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One-Click Reprise 97

Posted by michael from the click-me-baby-one-more-time dept.
The One-Click Saga has been going on for a while now. BountyQuest has now thrown in the towel on finding a definitive usage of one-click web shopping that predates Amazon's patent. Tim O'Reilly wrote a response to the finding, where he accepts Amazon's patent as valid - with nary a mention of the fact that most of the world doesn't permit software patents at all. Finally, Internetnews.com looks at the future of one-click and notes that despite any smoking gun, this might help Barnes and Noble fight their lawsuit against Amazon.
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One-Click Reprise More

One-Click Reprise

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  • Yes. Narrow enough for me to be sure I NEVER give Amazon my credit card number. What I haven't found out is how we got in this IP patent mess in the first place.

    Who made IP patents legal? Why can't someone patent a novel or a song? Who owns your thoughts if somebody thought the same thing a week earlier?


    blessings,

  • Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:4)

    by TechLawyer ( 182030 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @04:35PM (#362964)
    Bingo. And to quote O'Reilly: On close examination, I also discovered that the One-Click patent is far narrower than people assume it is. The innovation it claims is based on some very specific software-driven steps in the Web shopping process that were designed to make it simpler and more automatic for consumers to complete e-commerce transactions. The specific steps of the claims were what had to be non-obvious and novel, and O'Reilly points out those claims are narrow indeed.

  • Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:3)

    by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @05:13PM (#362965) Homepage
    Geeks tend to constantly overestimate their own ability in what amounts to severe egotism. They assume that if someone else could create something, then surely it wouldn't been no trouble to them.

    The XOR patent for cursor display was the favourite whipping boy of the anti-software patent movement (you can still find the odd reference here and there). XOR-ing cursors was according to the anti-software patent folks the "obvious" and "natural way" to do it.

    Then at some point a researcher took the care of examining how exactly cursor display was done in all other graphic systems in 1978 when the XOR patent application was filed (there weren't that many) and all those he could find used a copy buffer and not the "obvious" XOR idea.

    IIRC, the XOR idea was so quickly adopted that by 1981 it was prevalent and even tought in school. But no documented use before 1980 or so could be found.

    In 1989 corporations with deep pockets challenged the XOR patent. It was duly reexamined and held valid by the PTO.

  • (I think) he just means that you can't rely on your employees to have all the great ideas, to the exclusion of anyone else's employees having any.

    The right ideas, the right place and the right resources are probably all required to do well in the grand dance of capitalism... having a monopoly of all the good ideas just isn't possible.

    --

  • I predict that we will soon start patenting philosophies or religions.

    One word... Scientology <shudder>


    --Gfunk
  • Better be glad Tim did that ass kissing, Amazon might have stopped selling the animal books. ;)

  • MiniVend - Submission 16 to Bounty Quest (Score:3)

    by mami ( 209922 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:31PM (#362969)
    I find the entry number 16 of the submission to the one-click BountyQuest very interesting. See here [bountyquest.com]

    Tim O'Reilly says the following (quote):
    "16. Online Minivend Reference Guide "MiniVend -multi-catalog shopping cart and mall," March 14, 1997. Mike Heins, the creator of the MiniVend system (now owned by Red Hat under the name "Interchange") provided some great art. He showed us how to very easily configure his open-source system to perform single-click buying. In writing the system, he put considerable effort into saving customer session information, so that buyers would not have to reenter their information to make purchases.

    However, the submission is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone made those simple changes and implemented 1-Click shopping in the proper fashion before our Prior To date." (end of quote)

    The last sentence is, IMHO, really MORE THAN ANNOYING ! Not that I blame Tim O'Reilly for it, but I simply don't believe it.

    I have been reading the minivend mailing list since it started out beginning of 1997. Mike Heins posted to his minivend mailing list as a response to someone who asked exactly for something that represents the implementation of the one-click ordering feature, that this feature CAN be implemented AND THAT IT HAS BEEN DONE. This was on May 13th, 1997 and clearly before the cut-off date of Sept. 27th, 1997.

    Please read the short thread of the post on "Retaining user information" here [akopia.com]

    I am aware of the fact, that Mike Heins might have been under restrictions to release any more information of who had done it at that time, but obviously he knew so much, that he confidently could mention on the mailing list, that it "has been done". I can say, that what later became known as the "famous" one-click feature, was something that was an option to be implemented easily for a programmer who could understand the software, i.e. a person skilled in the trade, and users of MiniVend were aware of it. I am sure several people have thought and played with setting it up, but might not have gone through with it, because many customer didn't like it at that time. It was considered just too mysterious and considered not "slow and clear" enough.

    But quite frankly I could very well imagine that in certain industries that feature might have been welcome and that it was implemented. I simply think that the ones, who did it, don't want to come forward for whatever reasons.

    Now, may be it is really impossible to find the person or site, who implemented it and prove that it was done, but this is an appeal for whoever it was to COME FORWARD.

    So, even if Tim O'Reilly throws the towel, that doesn't mean that the battle is lost.

    Would be interesting to know if the site could be found and retrieved in the Alexa archive, which of course now is conveniently owned by Amazon.com itself. What a coincidence. For more on Alexa archives look here [alexa.com] and here [alexa.com]. The archives have now 16 terabytes of text, audio and graphical files, accumulated from April 1996 on.

  • Read the US Code. Novels and songs are not patentable subject matter. With regard to patentable subject matter, the PTO doesn't discriminate against software innovators & say that their inventions are somehow less worthy than the inventions of hardware innovators. On the flip side, software developers have to start worrying about the same concerns that their hardware brethern always have.

    Don't worry about your thoughts. You can think whatever you want at any time, and if you're ever concerned you can't, there's always tinfoil. :) But just like you can think about blowing up a building but get in trouble if you do it, you can think about a technology that will violate a patent if you make, use or sell it.

  • Well it is so decent, that it is meanwhile standard e-commerce platform for the upcoming e-commerce solutions services from RedHat.

