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Comments: 91 +- Your Rights Online: Amazon Scores Gift-Delivery Patent on Monday November 23, @10:08AM
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theodp writes "In May, the USPTO rejected Amazon.com's patent claims (PDF) for its Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network (a 1-Click spin-off). At the time, a USPTO Examiner cited Bilski, explaining that elements of CEO Jeff Bezos' gift-delivery invention 'may be performed largely within the human mind,' coming to essentially the same conclusion a NY Post reporter arrived at in 2002. But Amazon's attorneys have worked their legal wordsmithing magic (PDF), convincing the USPTO that 'obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient' is indeed novel and patentable. A Notice of Allowance for the patent was mailed to Amazon on November 17th, just in time for Holiday Season injunction-giving!"
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F It, I'm Patenting Eating (Score:5, Funny)
Abstract
A method and system for correctly and precisely placing a reasonable sized and digestible material inside the human mouth without death or injury to the consumer. This patent produces a new novel approach to the problems humans face in locating food in front of them and successfully placing it betwixt their teeth without injury to eye, nose or throat. The fact that the location of the food in front of them may or may not be immediately known inside their brain until they cast their eyes upon it establishes the validity of this patent.
Claims
Prepare to starve.
Re:F It, I'm Patenting Eating (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I patented swallowing and digestion, so good luck getting people to chew stuff and spit it right back out. lol.
Parent
Re:F It, I'm Patenting Eating (Score:4, Funny)
Well, I patented swallowing and digestion, so good luck getting people to chew stuff and spit it right back out. lol.
Not a problem, I have earlier patented a method and system for contacting a legal consultant in order to sue for patent infringement. Balls in your court.
Parent
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Well I had earlier patented patenting so you're all screwed.
I trademarked the word "patent" and all variants (Score:2, Funny)
So all of you owe me $599 per use.
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I think you should pay Microsoft and its IE branch for all "e"s in your post (that 1 in quotation marks was fair utilization, so it did not count). $300/"e" is a fair cost IMO.
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You weren't planning on writing to your lawyer, were you?
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Unfortunately for you, I appended "On the internet" and got the patent for that.
Licensing contract is en route to mitigate the need for litigation.
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Good luck getting your cells to work on nitrogen. Chumps.
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Well, I patented swallowing and digestion, so good luck getting people to chew stuff and spit it right back out. lol.
Not a problem, I have earlier patented a method and system for contacting a legal consultant in order to sue for patent infringement. Balls in your court.
Since patent infringement suits have been around for several hundred years, your patent is long since expired. Thanks for innovating in this field, great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddad. Now, how about publicly disclosing your method of eternal life?
Apostrophize, young man! (Score:3, Funny)
Ball's in your court.
"Your turn." Standard English.
Balls in your court.
A judge is alone at her bench when the handsome young lawyer walks in. Bow-chicka-bow-wow!
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But without my excretion patent, then what?
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Hey, Cyclopes are people too.
So, forget about my letters to Santa this year? (Score:2)
Boo-hoo, and shame on you! Nasty, nasty Amazon!
Psychic Postmen (Score:4, Insightful)
"obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient"
Hey, if they have truly figured out a way to determine who I am sending a gift to without asking me or the person receiving the gift I would say that is worthy of a patent. All other retailers will be stuck actually asking you where you want your stuff mailed and who has the time to enter all that info?
Re:Psychic Postmen (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a little sleight of hand in that wording.
Some of the patent claims actually involve contacting the recipient in various ways to get delivery info. A nice feature in some situations, though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were prior art (though as I've mentioned elsewhere I'm not specifically aware of any).
Others, however, do involve going to 4th-party sources - online databases of contact info, I think it even mentions DNS records as a place to check, etc. This is the part I think least likely anyone else had thought of; but then again, it's the part I'm not sure I would want to rely on when trying to send someone a gift...
Parent
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I'm sure if I give a strong guy a buck he'll crack a walnut for me, but a nutcracker is still an invention.
The method, not the thing being done, is what is patented. An automated way of doing something you'd otherwise have to pay a person to go to the trouble of doing manually is pretty much the definition of an invention. That you suspect you could get someone to do the task without the invention has no bearing on whether the invention is novel.
Patentable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I'm holding off to hear more arguments.
