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One Click Patent News 89

Posted by Hemos from the more-trouble-for-amazon dept.
Agro writes "OpenTV is is trying to broaden one of their set-top box patents to include one click shopping. They say their claim predates Amazon's by "more than three years." The press release is posted here. I can't decide if the filing is the worst part or the fact that OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer." As well: Darrin Cardani writes "This article on Yahoo claims that OpenTV thinks that Amazon's 1-click patent infringes on one of their patents filed 3 years earlier."
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One Click Patent News More

One Click Patent News

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  • If the patent is invalidated, Apple won't have to pay Amazon any more, so all the better!

    Right, then they get to pay OpenTV instead, and how much do you want to bet that he isn't going to get his money back from Amazon?

    (for that matter, OpenTV might be inclined to charge him retroactively for his unlicensed (by them) use of the ... ahem ... technology)

  • Unless you are a cable operator its not bloody likely that you will ever buy anything from OpenTV anytime in the future.


    Note: I am an OpenTV employee.
  • I don't like CIPO. How about CHIP OFF? (CHief Intellectual Property OFFicer)
  • Hey,

    That falls under my patent on "'Lawsuit-related business practice' related business practices"

    Aha! That is in conflict with my 'Being bloody stupid' buisness practice. My lobbyists have been notified and as soon as the appropriate laws have paid thier wat into the statute books, the feds will be kicking down your door. Your only hope is to spend a few $ thou' on lawyers to hopelesly outgun me for a few years, until I have no money left. Or you could just do an OJ Simpson and hope the jury is comprised of ignorant morons. In fact, these law things are silly, I think I'll train my accountants into an eliete ninja force to crush all me competitors. I am going to call them The middle-aged mutant ninja accountants [cmdrtaco.net]! Ph33r!

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Its not bad, except for the small businesses and the like that don't have $millions to start-up their business. If we had one more revolution in the regard to individual freedoms, I think it would probably be the only way to go.

    Having been interested in the whole debate and read most of the articles and discussions on it, it seems the faults of the patent system are really apart of the big business corporatism. These issues all come from the problems related to placing $$$billions in the hands of a few and expecting them to act in a fair or an uncorrupted manner, which nobody seems capable of! They always get bent on crushing the competition and extracting more money from the customers (i.e. everyone) to pay for their power and control.

    As for solutions, its up to the government allow or not allow something like this to happen... So, its actually a direct problem with the peoples' inability to monitor our(US)/their own government and have it perform the way we want it to work.

    All power in any real "free" country comes from the people, anyway. Corrupt people tent to ignore everything but lots of money and concentrated power pools.

  • Genes can -not- be patented. 'Discoveries' of natural things can -not- be patented. 'gene patents' is media shorthand for 'have patented the process of extracting or synthesizing the gene sequence'.

    Similarly to 'algorithms cannot be patented'; you can't stop people from engaging in public key cryptography if they do it with pencil and paper. (Or maybe you can if you patent 'a process implementing public key cryptography with pencil and paper' ... but I doubt it. I think it's 'obvious' even to the patent office that math can be done with a pencil and paper...)

    So, software patents are on the -synthetic- process of a program running in memory, and gene patents are on the -synthetic- process of extracting/synthesizing genes. The 'natural' processes of thinking through a math problem or procreating are unpatentable.

    The -scary- part of gene patents is the same thing that is scary about -all- medicinal patents. What if you have a deadly disease but have no insurance and cannot afford the inflated prices of the exclusive manufacturer of the treatment? (As happens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with AIDS right now... ). Anyway. Don't dilute important issues just because the media is too lazy to describe things properly. (They do, you know, at least once every few weeks have an 'in-depth' discussion of gene-patents, and the first question is always 'how can you patent a gene?' followed by the explanation I just gave. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by NPR and the BBC... )


