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USPTO Takes Second Look at Y2K Windowing Patent
Remember this patent? Seems the USPTO is having second thoughts about it, too. Anonymous Coward says, "According to News.com the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office re-evaluates the Y2K windowing patent."
At the risk of being redundant, I think it's important for everyone here to realize that the USPTO is reviewing this patent, not because a bunch of open source geeks (no offense intended, I consider myself a geek) made a fuss about patent reform, but because a bunch of big companies that make generous campain contributions to key lawmakers would stand to suffer because of the existence of this patent. I doubt those same companies will support any patent reform that challenges their own bottom lines.
Sure, we've won this battle, but for the wrong reasons. And, I'm sorry to say, this doesn't bring us all that much closer to winning the war.
I remember trying to submit the original story to slashdot last month but it was rejected for some strange reason.
Anyway what I was going to say was this...if IBM can get this stupid patent overturned by showing prior art from documents dating as far back as 1991, maybe we can do something about the Amazon patent. I know someone has implemented or described the process of storing user info in a cookie and keeping track of the user's behavior (don't say purchases I'm pretty sure Amazon got a jump on patenting it in a retail environment)... whoever has this info or knows someone who has this info should send that to B&N so they can build a portfolio of prior art. Hopefully we, as a community, can get this stupid patent overturned. It seems like it is about time for that open source patent database.
Bad Command Or File Name
This is absurd. First we patent a user interface to a website (amazon.com), then we patent a business model (priceline.com), and now we're trying to patent (and have apparently succeeded) a method of handling dates??
Somewhere, someone needs to come up wih a way to overturn these absurd patents, AND the patent laws need to be seriously changed to define what is and is not a patentable concept.
For instance, a new drug is very well deserving of a patent. A company spent millions of dollars researching this drug to test its effectiveness on the disease it is supposed to treat, and this company gets in return a patent which prevents others from stealing their invention for a limited period of time, and that period of time is reasonable for that industry.
That's great for the pharmaceutical industry, but the same thing does not hold up in the software and website design industry. What is a reasonable period of time in the pharmaceutical world is an order of magnitude different the a reasonable period of time in the software world. Drugs take many, many years to bring to market, and require a significant investment of time and resources to bring them to market.
Now let's take a look in a little more detail at the amazon.com patent. What they have patented (from what I have read on /. and other places, I have not read that patent myself. If anyone wants to send me the patent# so i dont have to search for it I will read it, but IANAL. While writing this, I decided to do some research of my own, and I did find the patent. Look for some interesting details from it later on.) to be a mechanism for ordering products with one click of the mouse, and having your shipping and credit card information previously stored. A great idea for e-commerce. However, not patentable IM[ns]HO. Perhaps a copyright on the design of the website (the overall design, not that particular element) would be in line, but not a patent. What they have patented is:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising:
under control of a client system,
displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.
I take several issues with this. First is that it also seems to patent a business model, because what it patents is the complete system of one-click ordering. What I have pasted is only a subset of the patent, but its enough to get the jist of it. Later in the same patent, it would appear that they patent the idea of one-click ordering combined with shopping cart ordering. Again, IANAL.
While researching that previous patent, I came across another Amazon.com patent that is even more absurd. It patents entering only a subset of a credit card number online via an insecure connection, and then placing a telephone call to an automated system and entering the complete credit card number, and having the system correlate the two.
Is there anything that the retarded patent office wont patent???
When someone like Amazon(TM) patents something One-Click Shopping(TM) and uses it to beat up on a competitor, most other observers are relatively neutral (ie. they have nothing to directly gain or lose from any judgement on the case) and therefore the thing is just a big gladitatorial battle between competing lawyers.
When someone like Big Corporation(TM) patents an Obvious Idea(TM) and sues a bunch of Smaller Companies(TM) for infringement, then they are just bullies who are extorting money from those who don't have the resources to fight back.
In this case, Bruce Dickens, the owner of the Y2K Windowing Technique(TM) [no relation to Microsoft(R) Windows(TM)] is attempting to extort money from almost every other corporation in the US, big and small. Many of these companies depend on this technique for their very survival, and it now being so close to the magic date, Ceasing and Desisting(TM) is not an option. And nobody wants to pay money to some guy they never heard of for using a technique that is so obvious even student programmers know about it.
So picture this: Every big company calls their lobbyists in DC and every small company calls their industry association who calls their lobbyists in DC. All of these lobbyists visit the offices of every politician in DC and remind them that Y2K is an election year and if they have to give money to Bruce Dickens, well then there will be that much less money that they will have available for political contributions. The politicians check their records and see that Bruce Dickens has not really contributed anything to their campaigns in the past. The next thing you know, the head bureaucrats at the USPTO are receiving several hundred memos from their political masters suggesting that it would be in their own best interests to review this particular patent.
In a nutshell, Bruce Dickens pissed off a lot of people, and most importantly, a lot of powerful people.
The fool never really stood a chance.
Ideology is for ideots.
Say the patent is overturned and someone goes out of their way to prove that the patent was filed maliciously, can the former owner of the patent be jailed for extortion? Everyone with a brain knows that this windowing technique is prior art (_way_ prior, some versions have been used for centuries).
Let's assume that the holder of the patent knew that the technique was prior art, and a criminal court can prove it. They would be very close to an conviction for extortion. How are Mafia 'protection' schemes any different? You threaten someone that if they don't pay, you'll take some action against them, with the threat being based on criminal activity.
Is it a crime to obtain a patent on prior art? IANAL, but it seems like it should be, at least if it can be proven that you knew about it beforehand. If the reason he obtained the patent was specifically because he wanted to shake down other people?
It'd be great if this gonif got sent to jail... =-]
Why not have a new section under slashdot for maybe the top ten or top one hundred patent abuses? You could list a patent and then it gets voted upon.
Only by highlighting abuses like this will the USPO maybe change. Once there is a list of abuses then the problem can be highlighted in a stronger manner.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."