Amazon Sued for Patent Infringement 304
theodp writes "Amazon's 10-K SEC filing discloses that the e-tailer has been sued for infringing on Soverain Software patents for Network Sales Systems (5,715,314 & 5,909,492) and Internet Server Access Control and Monitoring Systems (5,708,780), aka the Open Market patents, aka the Divine cashectomy patents, which Soverain obtained in the wake of Divine's bankruptcy sale."
Re:Not Another One! (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way to stop it is to change the conditions the companies live under. To make it impossible or disadvantageous to patent and litigate. My personal suggestion is (and has been for some time) to completely abandon patents and copyright. All they are to me is children whining "I thought of it first".
All your ideas are belong etc... (Score:4, Interesting)
Couple this patent with the Eolas [slashdot.org] patent and you pretty much own the whole shebang.
It's Official (Score:5, Interesting)
It's official - software development is now a relic of the Old Economy where companies actually create products. So passe'. The New Economy is all about data mining for litigation.
And then while we're too busy in the courtrooms to notice, and our production skills so atrophied from lack of use, the aliens will land and take over.
"It's a cookbook!!!"
HA! (Score:3, Interesting)
Patent Lawsuits out of hand (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Real Reason for Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, this part is pure fantasy. If you want to get in power, you need money. To get money, you need to promise favours/sell out to the people with money. With shitloads of money, enough to spare some on politicians. Thus effectively, the people with shitloads of money are the ones who make policy. The interests of people with [shitloads of money|power] and those of the common man will never coincide. The only way to keep shitloads of money/power and have it mean something, is to make sure the average man has a lot less than you.
Of course thes problems all go away if the people revolt and make sure that the ones who want power never have it.
</rant>
Hiding in my bunker (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Real Reason for Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Regarding the first patent ever granted anywhere, "In return for his monopoly, John of Utynam was required to teach his process to native Englishmen."
Later, when the U.S. came up with its patent laws, it went like this: "The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries."
Nothing really about protecting small businesses. It has always been about sharing knowledge with the public in exchange for a limited-term monopoly. In practice, this rarely has the effect of protecting small businesses, most of which make their money off of actually doing stuff, not litigating.
Personally, I think patents are a bad idea in the general sense. Ideas are worthless in real business, it's always the implementation that counts.
However, in the present reality, patents aren't going away any time soon. It seems to me that if one must extend the patent concept to software, the only real way to get the public benefit demanded by the patent system is to require working source code to be published with the patent.
Re:Patent Lawsuits out of hand (Score:2, Interesting)
Well...if I take my maching gun and fire it blindly about the neighborhood one night, should I not be responsible for harm if I didn't willfully intend to kill a particular person? Of course not. Not quite the same thing, true, and I have to agree with you that litigation as a whole is getting out of hand.
Patents are a matter of public record (which is the whole idea, after all), and if a manufacturer is using a process that he doesn't know is patented or not, then I wouldn't think much of his business acumen, since he should either be protecting his process by patenting it himself, or, with the same research, discovering that it is already patented.
I have to admit, though, that many of these intellectual properties patents, such as the Amazon 'one-click' process cited in other posts, certainly muddies the water for me. I always thought of a patent being for something you can hold in your hand (figuratively if not literally).
To those still amazed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Real Reason for Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Software is speech, and speech cannot be patented.
You are spinning a circular argument. When you accept software as expression, you are excluding it being an invention.
Hardware patents are just fine by me. If you want to invent a better mousetrap, go ahead and patent it - thats why we have a patent office.
But if you patent a "mouse trapping system", with nothing more than a vague description, expect both the scorn and ridicule, as well as the eventual first place against the wall when the revolution comes.
Re:To those still amazed (Score:5, Interesting)
Why you think this has anything to do with braindead overly broad patents is beyond me.
Software is over protected by IP law (Score:5, Interesting)
The other big problem with software patents is that the Patent office is totally out of touch and is essentially selling patents, not reviewing them.
Business models and methods should also not be patentable
Reducing the cost won't help (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole purpose of patents is to protect the commercially viable ideas of small companies or individuals - i.e., so they can benefit from their innovation.
The best way would be to incentivize the US Patent office to make sure prior art is actually researched.
