5 ms·

Check the last two pages. It only took 4 years for a re-examination to cancel all 20 claims.

by jws 16y ago

wisty 16y ago
Fantastic. Only four years in which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit. My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid? If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation? I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap.
- iamwil 16y ago
  According to Jeff Bezos, the 1-click purchase wasn't obvious at all, especially when you have a large supply chain system at Amazon. This is mostly due to edge cases like, what if the user cancels the order and the book is already making its way through the warehouse being packaged? What if the number of orders change while the book is being selected from the warehouse? From what I remember, when a user clicks on the 1-click purchase to buy an item, it actually queues the purchase for a certain amount of time before being acted on by the warehouse, and there are things in place to back it out if the user decides to change the purchase.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Then why did anyone that wanted to allow their customers to purchase items with a single click have to license from Amazon? If the real innovation that they were protecting was the way that the back-end system was implemented, then why is the front-end piece being (aggressively) licensed out? Something smells fishy about that explanation. It reeks of the MS justification for their patent portfolio (it's defensive only! really!), only to contradict their statements later on (suing TomTom over FAT32 patents; making (empty) public threats against infringements by Linux; etc).
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    That argument would be plausible if Amazon was patenting a particular logistical implementation of 1-click purchase. ("This is a specific device which allows canceled orders to be tracked and routed back to inventory...") But they patented the entire concept, which would prevent even companies with trivial logistics from allowing 1-click purchasing without paying Amazon royalties. And indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly, Bezos defended the broad patenting of all types of 1-click purchasing. Here is an excerpt of O'Reilly's description of their conversation: > First off, Jeff wanted to explain why he thought 1-click was original enough to patent. It has nothing to do with the implementation, which he admits is fairly trivial to duplicate, but with the reframing of the problem. At the time he came up with 1-click shopping, everyone was locked in to the shopping cart metaphor, because that's what you do in the real world. You pick up an item and take it to the counter to buy it. On the Web, he realized, something very different was possible: all you had to do was point to an article, and it was yours... >What's more, Jeff went on, small inventions can often seem extremely obvious in retrospect. The patent literature is full of this kind of thing. The significance of an invention isn't how hard it is to copy, but how it reframes the problem in a new way. > This may be true, I replied. But it is hard to believe that if Amazon hadn't introduced 1-click ordering (if they were indeed first to do it), that someone else wouldn't have done this. It beggars the imagination that this is so significant and unexpected an innovation that others should be prevented from using it. Patents are meant to promote the common welfare, the idea being that certain ideas won't be developed without government providing a degree of protection. Is this an idea that required that kind of protection to be developed? http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.htm...
    - iamwil 16y ago
      I read the article you linked. It gave a different flavor than I thought. It seems there are a couple issues mixed together here. The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it. My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds. That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it. And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  > all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. That's it - my new goal is to invent and patent the Zero-Click Purchase. You read it here first.
  - rubyrescue 16y ago
    i've been saying this for years. my idea was - hover over an item for more than a few seconds, it's delivered to your house! you better lawyer up.
  - eftpotrm 16y ago
    Slashdot described the method and benefits for this many years ago, so could be cited as prior art.
    - Symmetry 16y ago
      My college dorm's Laundry webservers were slashdotted but someone was still able to come along later, patent the idea, and try to sue us.
      - eftpotrm 16y ago
        ... which is just another example of that which has long been implemented (and sometimes long been patented) still managing to attract protection. However, at least when there is a significant pre-established publication of the idea the 'try to' becomes rather more significant than the 'sue' and they can be got rid of rather more easily.
        Symmetry 16y ago
        Yes, and really it wasn't much of a problem for us. The company still has a monopoly on the laundry-webserver business, though, and overcharges other people horribly.
        16y ago
- njharman 16y ago
  > which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit. That is not how patents work. Your statement is ridiculously ignorant fear mongering. There's real problems with patents, you're just fueling the forces that wish for status que by letting them label paten reformers as kooks.
  - asmithmd1 16y ago
    That is exactly how patents work. When you patent an invention no one can make, use, or sell your invention without a license.
rudyfink 16y ago
Yes, and this re-examination was initiated by the PTO director too! [The PTO can order re-exam on its own action (as opposed to action by an outside party)] It may sadden you, but the patent was invalidated based on at least two pieces of prior art (patents in this case) that were both stick shaped dog toys. The first is a patent (4577219) filed in 1984 for a stick shaped chewable dog toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ) The second is a design patent (D428220) filed in 1999 for a stick shaped pet toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ). If you were also curious about the gory details of its re-examination process, you can pull it off of the patent application information retrieval (PAIR) service ( http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair ) -- enter the reexamination request number off of the re-exam certificate ( 90/006301 ) and click on "image file wrapper" and then you can see all of the actions undertaken.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  These cases are very tricky. Patents in general are. The question is: Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones OR do they only hinder innovation? Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)? The paten question is no triviality and should not be treated as such. Don't think "oh why don't they just revoke it". Perhaps what is wrong with our system is the time given, 7 years in software terms may as well be a lifetime, while 7 years in physical product terms is hardly anything. Thats the problem with our system. And copyright is a whole nothing monster. They mingle often, but are not the same.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones I think everybody knows the answer to that one and it's as asking if the US went to Irak on valid concerns for WMD: official answer is Yes; and when that will change hell will freeze.
throwaway8487 16y ago
Just like the title of this post, your comment can be misleading. USPTO sends an action and attorneys respond to that action [1]. Which means a case can go on for years if attorney (for clients) has deep pockets [2]. A patent grant was not designed to be end-all be-all for that patent. For example, it can be found invalid at anytime by uspto (re-exam) or by the courts. An examiner only has hours to read/understand/search/write a response but in any case this was really bad mistake that should have never happened. 1. Attorneys have usually 3-6 months and USPTO has usually upto 4 months to respond to attorney. 2. Using request for reconsideration and continuation among other things.