    It's now called RedHat Interchange TM, a product which represents a merger of the former Tallyman software and the former MiniVend software, which occurred last fall into the product Akopia Interchange[TM] and last month was taken over by RedHat.

    http://developer.akopia.com
  • A *novel* idea (in ASP, for example):

    Sub OneClick

    If Request.Cookies("oneclick") = "TRUE" Then

    Dim SQL, RS

    SQL="SELECT * FROM OneClickShoppers WHERE OneClickShopper.UserID=" & Reqest.Cookies("UserID")

    Set RS=DSNString

    RS.Open SQL, ConnectString

    Call ProcessOneClickOrder

    Else

    Call DisplayNormalUserForm

    End If

    End Sub

    To any programmer with a couple months experience, this is not novel, this is obvious. This is a standard feature of the web. Unfortunately, I'm too tired to go searching for pre-Amazon examples of this usage (and let's face it, most if not all of them have probably gone tits up).

    $man microsoft

  • I find it very interesting that Bountyquest posts this a week after M-CAM [m-cam.com] publically posted it's report [m-cam.com] on the '411 patent.

    Coincidence?

  • I forgot about Scientology. Well, pretty soon we'll start patenting philosophies. Or did Ayn Rand take out a patent on Objectivism?

  • Who will end up owning this patent? (Score:3)

    by jimhill ( 7277 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @06:55PM (#362975) Homepage
    I am one of the folks who thinks that Amazon's destined to go belly-up, that the reason they haven't yet is because they were the giant, and it's harder to get the big tree falling -- of course, once it starts it's impossible to stop.

    So assuming that I'm right (and please save your joke about "assume", those of us out of elementary school have heard it already), Amazon's going to be having a great big "We've lost our lease, everything must go, we're holding nothing back!" sale. And then what will they have to offer? Limited inventory, a huge database of customers cross-correlated and analyzed out the wazoo...and, of course, a patent portfolio. One which if rigorously enforced pretty much gives the online store to whomever ends up owning the patent.

    So what happens then? I'd especially like to hear from real live professionals, who might know what happens when the legal entity holding intellectual "property" dissolves.
  • Poor software developers... They have to operate within the same constraints as people in other industries. Don't take the patent so personally, think of the larger picture involved. It's not all about just one patent. It's about patenting things that really shouldn't be patentable. And don't take this as an anti-patent schpeel, because i'm totally for patents as being valid protectors of real innovation and new technologies. But patenting business models themselves?

    I don't actually see a problem with the patent itself, just the theory of patenting business models rather than actual advances in technology and discovery. It's too bad that they're allowed, but no one will put up a big fight on business model patents until they start leaking out of the tech world and into the realm that it effects the other 95% of the business world.
  • OK, could someone now explain to the rest of us what the XOR patent for cursor display is?


    ---

  • I meant in Europe and the US, above.

    E
  • ...

    In 1989 corporations with deep pockets challenged the XOR patent. It was duly reexamined and held valid by the PTO.

    Just because something hasn't been done before does not mean it's "non-obvious." It's especially hazy with computer algorithms.

    Consider something George Carlin once said... (I paraphrase)... "Here is something no one has ever said before: 'As soon as I get done sticking this hot poker up my ass, I'm going to chop my dick off!' You've never heard that. Right! No one ever said that! Which means I'm the first person in the history of the planet to put those words together, in that exact order! First Ever!"

    Ahh crap... what was I saying?
  • Having said that, I can see why awarding the one-click patent to Amazon might rub people the wrong way. There isn't a substantially new discovery or technique in their claim. In fact, it looks more like the machinations of their IP attorneys.

    The problem is exactly that. Patent battles have become (by and large) exactly that. Lengthy legal wrangling over patent portfolios. The patent system as it exists today neither 1) fosters innovation nor does it 2) rewards the innovator.

    This, combined with the fact that many of us (although certainly not all) question the whole concept of intellectual property, brings us to the broad, sweeping conclusion that patents are bad, mmmmkay?

    And a nice intellectual property discussion would be woefully incomplete without this gem (seeing as somebody inevitably brings up the constitutional heritage of patents/copyrights):

    "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

    - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
  • One-click is mostly valuable to frequent customers. Maybe Amazon was the first to have enough repeat buyers to make one-click pay off.

    No, I don't believe so. Porn sites had already enough repeat customers and that is why in 1997 only porn sites had the one-click order procedure implemented. Now, are you willing to search through the porn archives to prove it, in order to provide evidence of prior art ?

    As ethical questions are not relevant anyway, why is the open source community not open enough to prove something, what they are never tired to argue about in defense of the programmer, who test their software with help of porn sites. That you can learn something from the porn industry and if it were not for the porn industry, we wouldn't have "all this advancements in web technology". I am sure they are the first to implement one-time, prepaid credit cards, so that customer's anonymity is protected.

    I mean any spider can search for a couple of thousands or millions porn sites in seconds, but strangely enough they can't search these sites for implementations of the one-click ordering feature. Can it get more pathetic than this ?

    Aren't porn sites the only ones, which surely make profit, need to be anonymous, because they are target of frequent and repeated usage by customers, who really won't bother typing their personal information over and over ?

    Case closed.

  • Well, if she didn't you just gave the most recent crop of Randroids a wonderful idea...
  • Say you have a 1-bit bitmap (black & white), and you want to superimpose, say a mouse arrow cursor over that bitmap. What programming technique do you use to make sure that you don't leave "mouse trails" when the cursor moves.

    (1) Each time you draw the cursor, save a copy of whatever the cursor is overwriting. When the cursor moves, restore the screen data from your saved copy.

    (2) Exclusive-or the cursor with the bitmap. By doing this, all of the black pixels in the shape of the cursor turn white, and all the white pixels turn black. The advantage to this is that you don't have to save any screen data. To restore the background bitmap to its original state, simply repeat the exclusive-or operation.

  • In their briefs filed with the court in question, B&N uses the example of a Compuserve stock quote system which allowed a subscriber to order (with payment charged to their CIS account) a stock chart with a single command. This example seems to posess all of the claims of the Amazon patent and was influential in getting the preliminary injunction quashed.

  • Re:Question to all (Score:3)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:11AM (#362985) Homepage
    Patents are NOT a competitive advantage. There is no competition in a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to make something then market forces can't select the best product.

    Patents IMHO last longer than they should. The purpose of a patent shouldn't be to ensure a monopoly, it's to let you get to market first. This is accomplished with a limited term monopoly sure, but the monopoly should be the means, not the end.

