JPMorgan Files Patent Application On 'Bitcoin Killer' 292
Velcroman1 writes "Banking giant JPMorgan Chase has filed a patent application for an electronic commerce system that sounds remarkably like Bitcoin — but never mentions the controversial, Internet-only currency. The patent application was filed in early August but made publicly available only at the end of November; it describes a 'method and system for processing Internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.' The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds — just like Bitcoin. It would allow for micropayments without processing fees — just like bitcoin. And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union — just like Bitcoin. There are 18,126 words in the patent application. 'Bitcoin' is not one of them."
Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
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Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Informative)
No, first to file doesn't affect the issue of publicly disclosed prior art.
First to file only sets the priority of the application.
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Insightful)
Possible, but there's another explanation: Many companies just throw as many patents at the office as they can, including ones with no merit to them at all. The worst that can happen is rejection, for which there is no penalty at all, and even the most obviously junk patent has some shot of getting through. It may not stand up in court, but it can still be used to pad a portfolio.
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Informative)
Applying for a patent is a negotiation process in which you throw out a bunch of claims looking to get the best deal you can. You start with Claim 1 being a claim on the sidereal universe and all it contains and work your way down to more specific stuff. Depending on the skill of those writing the patent you will get more or less of the invention you actually wanted.
As you can see in the application they have already dropped the first 154 claims in the original application.
Looking at the application it seems to me what is most interesting is the last claim.
That is:
A computer-implemented method of providing an anonymous payment from a mobile device to a payee device to enable an electronic payment between a payer and a payee without provision of an account number or name from the payer
So its a mobile anonymous untraceable payment, something that BTC doesn't address but something a lot of smartphone users would probably like.
Micropayments are discussed in the specification but aren't mentioned in the claims so are just some bullshit to make the examiner think this is cool new stuff or something.
Not really what the story is talking about, but that's not surprising since Slashdot is pretty weak on anything to do with patents.
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Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Informative)
First to file still considers prior art.
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So look at it this way, just because nobody has patented fire or throwing rocks,
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't matter. If the people behind Bitcoin never bothered to file for a patent, JP Morgan is now going to get it first--meaning Bitcoin will then be in violation of said patent (as unfair as that is).
That's not how first-to-file works. If the people behind Bitcoin kept Bitcoin secret, never published anything, never used it publicly, etc., and then (i) JP Morgan filed a patent application on it, and (ii) subsequently the people behind Bitcoin filed a patent application on it, then JP Morgan would win and get the patent - because, given two applications by two different inventors on the same invention, the first-to-file wins (hence the name). This is as opposed to the first-to-invent system, where in the above scenario, Bitcoin would win if they could show lab notebooks and internal documents showing that they actually invented it prior to JP Morgan and were working on reducing it to practice the whole time. Those proceedings were called interferences, and they occurred, on average, about 20 times a year. Out of half a million applications. That's literally all the change to "first to file" means, and those .004% applications are all that were affected. It has nothing to do with what's prior art or whether Bitcoin, which predates JP Morgan's application, can infringe any patent granted from it - and no, it can't. Not unless they change their implementation to incorporate something new that's in the JP Morgan application. If they freeze the implementation here, they can't possibly ever infringe.
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:4, Informative)
That's not what first-to-file means. Even if Bitcoin is never patented, the Patent Office can still (and should) reject the JP Morgan application based on the Bitcoin prior art. First-to-file means that if JP Morgan files first, the Bitcoin people cannot obtain priority over JP Morgan, as JP Morgan filed first despite inventing second.
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Even if Bitcoin is never patented, the Patent Office can still (and should) reject the JP Morgan application based on the Bitcoin prior art.
Ah, but the patent filing date is in 1999. Apparently, the patent hasn't been issued yet, probably because claims the long running application make were overly broad,and the application hadn't fully gone through the system yet, but they are amending the patent claims on an existing application to cover Bitcoin.
The patent will probably be issued with a 1999 filing
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Yeah, because no one cough...Rambus...cough would ever think of trolling standards group discussions to patent ideas that come out of them.