Check the last two pages. It only took 4 years for a re-examination to cancel all 20 claims.

by jws 16y ago

Check the last two pages. It only took 4 years for a re-examination to cancel all 20 claims.

wisty 16y ago

Fantastic. Only four years in which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit. My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid? If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation? I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap.

iamwil 16y ago
According to Jeff Bezos, the 1-click purchase wasn't obvious at all, especially when you have a large supply chain system at Amazon. This is mostly due to edge cases like, what if the user cancels the order and the book is already making its way through the warehouse being packaged? What if the number of orders change while the book is being selected from the warehouse? From what I remember, when a user clicks on the 1-click purchase to buy an item, it actually queues the purchase for a certain amount of time before being acted on by the warehouse, and there are things in place to back it out if the user decides to change the purchase.
- pyre 16y ago
  Then why did anyone that wanted to allow their customers to purchase items with a single click have to license from Amazon? If the real innovation that they were protecting was the way that the back-end system was implemented, then why is the front-end piece being (aggressively) licensed out? Something smells fishy about that explanation. It reeks of the MS justification for their patent portfolio (it's defensive only! really!), only to contradict their statements later on (suing TomTom over FAT32 patents; making (empty) public threats against infringements by Linux; etc).
- jessriedel 16y ago
  That argument would be plausible if Amazon was patenting a particular logistical implementation of 1-click purchase. ("This is a specific device which allows canceled orders to be tracked and routed back to inventory...") But they patented the entire concept, which would prevent even companies with trivial logistics from allowing 1-click purchasing without paying Amazon royalties. And indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly, Bezos defended the broad patenting of all types of 1-click purchasing. Here is an excerpt of O'Reilly's description of their conversation: > First off, Jeff wanted to explain why he thought 1-click was original enough to patent. It has nothing to do with the implementation, which he admits is fairly trivial to duplicate, but with the reframing of the problem. At the time he came up with 1-click shopping, everyone was locked in to the shopping cart metaphor, because that's what you do in the real world. You pick up an item and take it to the counter to buy it. On the Web, he realized, something very different was possible: all you had to do was point to an article, and it was yours... >What's more, Jeff went on, small inventions can often seem extremely obvious in retrospect. The patent literature is full of this kind of thing. The significance of an invention isn't how hard it is to copy, but how it reframes the problem in a new way. > This may be true, I replied. But it is hard to believe that if Amazon hadn't introduced 1-click ordering (if they were indeed first to do it), that someone else wouldn't have done this. It beggars the imagination that this is so significant and unexpected an innovation that others should be prevented from using it. Patents are meant to promote the common welfare, the idea being that certain ideas won't be developed without government providing a degree of protection. Is this an idea that required that kind of protection to be developed? http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.htm...
  - iamwil 16y ago
    I read the article you linked. It gave a different flavor than I thought. It seems there are a couple issues mixed together here. The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it. My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds. That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it. And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