    With a mechanical process you need to tool up, a process that isn't even taking as long these days, and then ship a new physical product. With software you can ship a product in six months (I know of which I speak, my company is releasing products we were having first design meetings about in September 2000.) so a nearly twenty year monopoly is insane.

    So, that's a problem with the implementation of patents in general. If it takes a company two years to bring hardware to market the patent should be for three years or so, not seventeen (last I heard). Protection should be removed when the company brings a product to market, or when they stop production. This would stop companies from laying a mine-field in an undeveloped industry.

    Then, onto the specifics of software patents... Most software patents seem to either cover a basic universal property just used in a new medium. Discoveries supposedly can't be patented. If you discover a formula for pi you can't patent pi, or the formula. But that's the sort of thing I feel you see in software patents. What should be patentable is a specific chip that is designed to calculate pi more quickly than a general CPU.

    To use the favorite example, using XOR to draw a cursor.

    This was patented in the late 70s, before the PC revolution. Nobody was really working on GUIs and the ones who were weren't doing it for production systems. To implement ASM-level optimization in drawing routines on a concept system would have made it harder to design for and wasted developer time on speed tweaks. (Tweaks for speed come before release, when the number of users is such to justify their savings vs the outlay of the programmer's time.)

    So this patent was basically granted to the first company to get around to optimizing a GUI to the point where they did the obvious thing for drawing a cursor.

    For a cursor you want speed much more than looks. It doesn't matter if the cursor changes color as it moves, in fact, it's easier to see if it's always in reverse-video relative to the background. So the tradeoffs involved in display quality are irrelevant with the usefulness of being able to draw and erase the cursor with the same routine, and with not having to have a buffer to store the part of the screen being overwritten.

    But there's no reason this would have been developed early. A generic drawing routine would have been of use for anything you wanted to draw. It would have been slower and taken more memory, but a single test system can afford to be faster and have more memory than the eventual target system. Thus slower, more general routines are obviously what should have been used.

    So why does a company deserve a patent on someone that any competent programmer (of the era, back when people learned ASM) could have done, had they had the need?

    Patents are supposed to reward innovation, not simply the first person into an area.

    Similarly, almost all software patents I've heard about have been trivially obvious. Sure, the patenter was the first, but that's not a high enough standard for non-software patents. We also require that an average professional in the industry wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstance.

    But was any programmer of the era asked to optimize a cursor drawing routine in ASM, to see how they'd go about it?
  • that's a great point! There doesn't seem to be anyone stopping others from selling "self-stick" notes or sticky-notes. Like these. [officemax.com]

    Granted, they don't call them post-it notes, but they're exactly the same thing! Now, are you really a lawyer? Care to continue the conversation?

  • And that is the key point: "On close examination, I also discovered that the One-Click patent is far narrower than people assume it is". I read a lot of patents and I write them too. It is the claims of the patent that need to be carefully examined to discover the breadth of the invention. Often novice patent readers give too much creadance to the specification (the bit before the claims) and get all flustered. Invariably the specification contains prior art and a whole stack of description that sets the scene for the invention. Writing a good specification is important to the claims and future continuations/clarifications so bundling the kitchen sink in there is a good technique for the writer.

    Further, remember that although the patent can be granted, that doesn't mean that everything is a done deal. Patents can be strong or weak, broad or narrow and you only find that out in litigation (or by asking someone like me to evaluate it for you ;-). If you have a good patent attorney they will write the patent assuming it will be challenged in court. That means that a jury might actually end up deciding how good your patent is! A jury - common people. Worry about that!

    Finally, software patents are entirely valid in my opinion. Copyright doesn't protect inventions in the same way that a patent can so a patent is required to recoup the R&D investment, especially for the little guy. However, given the fast moving pace of software, actually getting a patent can take so long that the business advantage can be lost. Also, because of this delay in the granting, patents can often come as a surprise to others who thought the invention was commonly available. I would certainly trade fast granting (3 months or so) in exchange for a 2 or 3 year monopoly rather than the current patent lifetime.

    Cliff.

  • Amazon's competitors would do good to spend some money getting a mouse driver written that will send a mouse_click event on mouse_down event?

    Amazon has not patented the 1/2 click now, has it?

    If that's patented, try mouse_move.

    -rao
  • Despite thousands of geeks clamoring about how obvious the idea was, nobody has been able to produce a usage of one-click shopping prior to Amazon's patent? This strikes me as interesting, to say the least.
    Yeah, and no one has been able to produce a good reason why anyone would really WANT one-click purchasing. It strikes me as potentially very dangerous and not something I'd ever want. I'm not even very happy about amazon.com keeping a record of my credit card number after my transaction with them has completed.

    On a different note, the fact that many people find this patent offensive is the fact that it really didn't involve the 'invention' of any new technology but rather just a different use for existing technology. There's nothing new or novel about using the same database that stores your users information to store credit card information and automatically process an order when a particular page is requested. Another problem is the fact that even the finished patent doesn't help anyone trying to implement a competitive implementation -- it's writen by lawyers for lawyers for the most part. And to make things worse, they have a monopoly on this technology for twenty-one years, an eternity in the computer industry.

  • From my point of view, all business-model and software patents are bad mojo on the face of it, and finding prior art for them is wrongheaded and simply plays into the "software patents are acceptable" mindset. Proving Amazons 1-Click Shopping is invalid due to prior art is only a way of saying that that prior art should have gotten the patent in the first place, which is just as bad.
  • Now how could anyone ever be weary of goatse.cx?
  • Please, people .. Jeff Bezos founded BountyQuest together with O'Reilly. Now, does it really surprise anyone that BountyQuest announces they found no prior art for a patent Bezos attempts to make a lot of money with? How naive can you possibly be? Do you really believe a man like Bezos who is now suspected for insider trading has any kind of morals at all, let alone problems with the existing patent system? The whole reason this project was started is to say "Nobody did it" later. It's a clever PR stunt, nothing more, nothing less .. but an extremely dangerous one.

    --

  • People patent all kinds of stuff no one would really ever want. Particularly individual inventors who think the world wants their better dog dish/sex toy/etc. It's always fun to go to Delphion and search on the name of your favorite sex toy, and see if you (or anyone) would really ever want the innovation. [delphion.com]

  • I'm asking this question because it seems like there are two major groups of /. members: The ones who think "all software patents are bad" and a few (like me) who think " this software patent is bad".