    --Parity
  • One would think that Apple would have first shot at the one click patent.
  • more-than-one-click shopping existed for a while. Logically, less clicks is better.
    One Click Shopping is like patenting "Method for Building Larger then Average Gasoline Tank"

    ----
  • What?
    I am a developer for digital TV. Our company has bought stuff from OpenTV - a SDK license and a box from Pace (but bought through OpenTV).
  • I think it's time shareholders were required to obtain some sort of certification. It's no longer corporations' fault or the Patent Office's fault. The value of a stock will rise whenever some company pulls something like one-click or IBM's mock wheel patent, regardless whether that IP ever actually leads directly to profit. Nevermind the fact we're not talking about products or inventions but solutions. It's like patenting a particular book used to hold up an unbalanced table.

  • You forget this is Online one-click shopping. That's totally different as everyone should know.

    - Steeltoe

  • "one interaction"?

    How about:

    . Putting your card behind the bar
    . Shopping someplace you have an account card

    Both of these patents should really be covered by "obvious usage" if they don't merely cover /how/ the server side is implemented.

    .. The same way you can perhaps patent how you achieve lift with a new wing or engine, but you can't patent flight as a result of not being on the ground.

    One-Click as a user-interface feature as a means to conducting commerce probably has hundreds of 'proveable earlier uses' predating either of these patents.

    Oliver
  • Who cares? We need more cases like this for patent office reform

    Probably won't help. One will sue the other (or both will sue each other), but it will never make it to trial. They'll settle out of court with a cross-licensing agreement.

    (Aside: ...which does not strengthen the patents against other challenges, legally. A patent becomes neither more nor less valid simply because it's been licensed, one time or several.)

  • I really, really hope that this claim goes through.

    Very unlikely. It probably won't even get to trial. Much more likely that they'll just cross-license the patents to each other.

  • Okay, besides checking if the patent is legal, shouldn't they also check if it infringes on sombody else's patent?

    No. To understand this, it's important to understand exactly what a patent grants you. If you have a patent, that means you can prevent anyone else from making or selling your invention. It does not give you the right to make or sell it yourself. (If you could have made/sold it before the patent, you still can, but that right doesn't come from the patent. Conversely, if you couldn't have legally made/sold your invention before, you still can't.)

    To be precise, your action in making or selling an invention which someone else has patented is an infringement upon that patent. Getting a patent itself never infringes another patent, because just getting a patent isn't making or selling anything.

    A common example from the pharmaceutical industry: Company A patents drug X. Company B can still patent the combination of drugs X and Y (in a single pill, for example). Just getting the patent isn't making or selling X, so that's fine.

    Now, company B cannot sell their X-Y combination without the permission of company A, since that would infringe on A's patent on X. Likewise, company A cannot sell X-Y without the permission of company B. (Of course, A can still sell X alone.) If company C wants to sell X-Y, it must have the permission of both A and B.

    Now, if B had tried to patent X alone (not the X-Y combination), with A already having a patent on X, the application will (at least in theory) be rejected by the patent office.

  • You forget this is Online one-click shopping. That's totally different as everyone should know.

    See for [dictionary.com]a definition of online/on-line [dictionary.com]. Read definition 2 in the American Heritage dictionary, and definition 1 in the Free On-Line Dictionary of computing as well. It's plugged in, it's turned on, therefore it's On-Line.

    Law is the buisness of pedanticism. IANAL but I am pedantic.

  • From what I've seen from looking into filing a patent (IANAL), the person filing is supposed to check for previous patents.

    Personally, I hope that:

    1) OpenTV sue the $#!+ out of Amazon.
    2) Amazon has to pay fines/licensing fees up the wazoo.
    3) OpenTV's patent is declared obvious or nullified by the Berman-Boucher bill passing.

    BTW, slightly off-topic, but if you read the B-B bill, the $200 fee to challenge the obviousness or prior art of an idea can be waived "if such waiver is in the public interest".

  • It the responsibility of the patent filer. That is why patent attorneys make butt-loads of money. They have to research all related patents then determine if you'd have a leg to stand on in court.

