any and all content on any and all web sites, where the content occasionally changes in order to entice people to return and see what changed?
Aren't patents supposed to be for ideas that aren't obvious?
Filing: 2001
Granting: 2011
Obviously it wasn't that obvious.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Flat out evil.
i patent putting lights up on my house at christmas and wearing green during st paddys. I call it Systems and Methods for Enticing Strangers to Associate based on Appearance.
Google just patented the Message of the Day...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Why doesn't every post about the USPTO automatically have an "idiocracy" tag?
Proving once again that "do no evil" really means "do no evil when people are watching"
Slashdot will be in violation of this patent in about a week and a half :)
It seem Google is just following IBM's path of patent anything/everything - just in case. In one very narrow band of technology that I'm familiar with, IBM files about 5 patent apps a year, and each one that I've read is simply common knowledge and widely implemented by the other 100 or so people in the world also familiar with this technology/engineering.
The patent is very narrow and specific, and is unlikely to be useful in court. For example: the doodle needs to be based on a standard company logo, as opposed to a logo for a product or service, or other image. The new logo must be created to reflect a special event. It has to modify the original standard company logo, and it must include one or more animated images. There must be a link or search results associated with the image, which are triggered by selecting the image, and they must be related to the special event.
In any patent litigation, the inventor(s) of a patent can be deposed by the defendants. In this particular patent, the other side can force Sergey Brin to sit in front of a video camera for hours and answer all manner of questions about Google Co. The relevance of those questions is given a lot of latitude. Then, that video and a transcript become public documents in the lawsuit.
This is not something Google wants to do.
But what the hell is this?
How about don't be ridiculous too?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It being patented is just doubly stupid.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I could just come up with "if user does this, then something is done when sensing a users action, which entices the user to perform an action, which leads that person to some place of my choice.
SO can I patent this
Say I have an e-commerce site and the lowest profit margin I need to make is 30% on each sale/item.
A user at my sites selects one or more items and when all those item(s), minus the shipping cost come out to 30%+ profit margin the shopping cart software then gives the user free shipping (also notifies the user with a "You qualify for Fee shipping" message) or possibly give the user discount on shipping just to make them feel better.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
And they say Google is a partner of the coalition for patent fairness (http://patentfairness.org/). What a joke.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961219163346/http://www.infowest.com/
My local ISP would change their web site for the holidays back in the mid '90s. Perhaps the above link doesn't quite count because the animated GIFs (hehe, it WAS the '90s) weren't directly integrated into the ISP's name?
I misread .. and here to tell you that "stupid pants google" gives 13,800,000 results.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
By patenting these kinds of ridiculous things you are making the world laugh at you.
In time a real company with something really worth patenting, will not be able to protect their invention because nobody else in the world will
take American patents seriously. I cringe when I read about stuff like this and when you combine it with the criminal element in the American
corporate environment, it does not give people a favorable impression/outlook on American's in general.
Here in Canada American is rapidly becoming a dirty word.
I hope Google's just doing this to embarrass the USPTO. Now that it's been granted, though, I'm sure the patent office will defend it to the hilt. Triple sigh...
you must take the claims as a whole. claim 1 states: A non-transitory computer-readable medium that stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page, comprising: instructions for creating a special event logo by modifying a standard company logo for a special event, where the instructions for creating the special event logo includes instructions for modifying the standard company logo with one or more animated images; instructions for associating a link or search results with the special event logo, the link identifying a document relating to the special event, the search results relating to the special event; instructions for uploading the special event logo to the web page; instructions for receiving a user selection of the special event logo; and instructions for providing the document relating to the special event or the search results relating to the special event based on the user selection.
EVERYTHING listed there is required. it's a pretty narrow patent if you ask me. it's stupid and in my opinion dubious, but they're entitled to it. i'm a former examiner and i've come across many, many outrageous applications. this one isn't all that absurd though.
This is only good for Google, right? People have been adding favicon.ico to their websites root directory for a long time. Other sites have been modifying site imagery for a long time to denote certain events (emoticons in blogs, etc). So this patent only applies to Google, right? Anyone else wanting to modify an image on their site for a particular day can still do it right, because its not Googles site, its their own site. Where I live, the weather people give daily forecasts, and when its going to be sunny, there's a big yellow sun added as a graphic, rainy days have a rainy graphic, snow, sleet hail, etc all have their graphics. Likewise, I've seen sites putting up graphics for Christmas, Easter, (just like the calendars that have been hanging on my wall year after year for decades --yes sparky, a new one every year). Illuminating text (adding pictures) has been going on now for a long time now. Are not the Franciscans or Dominicans in possession of prior art? How about the Egyptians (the ones who built the pyramids)? I suspect there were peoples far more ancient than that adding pictures for specific days. Prior Art? Hell yeah.
