Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL

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?

I'm not sure they even LOOK at patent applications anymore.

Re:Wha?

yep, I have never ever seen this one before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomeStupidRandomSearchTerm [wikipedia.org]

Patent Filed Date

Filed: August 23, 2004 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,287,042.PN.&OS=PN/7,287,042&RS=PN/7,287,042 [uspto.gov]

Re:Patent Filed Date

Filed: August 23, 2004

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.

Re:Patent Filed Date

Primary Examiner: Kim; Chong H

I recommend that Kim, Chong H be fired.

Wrong approach

You cannot fix procedural problems by simply blaming the unfortunate person who was executing the procedure. The entire patent system is flawed - it is not a random failure, it is just an outcome of an incorrect system.

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:Patent Filed Date

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,287,042.PN.&OS=PN/7,287,042&RS=PN/7,287,042 [uspto.gov]

That's quite a URL. If only they'd licensed a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.

Re:Wha?

Yeah except that isn't what they patented. If wikipedia worked with http://en.wikipedia.org/Priorart [wikipedia.org] then that would be an example of prior art.

Did you test that link? It does work (after a redirect).

Re:Wha?

* with apologies to Jon Lovett

That's John Lovitz [wikipedia.org] to you!

Watch out

Don't click that URL, it violates a patent!!!

Re:Wha?

How in the world was this ever even submitted?!

I think the flowchart makes that obvious.

During the course of the business day, most people will jot down notes about various things discussed during meetings or at informal cubicle conversations or whatever. Usually, these notes are kept for some period of time until they become no longer relevant, at which time they're either thrown out or shredded.

At my office, we throw such notes into little blue bins under our desks. The contents of these bins are then taken by a company who shreds them. In Amazon's case, the contents of the blue bins are apparently sent to the patent office.

So there you have it.

Re:Wha?

the contents of the blue bins are apparently sent to the patent office.

Then I guess if I worked for Amazon they'd be submitting a patent application for "An old newpaper with mustard and grease stains." They'd probably get it too.

Re:Wha?

It makes me wonder if someone can just patent filing a patent and just make the system grind to a halt.

Re:Wha?

Atleast Amazon can't patent THOSE methods now, since I've published them :) Amazon seems to make a living patenting obvious ideas, makes you wonder why they never patent anything REALLY original.

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.

STOP POSTING NOW!

I have patented putting characters in an ordered sequence. I'm calling it a SENT-ENCE. I'd ask for your thoughts on it, but I will of course need royalties.

Re:STOP POSTING NOW!

I have patented putting characters in an ordered sequence. I'm calling it a SENT-ENCE. I'd ask for your thoughts on it, but I will of course need royalties.

atht edia scuks.

Re:STOP POSTING NOW!

Fnuliny egonuh, yuo cna get aawy wtih ptrtey mcuh any oerdr as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lteetr are in the smae pacle as the oigrinal wrod, bsead on how the bairn wkros.

SO FCUK YOU!

Re:No prior art and innovative?

Right. So innovative that I only put a CPAN Perl module (CGI::PathInfo [cpan.org]) up for that kind of crap, oh, SEVEN YEARS ago.

Prior art?

The php website has done this for ages when searching functions. I am sure they have been doing it before 2004.

eg.

http://www.php.net/stupid%20patents [php.net]

My patent

I'm patenting a method where you click on a link and yo return a '404' for the first five minutes the link is avaialable. You leave some kind of message indicating you should try again, thereby increasing page views and advertizing rates.

Re:My patent

I would have checked my spelling, but someone patented that already.

Can you say mod_rewrite?

How is this not an obvious use of apache mod_rewrite??

Truly a work of towering genius, that flow chart

After intensive study of the proposed method in the flowchart, it appears to be an if statement.

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.

Similar has already been done

Similar implementations have already been done.

With Ruby on Rails, it uses a similar technique for discovering actions. It even has facilities for creating custom URL maps so what would normally come across as ?search=blah would get converted into /search/blah...

del.icio.us uses that for tag search (ie: http://del.icio.us/username/blah [del.icio.us]).

For my internal invoicing system that I wrote in PHP (but never finished), you could search for invoices by going to /invoice/# or invoice/customer/[name or number] or search for customers using similar techniques.

The trick involves a .htaccess file that does a rewrite to a single catch-all if the requested URL does not exist. The app can then parse the request and infer what the user really wants, whether it's an action of a controller, a query or similar.

Although I've never seen this specifically applied to search (a la google), it's been used for filtering with tags (like del.icio.us).

stupid software patents.

Prior art example #5294190

This slide [php.net] from a talk delivered in January 2003 describes the same idea of searching by URL content (listed under "Interesting Uses"). I don't remember being particularly surprised by the idea at the time, so I'm sure there's considerably older prior art, but this was the first thing that sprang to mind.