    Please understand that this isn't flamebait. I'm very interested in understanding why so many people in the /. community think that patents are wrong.

    As an entrepreneur and systems architect I advocate the approval of patents because that will give us one or more of the following:

    • A competitive advantage
    • The ability to raise more capital from investors
    • A potential marketing edge

    Having said that, I can see why awarding the one-click patent to Amazon might rub people the wrong way. There isn't a substantially new discovery or technique in their claim. In fact, it looks more like the machinations of their IP attorneys.

    Please share your thoughts. Thanks,

    E
  • I agree with you; seeing how credit cards are almost never (if ever) stolen in route to the server online shopping would be safer then offline if wasn't for the fact that companies like to keep the credit numbers. They do, so it isn't.

    Just don't blame one-click; Egghead didn't have it.
  • It is a saying. He didn't mean it literally. Its like the saying that if something bad could happen, it will.
  • I have done a proof of concept "zero click" applet.

    Just hold your mouse over the button and amazingly enough, after a few seconds you'll be transported to another screen (the "buy" screen or whatnot) without the bothersome click.

    http://www.tropo.com/techno/java/zeroclick/ [tropo.com]

  • A patent is an exchange. The United States gov't which operated somewhat sanely in the old days, took the problem of the natural need for money in any individual's life and said, "You can't make money if you can't learn. If share your ideas, you get the right to produce that and only that idea narrowly defined and exclusively."

    Patents nowadays are seen as some sort of prizes. To think of patents as prizes is to ignore the real world and the goal of individuals to progress beyond mere survival and to secure some life, liberty, and happiness (not job, not car, nor anything else collectively agreed upon and wrongly assumed).

    Patents do not offer any competitive advantage. The slightest improvement on your work opens up the playing field. Why is this allowed? Not everyone needs the improvement nor wants it. See the ACM complaints against Computer Scientists (granted I think the ACM went a little too far in whining).

    Ability to raise capital improves to the extent people are encouraged to read patents. The more eyes that of their own voliton seek patents the less work you have to do to pitch your idea. It also means that some investors will get the idea that you might be able to improve on a pastent thereby removing your and his responsibility to the original patent owner. Our society illogically frowns upon individuals reading patents.

    Marketting edge? You attract quite a few investors like the one I just described.

    Problems: By whatever course of action it seems we have encouraged schemers not entrepeneurs and I'd even argued that we've alienated and discouraged entrepeneurs from profitting in marketplaces. Most entrepeneurs have a sense of pride. The current market is flooded w/ those who do not.

    These schemers make no distinction between components which are necessary because they are innovative parts of their inventions and those components which are necessary by definition of the task that the invention accomplishes.

    An example is the MDI (multiple document interface) of a word processor. To the layman it might seem that because Microsoft Office has so many components (an icon is a compenent right? ) it should be patentable. To computer all MDI is is multiple locations in memory. Thats it. There's nothing innovative in having more than one screw in a device, nor should it be in a word processor. To the computer programmer MDI is likewise simply multiple buffers.

    What to the layman is a complicated powerful program, to the computer and programmer it is a large use of simple components.

    As a programmer I see the patenting of simplicity as a threat to my job security as well as to my right to create tools I may use around the house or in my computing environment for fun and profit.

    Did I miss anything?
  • Interestingly enough,

    Because of slashdot, I was brainwashed into the "all patents are bad" mind set. And then the other day, I received a gift certificate from amazon and decided that that this really wouldn't be violating the terms of my ban (I wasn't spending *my* money, after all).

    As it turns out, the shopping experience at amazon was very pleasant and intuitive. They have apparently put lots of time and money into their site.

    Because they patented something like one-click shopping doesn't make me hate them. After all, someone else surely would have done it. And what would this have done to their ease of use?

    If they make the patent *free*... Now you might get me to spend real money!

    Darren
  • It's simply a covering or encasement of common procedures. No novelty in it whatsoever. It's no different than your computer case's power switch.

    I'll add that a remote engine starter for a car is not innovative either. I find it disturbing for laymen to assume their utopian daydream logic is valid in the real world.

    A remote control is novel in using radio or infrared technology to reach a distant interface. The convenience of using buttons to access functions does not qualify it for a patent.

    Convenience may be desirable, but in no way does that mean it is novel. Stop drooling over it already, it's insulting to programmers.
  • There's a logical third group... those that think that even this patent's OK. I'm in the that third group. I think One-Click shopping is a novel idea that Amazon had every right to patent. But I also think that the patent's scope was too broad, most likely because of overzealous lawyering.

    Hasn't anyone here ever had an idea you thought was unique, just to find out that it wasn't unique after all? Imagine if you had lawyers as agents for your idea, and they went spreading patents (and lawsuits) about vague abstractions of your idea.

    The justice system will deal with Amazon's lawyers in time. And after its dealt with, Amazon's patent will be refined to be be detailed enough to describe the parts of the One-Click system that they use that make it unique and useful.

    Why does everyone on Slashdot insist on jumping down Amazon's throat about this? It seems like every other story has something to do with it. If it was your idea, would you want everyone attacking you and your business? Think about it... and then go fire your lawyers if you have any before they do this to you. :)
  • Thanks for the example. Why do consumers think they have a clue in these matters? We'd be better off if they went about their American dream and let developers fight with developers.
  • Why not display the UPC for the product on screen then wave your Cue-cat over it. 0-click shopping.
    --

  • Rares Marian wrote:

    Patents do not offer any competitive advantage. The slightest improvement on your work opens up the playing field.

    I disagree with you on this point. Having a patent can help you collect royalties from third parties using your idea, which in turn you can use for expanding your R&D and/or your company's presence. A patent may also be used as a barrier to entry against competitors. From a business point of view, I want to either make it as hard as possible for my competitors to get a leg up on me, or turn them into partners by licencing my technology to them.

    I found the other points in your posting thought-provoking and on-target. Thank you.