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but I'm thinking more of USPTO process in this case. The patent can still be granted unless someone files a petition citing prior art. After that it may be invalidated based on Bitcoin existing, but my point it that it's still possible that the bank can receive this patent.
Except that it is almost exactly unlike bitcoin. Because it deals in real bank account and real money. Money you can spend anywhere.
The novel part is the fees-free micropayments, which will allow you to use things on the web without being flooded with ads for things
you don't want. Payments as low as factional pennies. Its a frangible currency.
However, SCOTUS is currently reviewing this whole field [scotusblog.com] of "do something via computer" and get a patent, and the whole business practices thing is as likely to be tossed out or more tightly limited in the aftermath.
Coin is coin. And doing it by computer is not that new. Micro-payments are not that new. They were simply too expensive to deal with in the past.
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Pieces of eight.
The thing is, reading some random web page is worth some fraction of a cent. And if a news story, or a blog post cost a quarter of a cent, (or less) and the authors would probably earn more money than by foisting ads on their readers.
The ads cost money (bandwidth, to both sender and receiver) to serve, integrate, and manage. A micro-payment with zero friction (no fees) could be just as cost effective.
If they can maintain the anonymity angle (and make it NSA proof) everybody gains. Its a gr
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Bitcoin is not going to be deemed prior art regardless. This thing is claiming priority through a series of applications back to 1999.
We need a law, that any patent application not approved within 3 years of the original application date, can no longer be amended; add, or drop claims, and if not issued within 4 years, will be deemed abandoned.
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Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
I suspect that JP Morgan's patent attorneys aren't idiots, so they've probably done some clever rules-lawyering; but 'bitcoin' is one of those things with such substantial public recognition that it won't be trivial to hide unless the examiner is really sleeping on the job.
With a lot of painfully-obvious tech patents, the prior art (while it definitely exists) is mostly working knowledge among techies, and (because it's considered obvious) often doesn't get a writeup anywhere, although source implementat
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JP has the money to avoid that little inconvenience. This will go thru, and the will sue bitcoin.
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JP has the money to avoid that little inconvenience. This will go thru, and the will sue bitcoin.
How does one sue a currency?
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:4, Insightful)
By suing any company that accepts it in transactions as being in breach of their patent. The same way Newegg just got patent trolled by a company claiming a patent on (part of) public key cryptography. Oh you were using an implementation of our patent? You're going to get sued.
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Really? They're going to sue a protocol?
For BTC to ever become mainstream; there will have to be point of sale equipment, and E-commerce players using it.
They can just sue point of sale equipment manufacturers, retailers, etc, dealing in Bitcoin.
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Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
But its not bitcoin, and you can actually spend the money anywhere you want, because in the end it is
delivering real money to real accounts from other real accounts.
Negotiating a bitcoin sale or purchase is still like a scavenger hunt. Even if a willing buyer finds a willing seller the product is usually not exactly what they were looking for, close by, or convenient. There are maybe 5 restaurants in the world that will take bitcoin. And who wants to eat in a crowd of nerds.
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> And who wants to eat in a crowd of nerds.
Not even other nerds.
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But its not bitcoin, and you can actually spend the money anywhere you want, because in the end it is delivering real money to real accounts from other real accounts.
But this will then become invalidated based on the fact that europe has had the concept of free bank transfers for decades.
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Or we could hope that you can't patent ideas, only implementations, and the summary is big on telling us why the ideas are similar, but scant on whether they share an implementation.
If someone invents a steam engine, it shouldn't mean someone else can't create a different steam engine that does the same thing in a different way. Similarly, just because bitcoin allows micro payments and electronic funds transfers doesn't mean no-one
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole article is shit.
Patents don't protect what you want to do, they protect how you do it.
The article claims that JP Morgan have invented a system that does some of the same things that Bitcoin does, it gives no evidence that it does those things in the same way.
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Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
How are you going to show them a Bitcoin?
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yeah maybe you won't.