The submitter and at least one other poster are convinced that it's not at some obvious level, and I guess I'm missing the basis for that. So here are my questions:
1) Did you read the patent claims?
2) Do you know of anyone in the history of online shopping that has done the thigns the patent claims cover?
My answers: Yes I did; and No, I honestly haven't.
Lack of prior art alone doesn't prove something to be patentable, but if (as submitter applies) there is nothing novel about this patent, then I would be surprised to see we'd gone this far with online shopping and never seen it. Remember that just because something is novel, doesn't mean it doesn't "seem obvious" after someone has pointed it out...
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"the thing IS, in fact, obvious *specifically* because it isn't novel"
So I'll repeat my question: if that's so, why isn't anyone doing it? There may be a legitimate answer to this, but I notice that instead of offering one to further the discussion, you've opted to repeat the asswertion that prompted the question in more aggressive terms. That suggests to me that you probably don't have an answer.
"Your "objective, healthy skepticism" is not warranted in the field of patents... they've been too thoroughly
Should Patents be done away with? (Score:5, Insightful)
It just occurs to me that, like so many other things, the government is simply incompetent at patents. They aren't like copyrights where you basically do the equivalent of a diff() between two works and come to a conclusion nor or they like trademarks which are also similiarly easy to evaluate.
People talk of fixing the patent system, but is it any fix at all? The really good stuff seems to be always "proprietary" and hidden anyway, and the goal of patent was to open knowledge in exchange for limited time monopolies - well, considering that society is different and much more fluid now, that you're hardly in a secretive guild, let alone one company your entire life, do patents satisfy the original purpose anymore?
And if they don't, why keep it around? Is it becoming too big a drag on commerce? I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
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Mod parent up.
This is out of control. It's time to start the boycott Amazon mission. This is plainly ridiculous and far beyond an abuse of the patent system.
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Mod parent up.
This is out of control. It's time to start the boycott Amazon mission. This is plainly ridiculous and far beyond an abuse of the patent system.
How? If you read the rejection, the Examiner said "your system is obvious because of these references, and unpatentable due to Bilski, and oh, by the way, your abstract is 191 words long and it has to be under 150." The submitter here linked to the shortened abstract and claims that that "wordsmithing" - i.e. trimming out 41 words - fixed the obviousness problem. It didn't. The abstract has no legal weight - it's just to aid in searching the patent database.
The part that's plainly ridiculous is that peo
Re:Should Patents be done away with? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have the spine of wet spaghetti. If principles can be easily sacrificed for a few bucks here and there, you tacitly approve of the evil you describe.
Parent
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Oh come on, the moral issues regarding patents, despite the outrage on slashdot, are insignificant compared to the real moral questions of our time.
Re:Should Patents be done away with? (Score:4, Interesting)
Greed, it strikes me, is one of the great moral questions of our time (considering how it has brought to the world economy into its worst position in 80 years). Exploiting a broken patent system to gain ludicrous patents to use to stifle competition is as much a cause and/or symptom of the insane push for profit regardless of cost or merit. I doubt very much that anyone thought patents would simply become one vast extortion racket.
Parent
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Only they didn't. Slashdot skews peoples' perceptions of patent issues.
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Oh come, serious concerns over software and business method patents have been around for some time. Amazon is one of the worst as it doesn't seem to be merely creating a defensive arsenal but goes out, dreams up things that are clearly not patents for any actual technology of any kind, shoves them through, changing the wording when necessary to fool some overworked examiner.
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You have the spine of wet spaghetti.
Now that's patently unfair. Saying that I'm spineless implies that I'm either cowardly or an invertebrate. I submit that I'm not an invertebrate, as I've yet to meet on that can type. I also believe that I'm no coward, but as I pointed out my soul is certainly up for sale. Making a conscious decision to participate in a transaction that is marginally evil is not cowardly - It's just marginally evil. Sometimes being evil takes balls of steel (buying from Amazon doesn't qualify obviously). And, again as
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Patents are pointless they simply give a monopoly to one company, if they were withdrawn they would simply revert to using the copyright system, which is where most of this stuff should be....
Patents all give too broad a monopoly because they restrict you doing something no matter how you do it ...the patent holder has no motivation to improve
At least with copyright if you find a better way you can use your better way to supplant the current copyright holder ...