    Regards,

    E
  • Who owns the XOR-mouse patent, and when does it expire?
  • Tim may be right that the Amazon patent is narrow and, in its specific details, may very well be novel. There still remains the criterion "obvious". As someone "skilled in the art", I want to say a few things about "obvious" that seem to have been overlooked.

    First, just because something hasn't been done, doesn't mean it's not obvious. I can think of many other reasons why nobody before Amazon may have done one-click ordering on the web, among them:

    • Web commerce is relatively new, thus Web vendors have been charting unknown territory. Maybe they were so busy, they just didn't get around to one-click ordering.
    • One-click ordering requires especially careful implementation. Perhaps engineers at other Web vendors simply decided that the development and testing costs would be too high.
    • It isn't immediately obvious that customers will like one-click ordering. Amazon should perhaps be credited with proving they can; but this is a marketing/customer relations innovation, not the stuff of patents.
    • One-click is mostly valuable to frequent customers. Maybe Amazon was the first to have enough repeat buyers to make one-click pay off.
    • One-click works best with customers who feel secure about the vendor. Maybe Amazon was the first to win this trust from their customers.
    • One-click is not merely a feature of Amazon; it is part of their marketing strategy. It may be that one-click per se has little value, but that Amazon boosted its value with ingenious marketing. Again, a business innovation, not a technical one.

    Taking an idea that everyone could see and being the first to make it work may be laudable, but it does not advance the art of software.

    Second, the idea that narrowness somehow makes a patent less obvious is flawed. It is true that I might not have implemented one-click in the exact same way as Amazon. However, in software, it is typical for a problem to have many superficially different, but essentially similar, solutions; and while different programmers would come up with different implementations, another programmer comparing them would find no interesting differences. They're all "much of a muchness".

    Put another way, you might say of one-click,

    Your design is both useful and novel; but the parts that are useful are not novel, and the parts that are novel are not useful.
    If the pattern of the solution is obvious (for one-click, it is; why do you think Netscape introduced cookies?), and the specifics of the implementation offer no notable benefits over other implementations, the criterion "obvious" is not met.
  • This only protects those who have a staff of lawyers and a large legal budget. Everyone else is still in the "You loose, sucker!" category.

    The existence of the patent means that it is presumed valid until successfully challenged. This means that you must be able to pay lawyers, court fees, time, etc. to defend yourself, or it is valid against you.

    Bountyquest may think they have won, but they haven't won for me. Or you.

    These patents are evil. The only current plausible defense is to convince other countries to not honor them, and that doesn't help much, or maybe it will just keep things from getting worse.


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • This may be so, but the XORing of pointers (as opposed to cursors) was published in the Art of Computer Programming, and long predates it.

    If you are a speaker of english, then the connection in meaning between pointer and cursor makes the idea of using the same operations on one, also on the other, obvious. Perhaps is isn't obvious in French or German, since it's based on a pun, but in English it is obvious.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Software patents are bad because the USPO uses no judgement, and if a stupid patent is passed, it costs more than a normal person can reasonably afford to get it declared invalid.


    There probably is a reasonable case to be made for some software patents. I've never seen one, but it is probable.


    However, the current implementation is so extremely bad that we would be far better of with no software patents at all.


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.

  • OK. I had shopped at Amazon after they got the one-click system in place and before their patent was discussed. I haven't since. I don't intend to. I didn't find it that much easier. And I certainly don't intend to encourage a company that uses a patent such as that. Not that I think that highly of Barnes & Nobel, but accepting such a patent as a valid item is ... dishonorable. There may be a better word, but if so it doesn't occur to me at the moment.

    The only possible honorable use for such a patent is as a component of a patent pool (to defend oneself against the holders of other patents).


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Well, then maybe you should tell Tim that instead of just venting here.
  • Despite thousands of geeks clamoring about how obvious the idea was, nobody has been able to produce a usage of one-click shopping prior to Amazon's patent? This strikes me as interesting, to say the least.

    What a lot of people appear to forget is that everything looks obvious in hindsight. Hell, even the concepts of advanced physics are pretty straightforward if you don't have to think of them yourself.

    Geeks tend to constantly overestimate their own ability in what amounts to severe egotism. They assume that if someone else could create something, then surely it wouldn't been no trouble to them.

    This is absurd, and most of the time they can't provide an account of why they didn't create it! Face the facts. One-click shopping is a highly useful but non-obvious idea, and Amazon deserves to reap the sole rewards of the hard work put into developing it.

    - qpt
  • I regularly find myself browsing the web for Heidi Wall pictures [stonehenge.com].

    When I find one, I cannot resist the urge to start licking the screen. I've tried, but I just cannot do it.

    The problem is that with 6 or 7 licks, I wind up getting more moisture on my monitor than the little monitor cleaning pads are capable of dealing with.

    So my idea is a method whereby I only display the pic for only a fraction of a second. That way, I can only lick the screen once.

    So my question is can I patent this, or does the Amazon patent cover one lick techniques?

    --Shoeboy
  • They are trying to limit and mutate the definition of prior art. Once they have something defined as a test case that will create precedent for the rest of the industry, lawyers pour lots of money into it.

    Consider the future this will have judicially. All this does is raise the amount of capital you have to get togethr to start an e-business of this type- by increasing the level of liability you have to insure against. That hurts the dot economy, all those "entrepreneurs" you are always talking about, guys.

    Ironically, the lawyers glom onto the juiciest cows, the ideas most likely to revolutionize some aspect of our computing experience and thus to justly make money. Thus they retard progress.

    Just another note from the Ban the Lawyers foundation.. ;)

  • You need the learn what obvious means to the patent office. What you have written is far from that definition.
  • Anyone see the UserFriendly comic a while back; it was actually in a Linux mag -- it said "1 click shopping + 1 click mouse = trouble", or something to that effect - with a cat in front of the computer, presumably having purrchased (no pun intended) a new Porsche or something...

    Sorry, just thought it was kinda funny.
    ________________________________________________

  • Amazon was one of the first huge 'e-tailers'. If they did do something first it still doesn't prove that it was innovating and non-obvious. What if whichever company had gotten there first would have eventually implemented the same thing?

    The idea of patents isn't to reward the first person into a new field. The idea is to reward someone who has an idea which other people couldn't have come up with on their own, were they in the same position.