Re:Maybe the Patent Office will notice (Score:5, Funny)
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Everyone should have a dream.
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Didn't they recently change patent law so that prior art is basically meaningless now?
No, they didn't.
First to file only matters if there are two patent applications in progress at the same time. Neither could have copied the other's final approved patent, since it wouldn't have been published yet... but applications may be published, and it's of course possible to release significant details of an invention before the patent is granted, so copying could occur, especially with modern communications.
Patents still must acknowledge the contributions of prior art, and show a significant (in the
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That's not how it works. First to file means that, given that two claimants of a patent, the first to file will get it. It does away with a messy process that incentivized holding on to trade secrets and delaying filing a patent as long as possible. First to invent can get incredibly messy and expensive to prove. Before some reform years ago, there was a practice known as submarine patents where applications would be submitted and withdrawn indefinitely, effectively allowing extended patent protection witho
Being able to do the same things is irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because this proposed currency is capable of doing many of the things that Bitcoin does, doesn't mean it copies Bitcoin.
Point out the technical components that copy Bitcoin, not the capabilities.
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Re:Being able to do the same things is irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have a left, you have far out loopy extreme right, (Fox news) and hard right (MSNBC).
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Re:Being able to do the same things is irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I'm skimming the patent, and I don't see how this is like Bitcoin. It's not a decentralized currency. It's just a different interface for using existing bank accounts they control. It's only anonymous to the users. The whole system runs on trusted servers they control and can see what's happening on.
The stuff that made Bitcoin revolutionary isn't that it works over the internet, or has receive-only addresses. The revolutionary part was that it was decentralized. It didn't rely on any trusted or privileged groups or servers. All nodes that people run are equal. There is no central minting group who can secretly mint more or change the minting rules. The currency itself is limited. This proposal does not involve any of that.
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I now take you to late 2013, and I wanted to do the same thing again, but this time found that I had to "Sign up" for some service that would allow me to "Send money to anyone with an email account". I didn't w
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That sounds so weird that it is hard to believe.
If you cannot transfer money to your friend's account, how can you transfer any money to any account? And if you cannot transfer money to another account, then why do you have a bank account at all? That doesn't make sense.
Maybe what you mean is that you could do it free of charge, and that now there is a small transaction fee, even if both accounts are in the same bank?
Or maybe the redesigned their web pages and you didn't find the correc page page for transf
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It's JP Morgan. The only way that will come back is if they can charge 10-15% fee, the same as they do their money laundering, er, 'private banking' services. You'd be better off going to the cash machine, taking the cash out, handing it to him, and letting him deposit it into the same machine. They're not charging a fee for that again, are they? I left them when they started charging for our "permanently free" checking account.
You could probably do it at a credit union. They're owned by their customer
Has nothing to do with bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
The patent is a near-exact description of how paypal works.
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The patent is a near-exact description of how paypal works.
Minus the ridiculous fees no doubt.
Like bitcoin? (Score:2, Informative)
BitCoin is not anonymous, and it does have fees. How is it just like BitCoin?
For the billionth time (Score:4, Informative)
>The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not anonymous. There is a very clear, public trail linking your wallet to your purchases.
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>The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not anonymous. There is a very clear, public trail linking your wallet to your purchases.
Yes; but (unlike, say, credit cards) anybody can magic a wallet into existence with a dash of math, at any time, so connections between people and wallets are established only by inferences made possible by various forms of sloppiness in handling. Odds are that many wallets are robustly identified with users; but only on the basis of techniques unrelated to bitcoin proper.
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BitCoin not first (Score:3)
Something is wrong with the entire system (Score:5, Insightful)
Something is wrong with the entire system when a financial company is awarded a patent.
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I'm sorry, the fixed rate loan has been patented by a competitor, so we can only offer you APRs that go up by 30% a day.
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The US allows patents not just on software, but on business methods too. JPMorgan probably has a great many business patents.
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Why? Why does one's industry determine whether they can contribute an innovation to the world?
The patent is for a mechanism to make payments from an account by both sides exchanging possibly-anonymized information. What other industry would you expect this idea to come from? Agriculture?