Maybe, say, make patents more expensive, use the money to fund the patent office, but then make the patent office refund twice the money if any granted patent is overturned on prior art grounds. Commercially viable ideas will still get patented - trivial ones will not.
Yes, this would result in some folks losing the benefits of ideas that, when conceived have no useful benefits but then develop them later for some reason. But the tradeoff would be an end to today's wars over trivial and obvious patents, all of which have mounds of prior art.
Re:Thank God for all these lawsuits... (Score:2, Interesting)
Inspired! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I'm inspired. What better way to make a living than to let somebody make a fortune through doing business, and then extract that fortune from them by using lawyers and a piece of paper that says "I thought of it first" that they hand out at the patent office like candy.
I'm going to run to the patent office tomorrow with my new patent idea:
A method of extracting capital from another party by patenting a method that the aforementioned other party has already successfully used to earn revenue.
No, wait... I think that's a little too specific for the patent office. Patent plan B:
I'm rich!A method by which a party, called the 'seller' receives monetary compensation in exchange for providing goods and/or services to a second party, called the 'buyer'.
Re:Patent 5,715,314 Claims (Score:2, Interesting)
We programmers (er, "software engineers") are always complaining about the poor quality of our specifications. Could you imagine if the specs were written in patent-ese!?!
And become part of history (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.smash.com/seg/timelab/stories/121mcc
Although there are other theories on the origin of the expression, they all indicate the same thing: it's the best, it's the original, it's the real thing.
Software Patent Defense Organization (Score:5, Interesting)
But as long as American lawmakers don't understand the damage done by software patents, one other possible workaround would be to build a Software Patent Defense Organization (SPDO) after the model of NATO. I described that briefly in a book on software patents [lenz.name] I published in 2002 (in German).
The basic idea would be to copy Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Members of the SPDO would treat any software patent based attacks on any member as an attack on themselves and promise to retaliate with all means at their disposal.
That might be a deterrent even for those obnoxious outfits that have no business themselves except that of suing from overbroad patents, so they can't be impressed by any counterclaims based on defensive patents. They would still need to assess the threat of having to fight every member of the SPDO at the same time.
The IBM and Apache open source software licenses cancelling all rights in retaliation to a software patents based attack are one step in this direction. But stronger measures might be necessary to keep the system from collapsing.
Basically it's just like spam. With the amount of damage by spam rising exponentially, people get annoyed and angry, and start to ask for strong countermeasures. With the amount of damage by software patent lawsuits rising, the same will be true here.
If even Amazon gets sued, now might be the point to start considering building a collective retaliation option.
OT Hiding in my bunker - sorry, that's illegal. (Score:5, Interesting)
'Ignorance of the law is no excuse.' I had that quoted at me by a judge long ago (I was 18, and had a *lot* of speeding tickets).
Is there anyone out there who could rattle off every law we have on the books?
I am often fond of saying, "You break the law as soon as you wake up in the morning." I can't think of *anyone* I have *ever* known in my entire life that hasn't broken a law at least once a day. (Those who are in comas need not apply)
Take your car. You have a air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror? That's reason enough for a cop to pull you over - obstructing your view. Driving to work? Did you signal every turn? Did you look both ways? Is your gas door open? (I got pulled over for this.)
Your computer. How many have at least one mp3 or software program you 'shouldn't' have? Copyright infringement. Coding software? You've probably run into a software patent and don't even know it. Bought cigs for your kid brother? Spank your child in public? Pee on the side of the road? Stole a pencil from work? Ate a piece of candy from the bin at the grocery store? Have a garage sale without a permit? Give false information on your taxes? Walk across the middle of a street? Litter? Give someone the finger?
Granted, lots of this stuff is just rude behavior, and some of it isn't illegal where you may live, but who can possibly know all the laws on the books at any one time? God forbid you travel to another state and have to do two weeks of research in order to make it to the other side.
People will decide that they have no choice. Ignore it. Why bother? Everything you do is illegal, and moreso every day. Corporations ignore the law, and when caught, ignore the punishment. Politicans are making more laws all the time, yet are largely above the law.
I'd love to say that freedom for the US will be decided this November 2nd, but I know better, and I wish more people did too.
