Amazon 1-Click Lawyers Make USPTO Work Xmas Eve 117
theodp writes "In a move that would do pre-makeover Ebenezer proud, Amazon.com's 1-Click lawyers put the USPTO to work on Christmas Eve. On Dec. 24th, the USPTO acknowledged receipt of yet another round of paperwork submitted by Amazon's high-priced legal muscle, the latest salvo in Amazon's 3-year battle to fend off a patent reexamination triggered by the do-it-yourself legal effort of actor Peter Calveley. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent is also under attack on another front — on Dec. 23rd, the USPTO received $810 from Amazon's attorneys together with a request that the agency invalidate Patent Examiner Mark A. Fadok's final rejection of 1-Click patent claims on the grounds of obviousness. On the bright side, patent clerks — unlike Bob Cratchit — get the day after Christmas off!"
Don't see it (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there an assumption that USPTO has to somehow reply to this latest submission by midnight on same day?
The story seems silly. There is no life or death situation. I would expect no action from USPTO for 3 month or more.
Electronic Acknowledgement Receipt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a lousy business decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
Negative PR? Only with the tiny audience that reads slashdot or sites like it. That's not a slam of slashdot, but you have to admit this is not anything like a mainstream news site.
Re:Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:5, Insightful)
one click buying was as obvious as n[anything], it starts off with a bunch of steps and slowly gets optimized to the minimum, which is a very logical progression.
see 'one click recording', 'one button printers' and so on. Eventually all technology gets optimized to the minimum number of interfaces required to make it work.
Not only is this an obvious patent, it is part of a special class of obvious patents, the ones that are destined to happen anyway, no matter who patents them.
Re:This is a lousy business decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pushing this absurd patent is costing Amazon more in negative PR than the patent could possibly be worth.
Negative PR with who? The people that already feel questionably about Amazon? Because the truth is no one outside the Web world (that's us) cares, and we represent a very tiny part of Amazon's customer base, and most of us will keep on buying things from Amazon anyway (though I try to buy from Powells [slashdot.org] when I can).
My point is that hoping Amazon gets "embarrassed" about this isn't going to happen, and your statement simply isn't true.
Re:Electronic Acknowledgement Receipt (Score:5, Insightful)
Loosely translated means they filed the paperwork online and the whole thing was accepted automatically. So if anything, it was Amazon being Ebenezer making its lawyers work Xmas eve, the USPTO didn't have to do anything.
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, we're talking government employees here.
What the law should really be doing (Score:4, Insightful)
What's REALLY needed is a law which prohibits the storing of people's credit card numbers. The only people who need access to your credit card info are you and your bank.
That would moot this stupid patent, but who cares.
Re:What the law should really be doing (Score:3, Insightful)
What's REALLY needed is a law which prohibits the storing of people's credit card numbers. The only people who need access to your credit card info are you and your bank.
That would moot this stupid patent, but who cares.
Well, that won't happen as long as credit card issuers are responsible for any fraud. The thing is, sometimes they screw you over anyway.
Re:Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:5, Insightful)
so should TV commercials have been patented because before TV was invented "advertising on TV" was a very radical concept?
Amazon didn't invent e-commerce. they only popularized it. and even if they had been the first to implement one-click check out, it's still not a patentable non-trivial/obvious invention.
if businesses are allowed to patent trivial features like saving a customer's credit card information, then you risk destroying the software development industry. within a few years any software development firm would have to license 99% of all of their products' features because everything from autosave to file menus would have been "pretty unbelievable" at some point in time.
Re:Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not everyone's Christian... (Score:3, Insightful)
What's religion got to do with it? OK, sure. There are still those who maintain religious traditions around this time of year. And that's fine. But much of what we celebrate as Christmas is secular.
Looking around my household, I only find one religious trapping; a figurine of an angel reaching for a star. It is far outnumbered by the reindier, wreaths, nutcrackers, canycanes, snowmen, santas, christmas trees, and other assorted decorations. I haven't attented church in years. We didn't even say grace during Christmas dinner with the family.
I've seen the bumper stickers that read "Put Christ back in Christmas." And that's telling. For much of the wider population has left the religious pinnings aside. Or, at best, the religion is only a part of the holiday. Instead Christmas is a time of celebration, friends, family, and community.
Yes there are still echoes of Christian tradition in even a secular Christmas. But there are also echos of traditions that are decidedly non-Christian as well (never mind the history of all those traditions). So if Christmas is decidedly religious to you, then that's great for you. Enjoy the season as you would have it. But don't kid yourself in to thinking it is solely religious in nature much less religious to everyone else.
Re:Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, youngster, you are not giving those of us who were building e-commerce web sites "way back in the day" before there was an Amazon.com nearly enough credit. One-click was obvious even before they did it; the reason no one else offered it is because it's stupid.
All e-commerce sites I built before Amazon.com existed (and before "e-commerce" was the widely accepted term for them) stored account details that were pre-populated in the checkout forms after successful authentication. It was common as dirt, and even those customers who were beyond the reach of 56k dial-up expected it to work that way.
Yes, indeed, it was obvious even "way back in the day".