Trolling (Score:5, Informative)
Troll summary for a troll article.
The patent has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's a payment processing system that's set up so it can use anonymized IDs rather than actual account numbers.
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Hardly. The system itself would still be able to track where money came from well enough for law enforcement. It'd just be a bit safer to give out direct payment information online.
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"so it can use anonymized IDs"
kind of like, say, bitcoin addresses:
"A Bitcoin address, or simply address, is an identifier of 27-34 alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 or 3, that represents a possible destination for a Bitcoin payment. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin. For example, using Bitcoin-Qt, one can click "New Address" and be assigned an address. It is also possible to get a Bitcoin address using an account at an exchange or online wallet service."
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Yes, kind of like Bitcoin addresses, but without the rest of the Bitcoin architecture. Instead, the concept is adapted to fit a more traditional banking system, which is usually rather biased against working with temporary or disposable anything.
Anecdotally, while working in finance I helped set up a corporation for the sole purpose of selling a single house. The account had to stick around in our systems for 90 days, to accommodate a nonzero balance for about an hour.
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Just like BitCoin? (Score:5, Informative)
Bitcoin isn't anonymous. [bitcoin.org]
Processing fees are common with Bitcoin. [bitcoin.org]
Wire transfers are largely an oddity of the USA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't use wire transfers anyway.
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Wire transfers are largely an oddity of the USA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't use wire transfers anyway.
Don't forget about Nigerian Princes...
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Wire transfers are largely an oddity of the USA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't use wire transfers anyway.
Say what? I process wire transfers to Europe and Asia on a daily basis... they actually have better infrastructure for it in the rest of the world. IBAN/SWIFT
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Wire transfers are extremely common the world over. The oddity is that in the U.S. it's easier for individuals to do, and that's because most other countries police wire transfers more heavily.
I expect GCHQ know that my electricity costs £33/month, but the process is extremely widespread, free (for me), and very easy to set up, either for paying bills (of fixed or varying amounts), or sending money to individuals.
There's apparently a default limit of £10k/day, but that's the bank (who will change it if asked), not the law. Regulations are only for international or "suspicious" transfers, and that applies to Western Union as much (probably more...) than Barclay's.
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A check is a piece of paper that contains your routing number and account number.
Nobody actually writes paper checks for anything except paying their FIRST bill with a company -- so that the account number and routing code can be re-used for automatic EFT billing. The occasional grandmother-writing-birthday-check and paying-the-babysitter-check get written, but NOBODY born in the last 40 years uses a checkbook any longer for anything other than the OCCASIONAL weirdo at the grocery store holding up the line
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TELL MY EMPLOYER.
He still MAILS a paper check to all of his employees twice a month. AND it's a software company. HOLY DISSONANCE BATMAN.
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Your employer has a right to risk that his checks are lost in the mail; and he has a right to pay for printing, signing, and mailing those pieces of paper.
Every sane payroll services company offers direct deposit. It is not difficult to set up, and it is better in every aspect.
This has nothing to do with Bitcoin (Score:2)
The patent does mention "digital cash," and BTC is that. However the patent is not about creating new coins from thin air. The patent is simply about software that allows you to pay using your existing accounts with banks (they mention c/c.) The payment, however, is anonymous, and very cheap. That's all.
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Wonder if it might overlap with some of Chaum's anonymous currency patents. His venture didn't last long, but the underlying concepts of the currency were sound and it provided true anonymous transfer of money without relying on blockchains or "majority rules".
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Banks are not about creating coins from thin air? What do you think the bank bailouts were?
If you patent prior art, I feel bad for you son. (Score:5, Funny)
It's got 18 thousand word, but a 'bit' ain't one.
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If it contains prior art, Bitcoin isn't it.
Hah now they'll sue (Score:2)
without processing fees at chase bank? (Score:2)
Don't banks love to fee stuff up a lot.
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Their purposes are to: (repeat after me)
- Provide services
- For a profit
Any questions?