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"they restrict you doing something no matter how you do it "
Actually that is entirely untrue. If you find a way to determine the delivery address for a gift, and Amazon's patent doesn't describe that way of determining the delivery address, then you are free to do it, patent it yourself, etc. If you "find a better way", the law explicitly recognizes that as a new invention.
You cannot patent "doing something". You can patent "a device that does something", and apparently "a method of doing something". Gr
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Copyright does not come down to "basically [doing] the equivalent of a diff". Literal copying is only one form of potential copyright infringement; there are many ways to modify a work and still infringe on the original; and determining whether your work was the source of material in my work is really only the first step (and the easiest step) in determining infringement.
Trademark is far from "easy to evaluate"; I'm not sure I can think of any law with definitions as murky and subjective as trademark.
I don
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It just occurs to me that, like so many other things, the government is simply incompetent at patents.
Depends on what outcome you want. The patent system in the US is primarily a way to protect large companies from competition (foreign or domestic), and it's doing a good (but expensive) job at that. Ask yourself if Amazon is better off in the US where it gets this extra defense, or in a country without patent protections? And note that the question isn't whether the overall economy is better off, which is a different question.
...the goal of patent was to open knowledge in exchange for limited time monopolies
You started by arguing that the Government is incompetent, but that conclusion de
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I'm really curious what proponents have to say, because slashdot does tend to get one sided on issues.
Allow me to offer my opinion on the subject as I am a proponent of the patent system (in principle, not the present implementation). The primary purpose of patents is to acknowledge that ideas have value. Manufactured things, of course, have value and those who build them earn a wage for the manual labor that goes into making them. Without the inventor, however, we would have only raw materials and muscle but no manufactured goods. The patent acknowledges that a person has a right to earn money from their i
Prior art (Score:2)
obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient
OK, I'll bite on this one. If anyone is a frequent shopper at a store whereby the salesclerk knows you quite well, and you walk into a store and the clerk makes a suggestion based solely on the feedback you give them "I need a gift for a 3yr old boy", then they are using sources of information (the clerk's knowledge of gifts appropriate for a 3yr old boy, and not your knowledge) that is a source "other than the gift giver and recipient".
Now I highly doubt the patent means "sole sources of information other
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That's not prior art at all. The patent is about "obtaining delivery information," not gift ideas or suggestions. A better example would be walking into a store and saying "I'd like to send this widget to my friend Bob who lives on Main Street," the clerk looking up Bob in the phone book and confirming that you meant Bob Smith who lives at 123 Main St, Apt 1, Anytown, Somestate, 12345.
The patent is just about filling in the blanks in the delivery information in case you don't happen to know the gift recip
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Fine.
I've been sending flowers to my mother for years using the exact same florist. That florist happens to know who my mother is and where we live. So when I call around mothers day and tell them my name, the florist already knows where to send them to. Without me having to tell her where my mother lives.
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obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient
OK, I'll bite on this one. If anyone is a frequent shopper at a store whereby the salesclerk knows you quite well, and you walk into a store and the clerk makes a suggestion based solely on the feedback you give them "I need a gift for a 3yr old boy", then they are using sources of information (the clerk's knowledge of gifts appropriate for a 3yr old boy, and not your knowledge) that is a source "other than the gift giver and recipient".
That's a gift suggestion, not "delivery information". Delivery information would be that you tell the clerk that you need a gift for a 3 year old boy, and the clerk tells you where a 3 year old boy lives. Which is just suspicious.
Amazon has, effectively, patented Santa Claus... (Score:2)
Appears they've patented a delivery system where the source is other than giver or receiver...I wonder if Santa will have to pay per delivery or if he can negotiate a single license for all annual activity...
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I don't know what you mean by "the source is other than giver or receiver"; but since you're comparing it to Santa Clause, I assume you mean the origin of the delivery. Since that is how every catalog or online shopping service works - the source is a warehouse somewhere - there would be a tidal wave of prior art, if that were what the patent covers. But it isn't.
I wonder what this patent is for? (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem here is I have no idea what is being patented. Since /. patent-related headlines and summaries are always false and misleading, this posting just makes me wonder what Amazon has actually patented. It would be interesting to know, but since neither the headline nor the summary of the article contains any factual information about the patent that could be used to form a rational judgement about the novelty of the subject matter there's really no point in discussing it.