> all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. That's it - my new goal is to invent and patent the Zero-Click Purchase. You read it here first.
- rubyrescue 16y ago
  i've been saying this for years. my idea was - hover over an item for more than a few seconds, it's delivered to your house! you better lawyer up.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Slashdot described the method and benefits for this many years ago, so could be cited as prior art.
  - Symmetry 16y ago
    My college dorm's Laundry webservers were slashdotted but someone was still able to come along later, patent the idea, and try to sue us.
    - eftpotrm 16y ago
      ... which is just another example of that which has long been implemented (and sometimes long been patented) still managing to attract protection. However, at least when there is a significant pre-established publication of the idea the 'try to' becomes rather more significant than the 'sue' and they can be got rid of rather more easily.
      - Symmetry 16y ago
        Yes, and really it wasn't much of a problem for us. The company still has a monopoly on the laundry-webserver business, though, and overcharges other people horribly.
        16y ago
njharman 16y ago
> which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit. That is not how patents work. Your statement is ridiculously ignorant fear mongering. There's real problems with patents, you're just fueling the forces that wish for status que by letting them label paten reformers as kooks.
- asmithmd1 16y ago
  That is exactly how patents work. When you patent an invention no one can make, use, or sell your invention without a license.

rudyfink 16y ago

Yes, and this re-examination was initiated by the PTO director too! [The PTO can order re-exam on its own action (as opposed to action by an outside party)] It may sadden you, but the patent was invalidated based on at least two pieces of prior art (patents in this case) that were both stick shaped dog toys. The first is a patent (4577219) filed in 1984 for a stick shaped chewable dog toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ) The second is a design patent (D428220) filed in 1999 for a stick shaped pet toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ). If you were also curious about the gory details of its re-examination process, you can pull it off of the patent application information retrieval (PAIR) service ( http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair ) -- enter the reexamination request number off of the re-exam certificate ( 90/006301 ) and click on "image file wrapper" and then you can see all of the actions undertaken.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
These cases are very tricky. Patents in general are. The question is: Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones OR do they only hinder innovation? Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)? The paten question is no triviality and should not be treated as such. Don't think "oh why don't they just revoke it". Perhaps what is wrong with our system is the time given, 7 years in software terms may as well be a lifetime, while 7 years in physical product terms is hardly anything. Thats the problem with our system. And copyright is a whole nothing monster. They mingle often, but are not the same.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones I think everybody knows the answer to that one and it's as asking if the US went to Irak on valid concerns for WMD: official answer is Yes; and when that will change hell will freeze.

throwaway8487 16y ago

Just like the title of this post, your comment can be misleading. USPTO sends an action and attorneys respond to that action [1]. Which means a case can go on for years if attorney (for clients) has deep pockets [2]. A patent grant was not designed to be end-all be-all for that patent. For example, it can be found invalid at anytime by uspto (re-exam) or by the courts. An examiner only has hours to read/understand/search/write a response but in any case this was really bad mistake that should have never happened. 1. Attorneys have usually 3-6 months and USPTO has usually upto 4 months to respond to attorney. 2. Using request for reconsideration and continuation among other things.