For those too lazy to click, here's the primary claim:
A method of encouraging customers to provide reviews of purchased items, the method comprising:
receiving over a network an order from a first customer for an item purchased from an electronic catalog;
estimating by what date the first customer will have at least initially evaluated the item based at least on the item type;
initiating an electronic transmission, based at least in part on the estimated date, to the first customer on or after the estimated date of a message requesting the first customer to provide a review of the item to thereby encourage the first customer to provide at least one review, wherein the message includes a link to an electronic review form and activation of the link by the first customer causes the review form to be presented to the first customer;
receiving the review from the first customer electronically via the review form;
individually presenting the first customer review in a group of reviews to a second customer interested in the item; and
based at least in part on the first customer's review, using a collaborative filtering process to automatically generate personalized recommendations for the first customer of other items.
One thing that's common to all the claims is that the system estimates when the user will have evaluated the item, based on what kind of item it is. So if you always send the review request three days after shipping, you're not infringing the patent. OTOH, if you figure that books take longer than DVD's to evaluate, and therefore don't send a book review request for a week, then you may be in trouble.
Also, note that the patent application was filed in March 2000, so any prior art would have to predate that.
Interesting that the article omits these kind of details.
Movie theaters will still be around in 20 years, and long after. The Internet will be used to distribute movies to the theaters, but it will not kill movie theaters any more than TV did. A 19" monitor and 3-piece speaker system cannot replace a 30-foot screen and Dolby/DTS/etc sound.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, they neglected to mention that Microsoft's own sites have also been found doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING. Weird.
Here is the patent in question.
For those too lazy to click, here's the primary claim:
One thing that's common to all the claims is that the system estimates when the user will have evaluated the item, based on what kind of item it is. So if you always send the review request three days after shipping, you're not infringing the patent. OTOH, if you figure that books take longer than DVD's to evaluate, and therefore don't send a book review request for a week, then you may be in trouble.
Also, note that the patent application was filed in March 2000, so any prior art would have to predate that.
Interesting that the article omits these kind of details.
www.nonags.com
EMusic already does exactly that.
Er, Linux not Linus.
Just send that stolen code to Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, and *poof* Linus is dead!
Testimony from other witnesses at the hearing is available here.
What kind of dumbass VC would fund this?
Too bad he didn't demo one-click shopping too.
Mainly, PGP rolls off the tongue better than GPG does.
If Microsoft was going into the video game emulation business, wouldn't they have already done it for Windows?
Movie theaters will still be around in 20 years, and long after. The Internet will be used to distribute movies to the theaters, but it will not kill movie theaters any more than TV did. A 19" monitor and 3-piece speaker system cannot replace a 30-foot screen and Dolby/DTS/etc sound.
"By reading this letter out loud, you have waived any legal responsability on our part in perpetuity throughout the universe."
I imagine more people heard about it from the San Jose Mercury News than from Slashdot.