(Ignore the date on the top right, which always shows today -- the talk's date of January 22, 2003 is listed on the PHP talk index [php.net].)

Well almost like wikipedia

Only, wikipedia search for the string in the URL is an option that is one click away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't%20it%20true [wikipedia.org]

If you ask me I'd use the wikipedia way, or the good old search box.
Because if you're typing into the address box in a browser, you're likely to have autocompletion. That means you're likely to start a search whenever you want to get back at the site, bad for the search engine.
Also your searches are accessible through your browsing history - as for all searches through get requests I think.

Having said that, this patent differs from the prior art of wikipedia by simply doing an additional step automatically. Where's the innovation, USPTO guys?

If you don't like it, boycott Amazon.Com

The only way to get a reaction from boorish behavior in this industry is to hit someone in the wallet.

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.

That's mod_rewrite!

Did they just patented mod_rewrite??? Tue Aug 24 06:55:44 1999 UTC (8 years, 2 months ago) baby! http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/mappers/mod_rewrite.c?revision=83751&view=markup&pathrev=573831 [apache.org]

it has not patent number

It doesn't appear to have been granted yet. I imagine it's probably at "search" stage wherein the search examiner has issued their preliminary report with citations.

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 ... anyone want to cite documentary evidence from before 3 March 2004.

Flowcharts

Flowcharts can be very useful and convincing [toothpastefordinner.com].

LOL

Sorry... Does anything more need to be said?

OK, lets talk inflation.

Inflation of the money supply, inflation of grades, inflation of patent numbers, inflation of job titles...

It's really all the same thing. The more there is of something the less any individual item is worth. Money, grades, patents. Yet the vast majority seem to have some significant difficulty with that concept. More is better than less. Thing is, you don't actually have more, you have less but with a bigger number. Interesting. I wonder if there's a level of I.Q. where people simply can't understand that concept... Maybe they'll be happy when they earn a zillionty dollars per year each, have a PhD and are titled "Captain of the World".

By creating thousands, tens of thousands of patents you aren't actually producing anything of value, you're simply throwing doubt on the value of all patents.

Real value is relatively unrelated to inflation. The economy only grows for real (real stuff like chairs, tables, cars) at a couple of percent a year. Real academic achievement is still hard, only a small proportion are up to it and only a small number of patents are really innovative and being captain of the world doesn't help much if you are still sweeping streets.

Essentially, inflation is deceit. People who inflate are at the very best, liars and more usually swindlers planning fraud.

USPTO is the problem here

It's a given that big corporate entities like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all the others are going to try to patent everything they can. It's been discussed here before, and it's just a cold war effect -- if you're the only company NOT trying to patent everything, you lose. It's a dumb way to run a world, but there you go.

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 ...

I did this in 1999

I did this in 1999 as a part of software I wrote. I created a facility to map actions to URL strings (and yes, this includes the empty string), and one of the examples I gave was taking a freeform string and searching for it.

I am sure there are many, many, other cases where people mapped 404 to a search, which is the same thing.

In short, not only is this obvious, it is defeated by prior art.

I did this in 1996.

I was doing this in 1996.

I had just joined a startup company, "Hells's Kitchen Systems", or "hks.net". We were an e-commerce startup. Our main product was CCVS, a credit-card processing system for Linux and other versions of Unix. But our first product was a shopping mall written in PHP. Not a simple store, but a mall -- it could contain multiple stores, each of which had multiple departments, each of which had a variety of products.

So, the web content was driven from database searches. But we did not want it to look like that was the case -- we wanted it to look like a family of hand-crafted web sites.

So we did exactly what's described. We appended strings to the end of URLs, and parsed the URLs and used them to search in order to build the pages. People would go through an ordering process, and an order was composed and faxed to the warehouse so it could be fulfilled. It was meant to be a cheap way to get any company that could take catalog orders onto the web without forcing them to change their business processes too much.

It was originally written in PHP/FI2, and then ported to PHP3.

Two different stores that used the system made it into production and were up for years. I am going to wrack my brian to try to remember their names, and if I can, I'll find them on the wayback machine so I can point to them. I bet a bunch of my comments made it into the delivered HTML, and so we might be able to actually prove my claim.

Use RFC 2606!

"URL of the form www.domain_name/search_string, where domain_name is a domain name of the web server system" Jassy, et al. needs to read the RFCs! There are nice, reserved domains for uses such as this: example.com, example.net, and example.org. This is very handy when writing documents of this type and everyone should use it. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt [ietf.org]

No need to freak out, folks

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Fuck Off

there, I've said it.