Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL 306
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon search subsidiary A9.com was awarded U.S. patent no. 7,287,042 for 'including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.' In the Summary of the Invention, it's explained that 'a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.' Here's the flowchart that helped cinch the deal."
Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
No prior art and innovative? (Score:1, Insightful)
Having said that, is it innovative? I certainly never thought of doing it before I saw others do it. I was always happy with having it after a ? and typically formatted it so it was easier to get the information out of it. When I first saw it I thought to myself "Huh, that's pretty nifty, I wonder how they did it?"
As terrible as their one-click patent was, I think this might be a valid patent (as valid as any software patent can be anyway).
Can you say mod_rewrite? (Score:5, Insightful)
Truly a work of towering genius, that flow chart (Score:3, Insightful)
While in some ways this story is a dupe of the , "Some fuckwit given exclusive right to picking noses in an obvious way" story that seems to run every second day, the US does need to do something about this in the short to medium term as it is having the opposite effect to that intended by the framers of the original patent legislation through being inappropriately applied to things wich are either not original or not inventions.
I fully expect to see a large contingent of genuinely innovative tech companies moving HQ over to Europe and refusing to offer patent indemnity for their USian users in the medium term if this sort of crap continues.
Stop this madness now as they say.
If you don't like it, boycott Amazon.Com (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't like this seeming madness? Easy: don't shop at Amazon or any of its affilates.
Maybe they'll stop filing these things.
Perhaps there should be additional legislation that says that patent trolls, having been outed by prior art, should be forced into receivership. There's no spanking these satanic IP holders.
it has not patent number (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyhow Google URLs are acknowledged prior art. The idea is to use simply a free-form string of 1 or more words to perform a search. Wikipedia isn't a spot on citation (though it would help to refine the main claims) as, for example, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/write an article" simply leads to a page which allows a search to be performed. Granted that's not a huge inventive step but in such a well worked field it is significant.
What I'd be considering is for example the use of mod_rewrite (or similar) to perform a "search" in alternate directories if a file is not found with the specified name. At least the claims would need to be more specific as to what constitutes a "search".
So wikipedia isn't a spot on citation
USPTO is the problem here (Score:4, Insightful)
But the USPTO is the problem. Granting a patent like this just reinforces the grabby, greedy behavior of the big companies and creates an environment where companies are pitted against each other not in services or products but in ownership of intellectual property. If my company can get the edge in my industry by patenting something my competition uses (prior art be damned), there are going to be a bunch of businesspeople and attorneys within my company (not to mention shareholders) who are going to insist I file the patent. It's up to the USPTO to call bullshit on these things, and it's not doing it.
Not to mention that the big companies seem to get these things to go through while little guys seem to come up empty when they try to do it. If you have enough attorneys, you can pretty much do anything anymore. But that's a rant for another day
Re:Patent Filed Date (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable [uiuc.edu], which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI [uiuc.edu] program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.
So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.
This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.
No need to freak out, folks (Score:4, Insightful)
The issuance of a patent only provides a presumption of validity. If Amazon decides to sue someone for running afoul of this patent, the defendant in such a case will be able to marshall all kinds of evidence that the patent was at the very least, precluded by prior art and was obvious.
Remember that issuance of a bad patent isn't the end of the world. The patent system was designed to be fault-tolerant. If Amazon wants to sue on the basis of their bad patent, they'll face difficulties in court, not to mention in the court of public opinion.
Re:Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they probably can patent the things that you built years ago. Then they can sue you for violating their patent, and it'll be up to you to prove that you had the idea first. I hope you have kept enough evidence to convince the court, and enough money to pay your lawyers.
Fact is, the US Patent Office no longer does any serious patent examination. The huge expansion of patentable ideas back in the 1990s, plus dropping the need for a working demo, plus the decreases in Patent Office funding, means that they now pretty much just rubber-stamp patent applications and let the courts sort it out.
Re:Prior art (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patent Filed Date (Score:5, Insightful)
I recommend that Kim, Chong H be fired.
http://www.amazon.com/Fuck Off (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No need to freak out, folks (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the first defendant in such a case may not have the financial resources to defend their use of the technique in court. Once a court precedent is set it becomes more difficult for subsequent defendants to challenge the patent.
Wrong approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it was supposed to work that way - but then why pay anyone for examining the patents before they are filed? Maybe the Patent Office should just be a kind of notary who only records when someone came up with the idea, just to give him or her the legal basis for later defending his or her rights, but does not examine whether the idea is original.
Re:Well almost like wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
In layman's terms, here's the idea
A URL http://www.amazon.com/Van Helsing
means search for "Van Helsing"
if the user entered the page indicator (in this case,
"http://www.amazon.com/-Van Helsing" means go to the literal page http://www.amazon.com/-Van%20Helsing (even if one doesn't exist) - note that I've added %20, which is an automatic character translation for space in a URL, and retaining that character is essential for a URL to be valid).
NOTE: this does not currently work on Amazon's site, so don't bother trying it.
basically, it's like cgi-bin based search engine in reverse - if you don't get a '?' equivalent, then you automatically search. Yes, it seems incredibly obvious, and I (and many others) have written code that does something similar (if a page doesn't exist, pass the chunk of the URI after the ? into a search), but that isn't exactly the same.