    Patents are a social contract... society grants a limited monopoly in exchange for complete disclosure of a new idea. For that deal to be worthwhile, the idea must be worth something.

    If someone simply does some standard thing, on the internet, who cares? That's obvious. We want to enter into this social contract with someone who will offer us something of value. We want an idea that we wouldn't have thought of ourselves.

    Now, if Amazon had a unique linkage of databases and some incredibly clever routines that enabled them to pull all the data together so much faster that they could offer one-click sales where, for example, it took everyone else too much processing to do in realtime, then Amazon would have innovated.

    As is, there's nothing clever about it. They used a technology that was designed for customer identification, the cookie, to tell who they were dealing with. They did a simple SQL query to pull their info from a standard DB. They then process that order unless told not to before a certain time. To be sarcastic for a second, "Wow!"

    There's nothing there anyone else who wanted to implement one-click ordering couldn't have done.

    Why are we giving them a monopoly? What's in it for us? What's Amazon providing as their end of the contract? Details on basic SQL that could have come from _Web Design for Dummies_? Sorry, but I don't think that deserves a government enforced monopoly for seventeen years.
  • Please, some one explain to me what all this fuss about 1 click shopping and crap is.
    How cah you have a patent of clicking once on a webpage to order something?
  • Capitalism only works with a sense of fair play.
  • The one-click shopping which Amazon has patented clearly was, at the time it was created by Amazon, obvious. I don't say that because it was obvious in hindsight, but because it was exactly the type of thing which cookies were created for.

    The purpose of cookies was to enable the caching of form input data, particularly logins, for later use. There should be no difficulty in finding a document which establishes this. As applied to logins for sites such as Slashdot, the result is that a form is not displayed, but rather the previously-entered data is used. Now, consider what the page of billing and shipping information is. It is a form. One-click shopping only a slightly different manifestation of the same technology of auto-login scripts, and is exactly the category of things which cookies were created for.
    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.

  • New definition of "throwing in the towel" (Score:3)

    by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @04:47PM (#363021)
    From BountyQuest:
    In particular, it's highly unlikely that Amazon will be able to assert single-action claims in interactive TV, for example, even though the current patent covers that area. Even on the Web it's doubtful that Amazon can continue to enforce the 1-Click patent, except where alleged infringers utilize the precise sequence of software steps detailed in the patent. Simply put, the threat to e-commerce posed by the 1-Click patent is now severely diminished.
    So they've found enough prior art to invalidate any use of the patent except in the most precise form. Unless you do implement exact same system as Amazon you are safe. BountyQuest haven't "thrown in the towel". They've won.
  • The major problem is there is no way for the PTO to search prior art in the case of business models.

    Keep in mind that their current rules keep them from even doing google searches. The only thing they can search are the congressional library resources. Any search out side of that could reveal details of what is going to be patented.

    Software patents are a real problem because a large number of people didn't know the rules had changed and were under the wrong impression that software patents were not valid. Those companies that went ahead anyway are now the winners in the patent issues. The same thing will repeat with business model patents.
  • It means O'Reilly is as bad at logic as most people. "All the smart people don't work for you" is equivalent to "None of the smart people work for you", which I'd like to think isn't true for every business (unless the smart people don't work at all).
  • Have one click on the web take you to a "zero click" telnet session where a dynamically generated script buys the item for you then closes the session.

  • Question: I have been pondering implementing one-click on my bookstore website, page1book.com(apology for the gratuitous self-promotion).

    I am a single developer, and have yet to complete my bachelors. Yet, I believe I can implement this feature on my site in less than a week. The only reason I have not done so yet is because I am the sites sole developer and have not yet had the time to get around to this feature.

    Wouldn't a feature that could be completed by a single non-degreed programmer in less than a week qualify as 'obvious'?

  • Wouldn't a feature that could be completed by a single non-degreed programmer in less than a week qualify as 'obvious'?

    Aren't they all 'obvious' after you've already seen someone else implement it?
  • Everyone should read the article. The summary posted here seems to indicate that Amazon has won and everyone else is apologizing and in full retreat. In reality, the article states that, while the novelty of the specifics of the patent can't be disputed, the patent's scope is very narrow and enforcement will be difficult.
  • Every time I think about the one click patent, it never ceases to amaze me that a company can put a patent on a language/standard feature. The most obvious use of cookies is to enable one click features such as that of Amazon's. Maybe it's just me, but when I did my first site with a scripting language, and came upon cookies, that usage was obvious. It's like putting a patent on walking when everyone has two legs.

    $man microsoft

  • Aren't they all 'obvious' after you've already seen someone else implement it?

    That is exactly the problem with the "obvious" criterion, but isn't one-click obvious after you are told about cookies? Once the server can recognise an account holder one-click shopping is a bit of a "duh" option.

    TWW

  • It's obvious because that's what cookies were designed to do. The server sets a cookie on your computer so it knows who you are. This allows the server to say 'Welcome back!', or so you don't have to type in your password.... or... or... maybe... so you don't have to type in your cc# and address?

    C'mon, this is an obvious use, it's like patenting a method for using a database to store information.
  • A fairy story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin ...

    Once upon a time in the golden days, when men were real men etc., someone had an idea for something that was not easy to do, but would be incredibly useful if he could manage to make it work. He worked hard at making his idea possible, using a lot of ingenuity and much tearing of hair. When he'd finished, it was obvious from the product how he'd done it, so if he started selling the product others would be able to copy it. So he patented the invention to protect his hard work. And everyone paid him money to use his wonderful new invention, and they all lived happily ever after.

    In these modern times, someone has an idea for something that's new and never been done before. He goes along to his programmer, who says "Yes, I can knock one of those out in a few days". So he patents the idea to protect it. And they spend the rest of their days in court, trying to extract money from everyone else who had a similar idea.

    Now do you see the difference, boys and girls. In the first patent, it's the technique that's being patented, not the idea. In the second, it's the idea. Once the idea is there, the product can be created by anyone halfway "skilled in the art" as they like to say in "Patentese". Ok, maybe you'd get a different implementation, but that just shows that there's nothing special about the implementation, unless the original has something special that makes it better somehow than the copies.

    That's what makes many of the software patents (and probably all of the business method patents) wrong.