WTF? Idiot! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not Another One! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not Another One! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you also take into consideration the heavy changes those very antidepressants make to the neural system in a persons body, you can actually discover that their primary and sole concern is not people's health, but rather their wallets (and preferably that other people spend their cash on the oh-so-needed medication they so desperately need).
My father, which is currently studying the human neutral system, has referred me to the plasticity that the human neural system is capable of. The brain is capable of adapting to an impressively high number of various known (and certainly unknown) conditions - and when the brain adapts to something, via the neural system, this is what is referred to as plasticity. I quote : "It represents an intrinsic property of the human nervous system that persists throughout the human lifespan. The nervous system is constantly reorganizing in response to changes in the afferent input of any particular neural system or changes in the targets of its efferent connections." (Quoted Document Link [thehumanbrain.org])
It is quite easy to imagine the immense possibilities for plasticity in the case of anti depressants - and/or particularly in the case of SSRI antidepressants, due to their very nature of altering how the neural system works. Especially dangerous business is giving this type of medications to younger people, for instance teens, as they are still in the process of growing up.
Ir scares the heck outta me at least...
Re:Not Another One! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, there are two cults that are scarier than we are.
Just out of curiosity (Score:2, Interesting)
It's long past time to get rid of software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not Another One! (Score:4, Interesting)
It also gives them an incentive to shun and FUD remedies which they can't patent - which is a large part of why herbal medicines are generally either ignored or villified. With a patent system it makes sense to spend millions of dollars coming up with a slight variant on one of the active ingredients in an herbal remedy that you can patent, and then sell that, even if it's not actually as useful as the original herbal remedy.
And just to forestall some replies accusing me of saying more than I did - that doesn't mean that all herbal remedies are superior or even good. But some are, and they still tend to be ignored and villified because no one can collect a rent on their use. Although it's complicated by other factors, Cannabis is probably the best known example of this - it's superior to every alternative for certain uses, but it's kept outlawed while drug companies research ways to change the active ingredient enough to make something patentable instead, and push alternatives that are nowhere near as good from the patients point of view.
Re:Not Another One! (Score:3, Interesting)
Take away drug-aptents NOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
I sincerly hope that someday, you might be correct. Because right now patents are being used fof the exact opposite.
There is no continent in the world as AIDS-ridden as Africa. We all know this. So there is probably no bigger market either. However Africa doesn't represent a very wealthy part of our world. They can't afford to pay full price for AIDS-medicine.
So the drug-co's are using patents to make sure they don't get any drugs at all [manila.djh.dk]. That's corporate greed for you.
If you google a little bit on the subject, it seems they are finding legal ways around the patent-system to get drugs anyway.
But the fact that the so called human-friendly medical-industry is willing to let an entire continents die, just because they don't profit enough, probably shows how bad the idea of drug-patents really are.
It gives a monopoly to be a life-saver, but no duty. How bad is that? No really. That's just awful.
Drug patents vs. software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Drug patents differ a lot from software patents.
Drug patent holds one specific substance and the methods to produce that substance. Software patents are dangerous, because they hold a result.
Could you agree that a medical company could hold a patent for curing impotence or AIDS? Of course not! Such a goal isn't patentable, and so should it be in software too. One painkiller isn't enough, there should be room for other substances too and therefore you can only patent your methods, not the result.
Copyright laws are IMHO enough for protecting your code. No one can copy your work, but they are free to achieve the same results your software has, as long as they make their own work there. Imagine if someone had patented databases.
Users are part of the Infringing Parties (Score:2, Interesting)
The patent isn't for a system that can accept and process sales orders. It's for a sales system in which the user's computer is part of the system. Amazon doesn't have or deploy such a system. They only deploy a partial implementation of the system. An individual user doesn't have such a aystem, either, but he does have and use part of such a system. The sum effect of the free acts of Amazon and the individual buyer result in an emergent system that is equivalent to the patented system.
So, it would seem that neither Amazon nor a user can be particularly targeted in an infringement suit because neither of them infringes. Could a suit be brought against Amazon and its shoppers together, under a conspiracy theory?
Re:Not Another One! (Score:3, Interesting)
from now on, i'm going to call patents that steal obvious applications of technologies from public use "pirate patents".
Making Money by Owning Idea Not Implementing Them (Score:2, Interesting)