This isn't bitcoin, or a cryptocurrency (Score:5, Informative)
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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Except they didn't because the two systems are completely different. Someone read the title of a patent without reading any content and jumped to conclusions. Welcome to the Internet.
NOTHING like Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
In contrast, this patent seems to be talking about a system that uses your same old credit card account. Which is not surprising; how would a BANK use a DECENTRALIZED currency system with its customers?
So basically, this is a meaningless article written by some idiot at Fox News who wanted to make a headline that would stand out. Which I suppose worked, since it made it past the impeccable Slashdot editing process.
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The quality of most online news is pretty shitty, because authors are paid for the number of views they generate. So there is a lot of incentive to write a lot of articles with interesting headlines, and little to no incentive to actually learn what the hell you're talking about.
Anyone check the IDS? Duty to Disclose (Score:2)
Anyone check the IDS?
Applicant has a duty to disclose (See MPEP 2001) any and all prior art that they are aware of at the time of filing.
Per MPEP 2001.01
(c) Individuals associated with the filing or prosecution of a patent application within the meaning of this section are:
(1) Each inventor named in the application;
(2) Each attorney or agent who prepares or prosecutes the application; and
(3) Every other person who is substantively involved in the preparation or prosecution of the application and who is asso
This predates Bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)
The original application on which this is based is dated May 3, 1999. So this predates Bitcoin. Only prior art earlier than the priority date is relevant.
The life of the patent counts from the priority date, so this patent, if issued, will run out in 2019. The USPTO doesn't consider this patent to contain patentable subject matter; they've issued a 101 Non Final Rejection. (You have to look up the patent application in USPTO Public PAIR [uspto.gov] to see this. Public PAIR has the status info for all patents as they go through examination, and images of all the actual documents. All the letters and forms back and forth between the applicant and the USPTO are in there. PAIR is kind of slow, and there's a CAPTCHA to prevent it from being scraped in bulk, so the data in PAIR isn't indexed by search engines.)
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
I'm not sure that giving JPMorgan a patent on money is a good idea. Just sayin'...
Really? (Score:2)
There are 18,126 words in the patent application. 'Bitcoin' is not one of them."
So /. could take a lesson from JPMorgan's patent lawyers, then, and STFU about bitcoin already.
Have some time to help nuke JP Morgan on this? (Score:2, Interesting)
From the USPTO PAIR database, "By this preliminary Amendment, claims 1-154 have been canceled..."
154 claims canceled?!? Typical patents have around 21 claims. USPTO charges per-claim over 21 total claims. JP Morgan's application had 170 claims — way beyond even a 3-sigma deviation for all patent applications. That is, it's amateurish. But, somehow they managed to avoid paying the $80/each for the excess claims. Most rejections were nominally due to the claims being "too abstract."
So, anyways, f
Not via the methods you suggest... (Score:5, Informative)
From the USPTO PAIR database, "By this preliminary Amendment, claims 1-154 have been canceled..."
154 claims canceled?!? Typical patents have around 21 claims. USPTO charges per-claim over 21 total claims. JP Morgan's application had 170 claims — way beyond even a 3-sigma deviation for all patent applications. That is, it's amateurish. But, somehow they managed to avoid paying the $80/each for the excess claims.
It's actually pretty standard in many instances - i.e. there's nothing amateurish about it. Specifically, if someone comes up with a half dozen related-but-different inventions, it may be more efficient to write one giant application than a half dozen applications that repeat parts of each other. That one giant application may then have [drumroll] 170 claims. And when you file it, you actually file one and cancel claims 21-170 in a preliminary amendment on the filing date, "somehow managing to avoid paying the excess claims fees". And then later (or at the same time), you file a divisional application and cancel claims 1-20 and claims 41-170. And another canceling claims 1-40 and 61-170. Etc.
Let me guess... in spite of your description of this standard practice as "amateurish", you're not a professional in the field?
So, anyways, from the USPTO PAIR database — JP Morgan are claiming that their filing is under pre-AIA conditions. That is, that they are first to invent, and are not subject to the current first to file rules. Big difference. The inventor filed an "oath" regarding the invention date. Uh huh.