    I'm not saying I disagree with all software patents. For example, the MP3 patent is (probably) OK - it isn't obvious to any programmer how to gain high levels of compression without losing much quality. However, the RT-Linux patent is bad, because it's blindingly obvious how to do it, once you've had the idea of doing it. And in that case the idea isn't even new.

    (The morals of forcing a patented technique through as a standard, or sitting quietly while others do it for you in ignorance of the patent application, is a whole 'nother story.)


    --

  • Do you really believe a man like Bezos who is now suspected for insider trading has any kind of morals at all...?
    Uh, the man's suspected of the crime, not found guilty. Not all countries use the same constitution, but I still like to believe that we don't accept accusations as proof of guilt. Sure, he might be evil, he might be a really nice guy, or he might just be trying to do what's best for his company. I don't know the man, so I can't say.
  • I think the point of the XOR example is that some things shouldnt be patented on grounds of simplicity and nothing else.

    something like, say, long division ... not necessarily obvious or natural until someone thinks of it. But patenting it wouldnt do the world any good at all. the purpose of patents is to 'promote progress' by rewarding investment in 'innovation' ... below some threshold of simplicity youre not promoting progress anymore.

    After all, think about what patents do - youre forbidding other people from making use of certain methods/ideas. This is drastic.

  • Well, no. With sufficient training, a *monkey* can put glue onto paper, but that doesn't invalidate the patent for Post-it notes.
  • with nary a mention of the fact that most of the world doesn't permit software patents at all.

    He does nary mention it because it's nary relevant. One-click is a business process patent, not a software patent, and it's a patent in the USA, not a patent in "most of the world".

    Nary. For fuck's sake.

  • Not in a patent sense. Being innovative and inventive is what counts.

    Amazon was probably the first to implement one-click. So what? It's so trivial that it doesn't deserve a patent. Patents aren't supposed to be granted on things so trivial that given the task, an average professional in the field could do it. Especially if your method offers no benefit over other methods.

    Now Amazon didn't just patent a method, they patented the whole idea of one-click ordering.

    So, they used it first and got famous. It took others a while to decide it was worth copying. That's the benefit for Amazon. They can claim to be innovative because they were the first to offer something.

    But we shouldn't give them a patent for it. Patents are NOT for rewarding the first. They are for rewarding the inventive. Amazon simply used existing tools in the intended way.

    What is innovative about using a cookie to identify a user and fetch their information? What about that couldn't everyone else have done, had they felt customers would want it?

    Imagine when the first car came with a round indent in the dash to hold a cup. Would that company deserve to be the only company allowed to sell a car with a cup holder?

    It's exactly the same case as with Amazon. Neither involves new technology. So why does Amazon deserve a patent?

  • Patents are not supposed to be obvious "to experts in the field.

    When "experts in the field" read Amazon's patent, do they say "holy shit, thats so obvious, there is nothing innovative here", or do they say "hey thats quite clever, wouldn't have been able to put that system together myself without some good serious thinking"? As far as I can tell, the vast majority (including myself when I read it) exclaim quite readily the 'thats so obvious, there is nothing new here'. There is no requirement that the 'obviousness' must have presented itself before the patent claim to other experts. Rather, it is the opposite: even a person who is an expert in the field, when reading the patent, must at least have to *think* at least *once* to understand the patent. No thinking required for the Amazon patent, I promise you that.

    That should just plain give it away, really: the patent IS "obvious to experts in the field". It IS. They don't just say it, it really is. That alone is enough to invalidate the patent.

    The very specific nature of the patent (essentially writing down all the details in the order they happen) makes it narrower and more specific, but the patent isn't bogus for being too broad, it's bogus for being obvious. Simply writing down all the details and steps (thereby making it specific) don't make it any less ridiculous. If I wrote down all the steps I take to buy something from the local shopping mall (e.g. "leave house", "enter motor vehicle", "start vehicle ignition", "put vehicle in gear", "enter the public road transport system", "navigate through public road transport system using built-in neural network algorithms"), etc etc etc, doesn't make it innovative. This is exactly what Amazon has tried to do, all they've done is outline all the exact steps in the process. Lame!

  • They don't have to have come up with it first. If the majority of computer programmers read the patent and find it obvious (i.e. the patent does not actually have to make them *think* at all to figure it out) then the patent IS "obvious to those skilled in the field". Otherwise you'd end up with people patenting all sorts of things that are so obvious nobody bothers to mention them .. oh wait ..
  • And that, dear chap, is because the Post-it notes patent is *very specific*, and patents the *device* which 3M invented, rather than the *idea* of glue on paper. Rather like the Amazon One-Click patent.
  • In patent law, "obvious" does not mean "obvious after someone has explained it to you." The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is obvious to anyone who's taken an undergraduate course in molecular biology, after it's been explained to them, but that didn't (nor should it) prevent a valid patent on PCR.
  • Thats just the point - that nobody has to explain the "technique" used in these bogus patents. Sure, you have to *READ* the patent, but that is *NOT* the same as having to *explain* it - when people "skilled in the field" read patents like this, there is nothing that requires them to think about it at any point. Your definition of 'obvious' is a little weird'. Say somebody patented the process of brushing one's teeth. Now what you're saying is that simply because somebody has to *explain the patent* to you, the patent is not obvious? Come on - that would imply that NOT ONE SINGLE patent is obvious, since all the *patents* have to be explained. I'm talking about explaining the *process* described in the patent. Is the *process* obvious. Brushing one's teeth - have you ever written out that exact same series of steps? No - why bother, its obvious and well-known - but according to you the "brushing teeth" patent, since it first had to be *read* to somebody, ISNT obvious? Thats ridiculous.
  • Hmmm. Pick a better example, Pinball Wizard. The Highland brand of the product you link to happens to be a trademark of....3M. So this product isn't a knockoff, just a relabeling.

    Now quit trying to troll for trolls.

  • Good, I hate 1 click anyways (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I hope Amazon charges out the wazoo for this one and no one takes them up. When I purchase soemething, I intend the retailer to keep my credit card info only for the purchase that I make and discard the information afterwords. With breakins that have occured at egghead and other companies, the last thing I need is mor information being able to be recalled from a webserver regardless of a secure connection or not.
  • "It's a truism in business that all of the smart people don't work for you."

