Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Patents the Milkman
theodp writes "Got Milk? Got Milk Delivery Patent? Perhaps unfamiliar with the concept of the Milkman, the USPTO has granted Amazon.com a patent for the Recurring Delivery of Products , an idea five Amazon inventors came up with to let customers schedule product deliveries to their doorsteps or mailboxes on a recurring basis, without needing to submit a new order every time. 'For instance,' the filing explains, 'a customer may request delivery of one bunch of bananas every week and two gallons of milk every two weeks.'"
Newspapers, magazines, book-of-the-month, all these are products that are delivered at regularly scheduled intervals. But these are old media, so it makes sense that Amazon doesn't know about them.
"... an idea five Amazon inventors came up with ..."
It took five of them to come up with this brilliance??? Amazon must have some stellar intellects...
Karma: Bad
Because they can use it to threaten smaller competitors.
Apparently, you can take any patent in the database, copy-pasta in a word processing document, go to the end of the document and add these characters:
And you have a new patent, ready for filing.
This is becoming absolutely absurd.
You get the feeling that now the housing market is bust we need a new a new commodity to inflate into the next mega bubble.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you the new economy - trading patent portfolios.
1. Write down everything that has ever been done in human history on bits of paper
2. Convert bits of paper into patents
3. ?????
4. Profit!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The thing is, that this wouldn't be patentable in real life, even when patents first began.
Back then:
"Hey, I want to patent something?"
USPTO: "What?"
"A customer requests a product, not just once, but to have it delivered to them regularly. We keep their names on file and send it out and collect payment at the end of the month."
USPTO: "That's not an invention, that's how you run your business. Fuck off."
One click was based on an idea a few thousand years old. "put it on my tab" worked like one-click for more than a thousand years.
Learn to love Alaska
More closely to the actual patent:
"My invention is a method for business, where I have a machine that will listen to my customers, record what products they want regularly, and maintain an ongoing list for each customer. Whenever a product on the list needs to be ordered so it will arrive when the customer wants it, this machine will alert me place the order on the customer's behalf... on a computer."
Or in other words, it's not really like a milkman, or even how a milkman operated, but let's not let that get in the way of our Slashdot-mandated rant against the USPTO.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Even without considering prior art, this is not an invention.
It's not patentable matter.
Why is USPTO asleep at the switch?
This would fall under "Business method" patents. As for recurring deliveries without reordering, maybe my weekly newspaper should print a story on this "new" business method. They've only been doing this since they started.
35 USC 101: Patentable Subject Matter "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
That's the black letter law and has been for quite some time. Not saying it is right, or that the interpretations haven't been vastly overextended, but patents don't cover just inventions.
Oh bother... someone has been futzing with the word process.
There is an apparent corruption of the word process that confused a physical process with a logical process. The process for making steel is not the same as a process describing how to manage the making of steel.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
They are patenting an entire delivery scheduling methodology for customer order management of groceries (etc) that will re-occur on a predictable and fairly precise time period of the customer's choosing.
I have a picture of a milkman's horse lifting his blinkers with one hoof and rolling his eyes at this patent, it's just ordinary business practice for any company that delivers stuff to your door. The local chemist paid me to deliver stuff on on a push bike way back in the 60's. Most family's had one car (at most), the chemist had plenty of regular customers who had difficulty getting around so he bent over backwards to accommodate their needs. He didn't have a computer and trucks, he had an order book, a big black phone, and a bunch of eager kids on push bikes who had more than enough local knowledge to make UPS blush. If a customer was in dire need during school hours, he would get in his VW and deliver it himself. Virtually the same service is available today but it's organized by the government, you get a qualified nurse in a tiny car rather than a grotty kid on a push bike. There is however a shit load more paper work involved to join up.
Copyright protects Amazon's software implementation of this age old business practice, the only possible use for a patent such as this is to burden and stall serious competitors with serious litigation, as in Apple vs Samsung. Software patents are a legislative experiment that failed. It was worth having the experiment, but now we know that all it does is provide an arena for elephants to fight, and we all know what happens to the grass when elephants fight.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.