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not every job requires 100% attention 100% of the time. I have a friend, for example, who spends much of his night shift sitting. His duty is making sure none of the juveniles in custody leave through the door next to him. I think he could manage a slashdot post or three and still be doing the job he was paid to do.
Re:Not everyone's Christian... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you pay your respects to Jesus/Santa/Novi God then you are taking part in a religious celebration whether you believe in it or not.
Please feel free to point out what in my description depicted religious ceremony. And please - are you really implying that Santa Claus is a god?
Again - there are underpinnings of Christianity in many Western Christmas traditions. Sure. But then, there's also lots of underpinnings of other religions as well. Just because one follows such a tradition, does not make one a participant of that religion. If it was otherwise, Christmas as most Westerners observe it would present some serious problems for devout Christians (who are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of practicing multiple religions).
I should also note that I do not claim to be an athiest. My religious beliefs are, frankly, nobody's business but my own. The point isn't that Christmas is some Atheist field-day but rather you do not have to be religious to participate in the holiday.
I know that upsets the "reason for the season" folks. They'll have to get over it (they won't).
Re:More people should work on XMAS during these ti (Score:3, Insightful)
Unions are great!
Aside from the usual mismanagement, unions are also one of the biggest reasons US car companies can not compete with foreign auto makers.
Unions do serve an important function in many industries but they are also destroying many of those same industries. In the end, we all pay much, much higher prices for US goods which prices many of them right out to extinction. Simply put, if unions ONLY did their job to ensuring a safe/healthy work environment with fair wages, then there would be nothing but goodness. Unfortunately, unions work as well as the government, which means they are self destructive and ineffective in the end. It is to the union's own benefit to destroy a company with over paid wages. After all, higher wages means far higher salaries, benefits, and perks for those running the unions.
Do you really believe a worker who wields a paint gun should be paid $50/hr? Sure, a nice respirator and air exchange unit makes sense, but since when should we pay a worker $50/hr, $75/hr for overtime, $100/hr for holiday pay, and $175/hr for holiday with overtime for an inferior job compared to what a robot can do, which costs far, far, less in the long run. And let's not forget the health and retirement benefits many of the workers also earn - which can add up to an extra $50/hr for each worker. Being generous of what some unions actually provide, that works out to be over ***$225/hr*** for what should be a $50-65/hr worker - including all benefits, overtime, and holiday pay. Many doctors and/or lawyers don't make that kind of money and those are highly skilled professions.
Frankly, $15/hr + benefits + respirator, air exchange unit, painter's suit, is more than fair given the type of unskilled labor involved. The price difference adds thousands and thousands of dollars per vehicle - often resulting in a lower quality product to boot.
Now consider someone who moves a paint gun. That person can be fired despite the fact not moving the paint gun caused an entire assembly line to shut down. How about a better example. Someone missteps causing a piece of pipe, which was leaned against a corner, to fall onto the assembly line. Now let's assume it's either a holiday or a weekend where plumbers are all off. The assembly line is now shutdown costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. If anyone moves the pipe they can be terminated - so the pipe doesn't get moved. Someone now calls a plumber. The plumber lives an hour away. The plumber already maxed out his hours. The plumber shows up, moves the pipe, and goes home. For that simple feat, the plumber is paid a minimum of four hours. But wait, that's over time. And since it was a holiday, that's holiday pay plus overtime. That plumber is paid $60/hr. He drives home having "earned" $840.00 and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Frankly, these days unions do far, more damage than they help. Who wants to pay a premium for an inferior product? That, by in large, is why US auto manufacturers are failing.
You are not insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
My sister worked for a closing GM plant - and just got laid off. Worked there for over 20 years and her job is union-classified as skilled. Her particular job is being bandied about in the media as paying $71/hour. She gets a bit over a third of that, GROSS, not net. Her pension funding is going south - because they fund more by contingency than by trust accounting, I suppose (I am not an expert).
Now her friends and neighbors are giving her the same $71/hour shit.
You can pontificate about unions all you want - and you do - but you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's not the unions that destroyed the auto industry - it's that the entire industry, like so many others in the world today (and the US especially) are really run by the accountants and/or driven by accounting practices, with "professional" managers or promoted salesmen believing that they know crap about the ramifications of their decisions.
By the way - if any company you've worked for bills your time at less than a multiple of about 2.5 on your salary, then they're losing money.
Yes, pensions, 401ks, insurance, employer's portion of social security, compliance with unemployment and disability laws - those all come for free in your world, as do power, etc, etc. And if you think for one minute that those things aren't being "creatively" managed on the books and they aren't added into inflated labor reports - in short, if you think you know thing one about accountancy in the auto industry you're delusional.
That's just my friendly opinion.
You are correct in much of the over-specialization and waste that are union-caused. But that was the insane result of insane management forcing people (under threat of firing) of doing dangerous jobs requiring skill. It may not excuse what the union response was, but the simple fact is that what goes around, comes around.
And I close by criticizing your decision that a painter should get $15/hour. I don't know if you got that number along with the flying monkeys or not, but frankly - that amount does nothing to compete against a lot of jobs whose end products are in lower demand and carry lower costs than automobiles.
Take a course in economics and work in the real world for a while. You clearly have some idea of auto-manufacturing ops - but little else in what you postulate is even close to reality.