    I don't get it.

  • This is exhausting (Score:5)

    by dkwright ( 316655 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @04:51PM (#363045)
    When I encounter discussion of things like the one-click patent, it instantly wears me out. It's exhausting trying to think of ways to argue with people who see all ideas as salable "intellectual property". I don't think science would have made any progress if people in former times had been accustomed to thinking this way. Think if the telescope had been enforcibly patented, or the microscope.

    What can you say to someone who thinks this is a good idea? I'm not anti-business. But is there nothing that isn't owned, that isn't property.

    I predict that we will soon start patenting philosophies or religions.


    -- Purchase this .sig. Just click on it once.
  • Yeah, this is all attributable to 'the lawyers'. Those evil, faceless lawyers.

    There are crooked lawyers just like there are crooked doctors, crooked judges, and crooked people. Lawyers get stereotyped as crooked because spineless sniveling weasels are simply more attracted to the law profession than any other.

    Lawyers don't sue people, plantiffs sue people.

    (And what's this about Ban the Lawyers? Would you rather people fought it out with guns when they had a dispute?)

    Bah. Sorry about that, but I hate it when people bash on lawyers. Blame the idiots who create the lawsuits.
  • I never thought it was fair to beat someone to the punch at the patent office. Most of the people who are the progenitors of new and useful things never reap the fiscal benefit of their creations. That's when the legalist rapists set in and collude together to prevent this new useful entity from ever being used again without some form of royalty being paid. If the patent system protected the little people and spanked the big boys around, I'd have less the say, unfortunately, the converse is true. It seems the larger companies leverage this system much better to even work against the people who actually should hold the patent. Hindsight is 20/20, but if some grubber thinks to patent the obvious he should be sent down with the same reckless abandon the patent was filed in.
  • I still don't understand what you mean by "if one-click shopping is prior art." The issued and valid Amazon "one-click" patent will be prior art to future patent applications. I thought we were talking about prior art to the Amazon patent itself, though.
  • Now you're surfing on my wave--and you have figured out one of the key concepts of patent law, which is figuring out the scope of your patent. Some are broad. Some are narrow. And what determines whether the scope is broad or narrow is not the abstract or the text, but the claims and only the claims.
  • The purpose of the patent system is to grant a temporary monopoly as a reward for publicly disclosing the details of your invention to the public. Absent this system, inventors have an incentive to keep things secret so nobody else can copy their invention.

    Any invention which is obvious in hindsight, if by that you mean that it is easy to look at it and figure out how it's done, doesn't hold up its end of the social contract: if you can figure it out just by examining it then there was no need for the disclosure, and hence no reason to grant a monopoly as a reward.

  • However, because of the complexity of Amazon's complete patent, we weren't able to match every claim. And in fact, all the prior art that was submitted specifically for the Web confirms Amazon's belief that they were doing something original. All of the Web submissions focused on the shopping cart model, with multiple stages for checkout. Even systems such as MiniVend, the open source web commerce shopping cart, which could easily be configured for One-click, was never demonstrably used in that way.



    As anyone who has had to work with minivend (i worked with version 3.1x when it was current) it is not easily configured to do anything, although version 4.x is reportedly pretty decent, and it is possible that version 3 were also good.

  • Yeah, all of the lawyers who are on the staff of major corporations get paid on commission right? Oh wait, they don't. Amazon filed this patent just so they could sue competitors. That is a business decision. Complain about Bezos, not lawyers in general.

    As the saying goes, everyone hates lawyers until they need one.
  • Does M-CAM have a patent for their search engine?
  • It's not enough that someone is first (if indeed they were), the idea also needs to be innovative and can't be obvious.

    I don't doubt that it wasn't implemented much before 1978, very few computers existed back then (before the PC revolution). That sort of trick is more important to get speed on a low-end computer and it what a PC programmer would have done.

    So, of the fewer computer programmers in the late seventies, and the 0.01% who used a GUI system, none doing an open source (or one where they could show off some code) had used XOR for a cursor.

    That still doesn't mean it's deserving of a patent because if you stuck any of the great programmers down and asked them how to implement a fast cursor, what do you think they'd have said after thinking about it?
  • I thought that besides the prior art issue, a patent had to be non-obvious by professionals in that industry. I really do not see how "one-click" shopping is non-obvious. It seems completly obvious to me. Kind of like "one-step" brakes on a car. Does anyone know why it isn't challenged on this?
  • The most obvious use of cookies is to enable one click features such as that of Amazon's

    So where's the "prior art"? Because without it, you've got no case. Everything's obvious once you've seen someone else do it. Being first is what's valuable.

  • Anonymous Coward wrote:

    on the other hand, it will also make sure you cannot create any software without violating someone elses patent. Small companies cannot afford to hire lawyers to check everything they thing up against all the patents issued worldwide

    First of all, patents are only searched in the area of your jurisdiction. Since the largest, most important market in the world is the US, that's where you start. Patent law varies from country to country, and you pursue patents based on your business plan, i.e. you tend to patent things in Europe and the EU, for example. The search is not a worldwide wild chase. Also, getting a second patent in a different country might be easier if you can prove that there was "prior art" already patented elsewhere.

    I've been very lucky to have participated in three different startups. The first was very successful, the second one tanked, this is my third one. What I learned during the second experience is simple: One of the first steps is that you must hire the most competent law firm you can find.

    The cost of your counsel, when compared with the cost of not having it, is actually negligible. We're going through a patent search process now, and while it is expensive, it is cheaper for us to have the law firm do it than to assign someone from our staff to take care of it. And, unlike what you mentioned in your comment, we can't afford not having the knowledge.

    Cheers!

    E
  • HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
    ROTFLMAOWTIME!!!
    Wow, it's great to meet another userfriendly fan! There just aren't enough of us on /.!

    Did you see the one where all the unix geeks were talking about how much window sucks? That was the greatest! It's so funny because it's true!

    Or how about the one where they're camping and Mike holds up a pine cone and says "pine cone"! Get it, it's a reference to the pine email app. I nearly wet myself with laughter.

    That Iliad, he's a rocket straight out of the internet's collective unconscious!

    Later,
    --Shoeboy
  • I don't understand your comment. In what way is who trying to change the definition of prior art?

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