Since it's Amazon--assuming the summary has the assignee correct--the patent probably has something to do with online sales, but I wonder what? I just wish there was some way of figuring that out without digging down into the USPTO site myself, which I can't be bothered to do because all it will tell me is that a patent has been granted on something that might actually be kind of innovative. At least, that's what's always happened in the past when I've bothered to contribute to the /. community by trying to inform people about how the (badly flawed) American patent system actually works.
If we knew what had been patented, people might be able to present prior art, but since we know nothing about what has been patented there really isn't any point in talking about it, is there?
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Link to Amended ABSTRACT is Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
But Amazon's attorneys have worked their legal wordsmithing magic (PDF), convincing the USPTO that 'obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient' is indeed novel and patentable.
The PDF linked by the submitter is the amended Abstract. What legal weight does the Abstract have? NONE.
In fact, the single-page PDF with the amended abstract was to fix the Examiner's object that the abstract was 191 words long. That "wordsmithing magic" is just trimming the length down. It has nothing to do with the Bilski arguments.
At the time, a USPTO Examiner cited Bilski, explaining that elements of CEO Jeff Bezos' gift-delivery invention 'may be performed largely within the human mind,' coming to essentially the same conclusion a NY Post reporter arrived at in 2002. But Amazon's attorneys have worked their legal wordsmithing magic (PDF), convincing the USPTO that 'obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient' is indeed novel and patentable.
And this is two different arguments: inventions that are "performed largely within the human mind" are unpatentable under Bilski, even if they're completely new and non-obvious. In other words, if I invent a brand new type of mathematics that is completely unknown to the world, it's unpatentable because it's just done in your mind. It's not that it's not "novel".
So, essentially, the submitter has tried to claim that the attorney's fixing the length of the abstract, which bears no legal weight whatsoever and is merely for use in searching patent databases, somehow solves any question of patentability and novelty. And that's just wrong, and stupid.
Now, what did Amazon really say regarding the Bilski rejection? They amended the claims to include a server computer, which means they're tied to a specific machine, under the Bilski test. You can't do the method in your head unless you've got a web server installed in there.
Incidentally, as I explained above, this has nothing to do with whether something is novel or not obvious - this is just about "can you do it in your head"? Novelty is an entirely different question, and one that Amazon got around with further amendments to narrow the claims and additional arguments.
Also, this is the law as it currently stands. The Supreme Court will likely clarify the Bilski test in a few months, but currently, that's the test. So don't bitch at me about how a server is a generic computing device or how any computer method is still really just a mathematical algorithm. I'm just pointing out that the submitter's "they changed the abstract and that somehow convinced the USPTO that it's novel!" is completely, entirely, absolutely WRONG.
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Thank you for explaining that. Saves me the trouble!
It never ceases to amaze me, with the number of times that Slashdot has incorrectly and/or misleadingly reported on patent issues, and people who know better have complained about it in the comments, that we still see Slashdot articles quoting the abstract and generally misreading a patent application to arrive at apparently righteous indignation with the process. In this case, the OP used a lot of fancy language to appear like they did their homework, b
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The PDF linked by the submitter is the amended Abstract. What legal weight does the Abstract have? NONE.
So, essentially, the submitter has tried to claim that the attorney's fixing the length of the abstract, which bears no legal weight whatsoever and is merely for use in searching patent databases, somehow solves any question of patentability and novelty. And that's just wrong, and stupid.
Why shouldn't the USPTO judge patent applications based upon the abstract as well as the claims? Since the abstract is used for the purpose of performing preliminary searches of patents, poorly worded abstracts, or those that don't properly summarize the patent claims should be a basis for denial. Polluting the patent database with misleading data is one thing that the examiners should be taking into account.
In related news ... (Score:4, Funny)
...Amazon serves North Pole with cease and desist order.
Santa Claus counters with: Method for gift allocation by means of naughty/nice behavioral data mining.
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Ironically, without copyrights, we'd probably have a government enforced monopoly anyways, because they could recoup publication costs through taxes, where other book publishers must rely entirely on the actual sales of the books. Since without copyright, nothing would stop a competitor from cutting off their source of income by giving a work away for free, existing incentives for publishers would disappear without copyright. All that would then be left is our government.
Oh sure, there's the internet w
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Copyright isn't inherently evil it's just been stretched out to a point where it's harmful. Reduce copyright to a few years (let's say 15), non-extendable, and you keep a clear incentive to create while cuting out the "Disney owns