Well, yeah. This was first filed in 1999, long before the first to file rules. Of course it's subject to the first to invent rules. 1999 vs. 2013? Big difference. Uh huh.
USPTO also says, "Claims 155-175 are allowed over the prior art of record based on the earliest priority of the parent applications." I couldn't find the priority date that they are claiming, or whether it is before their filing date, but one might guess they are trying to get a pre-BitCoin patent priority date. Jerks.
You apparently couldn't find paragraph 1 of the application:
[0001] This application is a continuation of U.S. Ser. No. 09/497,307 filed Feb. 3, 2000 and is based on and claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Applications Nos. 60/132,305, filed May 3, 1999; 60/150,725, filed Aug. 25, 1999; 60/161,300, filed Oct. 26, 1999; 60/163,828, filed Nov. 5, 1999; and 60/173,044, filed Dec. 23, 1999, the entire disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Gosh, being really clear about the priority dates? What a bunch of jerks.
If only someone knew of some actual prior art, and that this person also knew the name and contact information for the patent examiner. Hmmn...
Ah, here we are: From their non-final rejection, "Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAGDISH PATEL whose telephone number is (571) 272-6748." I'm sure he has an email address as well.
Yeah, go ahead and call the Examiner, in spite of the fact that it's explicitly illegal without a letter of authorization from the patent applicant:
[T]he Office prohibits third parties from submitting any protests under 37 CFR 1.291 or initiating any public use proceedings under 37 CFR 1.292 (without the express written consent of the applicant) after publication of an application... Office personnel (including the Patent Examining Corps) are instructed to: (1) not reply to any third-party inquiry or other submission in a published pending application; (2) not act upon any third-party inquiry or other submission in a published application, except for written submissions that are provided for in 37 CFR 1.99 and written submissions in applications in which the applicant has provided an expres
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A preliminary amendment filed on the filing date along with the application can avoid excess claims fees. In other words, they filed a continuation that included claims 1-154 (because a continuation is supposed to have all the same stuff that the parent has, and this ensures that there is written description support for the parent's original claims in the child case), but then they amended the claims on the same day to cancel those claims and only present claims 155-175 (21 claims). So they owed us $80 fo
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Of course he doesn't know what he is talking about, very few who have commented so far appear to know anything about patents. This is nothing new or suprising for slashdot.
When did Bitcoin destory Western Union? (Score:2)
And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union — just like Bitcoin.
There are all manner of things Bitcoin could do, but I don't think it's succeeded at this one yet.
Kill The Patent (Score:2)
1) Bitcoin is prior art invalidating JPMotherfkr's patent.
2) The Supreme Court is seriously considering killing these types of patents and hopefully will.
Perhaps (Score:2)
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Well, they would be using their patented technology, so yes they can ( and will )
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That would be a great way to get their patent invalidated and waste a whole lot of money on legal costs.
How exactly would they expect to sue someone over a patent filed years after someone was already doing something publicly?
A more likely scenario is this is to scare/stop other companies leveraging existing payment networks to capitalise on 'anonymous' funds transfers.
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Big bankers don't get jail time or substantial fines for perjury or other criminal acts here, so yes. There's a snowball's chance, and enough additional snowballs where that came from that Hell will be inhabitable.
Grab your bitcoin wallet, your lawyer, and your ass. When an already powerful bank goes patent troll you may well need them all and in that order.
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No, they can't.
The patent claims describe a very specific architecture that is completely unrelated to the distributed system that Bitcoin uses. By design, the bank running the system approves transactions unilaterally through its own system.
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Sounds like the stock market, and that seems to be taken seriously.
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True. Can't use it as a value store, but it seems to have found a niche for use in transfers. Party A buys bitcoin for dollars, transfers coin to party B, party B buys dollars with bitcoins.
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Exposed public address...to receive payments. An account number? I may be American, but isn't that the way Europe handles cash transfers from one bank to another?