Amazon Patents Annotating Books, Digital Works

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Amazon a patent on its Method and System for Providing Annotations of a Digital Work, which covers 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.' This includes annotations received in a graphical or handwriting format, as well as highlighting of text." I think I smell at least one example of prior art.

Comments

Re:Bogus summary

[Theaetetus]

Sure but it should have failed the "obvious to someone skilled in the art" test.

That's not the test, that's the conclusion. The test - whether something is obvious - is whether one or more prior art documents, publications, or products, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element of the claimed invention. So, for example, if the claim recites "A+B+C+D" and you have one piece of prior art that teaches A+B, another that teaches C, and another that teaches D, then in combination, they teach everything in the claim, so the claim is obvious. If, on the other hand, no piece of prior art teaches D, then the claim is not obvious.

This is necessary because it creates an objective test, limited to what was known to those of skill in the art at the time the patent application was filed, which is required for due process. A purely subjective test of an Examiner saying, "without any evidence, I have a gut feeling this is obvious" would be almost certainly be improperly based on hindsight.

Re:This Patent is About Receiving and Serving

[JobyOne]

So sending and receiving a digital file (after all, that's what the annotations are, at the end of the day) from a server is non-obvious? You can't say "well, nobody ever sent and received *this particular type* of file before, so I'm inventing!"

Fuck that. A file is a file, and syncing it with a server is syncing it with a server, regardless of the content of that file.

I think Wikipedia could count as prior art. After all, it's nothing but a system for storing/receiving annotations to a digital work, and then distributing them to users depending on various criteria. Annotating text is annotating text, whether that text is hypertext or an ebook...FFS most ebook formats ARE hypertext in a stupid wrapper.