If you actually read the patent and scroll to other references. Other references cited by the EXAMIER for f's sake. It has a link to a yahoo page from the way back machine from 1996 with the yahoo logo all decked out for Christmas. For the lazy: http://web.archive.org/web/19961223150621/http://www8.yahoo.com. Do you see the cute rudolf in the logo?
Can someone please explain to me when there is such clear and easy to find examples of prior art how this got patented? I was on BBS' that did this with ASCII graphics (hey that was all that could load reasonably on those 2400 and 9600 baud modems way back then!) eons ago. How does an examiner say, yep I see this was used before by at least 5 years, so enjoy your patent!
The more I read these patents you can tell they are written as such BS it is insane. Read this patent application. It is so horrifc sounding to try to describe the uniqueness of using a logo for different holidays to entice visitors to your site. Why? Because you should not be able to patent something so obvious and already done. So you make BS up to make it sound not obvious and include a flow chart to show how technical it is.
"In accordance with the purpose of the invention as embodied and broadly described herein, a computer-readable medium stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page. The computer-readable medium includes instructions for uploading an initial object in a story line to the web page and instructions for periodically uploading successive objects, following the initial object, to the web page according to the story line."
Give me a break. That sounds like what I used to write when I had to make sure my book report had at least 1,000 words. You just keep repeating yourself in different ways to make it up to the word count requirement.
Another gem:
"In another implementation consistent with the present invention, a server includes a memory that is configured to store instructions and a processor. The processor is configured to execute the instructions to upload an initial object in a story line to a site on a network and periodically upload successive objects, following the initial object, to the site according to the story line to entice users to return to the site."
A server includes memory that is configured to store instruction and a processor? Really a server has memory and processor, crap I would have never thought that. What is the point of this in the patent? What it is even describing that the memory and processor serves images, like it does on every other web server? Oh wait not images cause that would be too specific, but object, yeah objects sounds better.
I can keep going with the absurdity that is included in this patent. Like the drawings that illustrate a f'ing computer network. Why? No sh__ sherlock websites are served on a network with 1 or more clients being served. Oh be warned the USPTO is so idiotic you need quicktime to view the images. No wonder this patent sounds so genious to them. But seriously Figure 1 is an old school cloud in the middle representing the network and a bunch of devices with lightning to connect to the network.
I wonder if I can patent the process of granting patents. Then in a weird paradox I could stop all patents from being processed. Maybe I should try, just have to find a link to that BS generator.
Google home page for Valentine's, which would be deja-vu-all-over-again for the 394 lovers who used the UIUC PLATO system on Feb. 14th, 1975
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What would it take for the USPTO to reject a patent application (one which includes the phrase "on a computer")?
My UID is prime. Hah!
So from the /. blurb there is this prior art: Google home page for Valentine's, which would be deja-vu-all-over-again for the 394 lovers who used the UIUC PLATO system on Feb. 14th, 1975
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My grade one teacher had nothing good to say about my doodles, so I know that I'll never entice anyone to view my site.
(yes, I'm old enough not to have gone to kindergarten... maybe that would have changed me into a taget for the "murder" of Google lawyers).
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Maybe you have not heard about Microsoft suing andriod makers over such silly patents as the idea of an index, or a graphic that displays while a page is loading. Or the dozens of other equally silly IP extortion scams launched by Microsoft.
Google may not be perfect, but Microsoft's IP litigation is in a class by itself.
Any tech company, especially a tech company that Microsoft is specifically targeting for legal harassment; would be stupid not to arm itself with every silly patent it could dream up.
Big difference between MS and Google - at least so far - Google is not using silly patents to harass it's competitors; which is more than Microsoft can say.
Just filing a patent is not necessarily evil, even if the patent is silly.
Unlike MS, Google is not actually filing harassment lawsuits against it's competitors.
When Google starts doing that, then it may be fair to call google actions evil.
Does IBM use those to patents to file frivolous lawsuits all of time? Does IBM aggressively use those patents for to harass and intimidate it's competitors?
If IBM does not do those things, then I would think that is a very significant difference between IBM, and Microsoft.
So, they patented a KISS doll for corporate logos.
The summary made me think Google patented oekaki. Now that would've made me mad.
patents & copyrights and all that ip shit ruined the world... so, IP/patent lawyers should be shot, and IP/patent lawmakers should be shot TWICE!
This does seem rather uncomfortably close to a patent on an "abstract idea" -- which the Bilski patent litigation was supposed to prevent. If S.23, the patent reform bill, passes in the House in substantially the same form, It will be interesting to see whether and how the business method provisions of that legislation may be asserted in the future against patents like this one.