    -tim
  • Patenting of software and business practices is not going away. The simple truth is that many companies primary asset is their intellectual property and wouldn't exist without protection. I do not think that the incentive to patent does much to drive the creation of new technology. It basically creates a windfall for whoever can get a patent. You create a company that owns nothing but a good idea and a patent and you have something very valuable. However, in a capitalist system such as ours, the patent laws are going to be set up to protect business not to encourage innovation. However, the system clearly needs work, and sooner or later you have to expect that it will be fixed. You still have to wonder how the patent office approves one-click shopping, even under its current guidelines. You aren't supposed to be able to patent anything that is as obvious as that.
  • I'm thinking of opening a sourceforge project to write software which will, given a complete list of objects, problems, methodologies, nouns,adverbs buzzwords, makey-upey words, and adjectives will generate syntactically correct descriptions of how to do anything to anything, using any damn method.
    Then I'll publish them all and we'll be done with this patent rubbish. :)

    "A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
  • I can see it now...

    • OpenTV get its 'patent' approved, nullifying Amazon's.
    • Apple sues Amazon for misrepresentation of its 'IP'-patents.
    • Amazon in turn sues the Patent office because of all the trouble this caused...

    This would be an ideal situation, as it would make parties responsible for their greedy actions, as well as giving them a well-deserved slap in the face.

  • Maybe I am wrong here but i don't think OpenTV are going to be going after amazon. They seem to be trying to get the patent on using a one click shopping technology in set top boxes. This means information is stored within the box for quick use on any site (I think) which is different to how amazon just store the info for their own site.

    It just seems that OpenTV are trying to cover against amazon ever going after them for infringing a patent with technology theyve been using for years.

    Of course I could have missed the point completely and be way off, it has been known to happen :)

  • Let us watch the patent system go up in flames, in one big f*ckfest of debilitating litigation. Instead of weening, let us all start filing absurd patents too. I'm claiming the zero-click, the two-click, three-click, say n-click processes for myself!

  • You're rich! (Score:5)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @10:02AM (#728621) Homepage Journal
    One Click Patent News

    What? You've figured out a way to patent something with a single mouse click? Now that is an idea worth patenting!

    __________

  • No one should be allowed to prevent someone from working. .. That's why there's a time limit. Should anyone be allowed to own highways so that anyone can put up road blocks?

    Whether it's any benefit to society is irrelevant. Society is definitely not beneficial to society. It's hypocritical for anyone to ask for all decisions to be based on whether there's benefit to society. For example, not one of the organizations concerned about world hunger ever talks about doing the dirty work of making sure governments don't import the food or resources that undeveloped countries need in order to begin to grow. It's all one bloody (speaking figuratively of course) pointless crusade like the bloody (speaking not so figuratively) drug war.

    The problem is that we allow a vocal uneducated group known as The Shareholders(TM) to control what companies do. I think that if a company is publicly owned beyond a certain percent it should be dismantled. A piece of land would be horribly ruined if many people shared it as it would no longer be managed properly and would fail to perform its function in agriculture. Similarly after many stab wounds a human being dies.

    Take any machine and give too many people control and it falls to pieces.

    Public shareholding is too communistic in my opinion for it to work. That why the system fails.


  • Independent invention by ONE other party
    does not prove something was obvious.

    Independent invention by ONE HUNDRED other
    parties would prove it was obvious.

  • One Click Shopping is not like patenting
    "Method for Building Larger then Average Gasoline Tank"

    this implies that all the click's were the same and you are just reducing the number of times
    you have to do the same thing. each click is a different step and they were eliminating the
    some of the steps.

    One Click Shopping is like patenting

    "Method for Filling a Gasoline Tank Without Requiring the Operator of the Vehicle to Exit
    the Vehicle, Open the Gasoline Filling Cover, or Requiring the Operator to Roll Down their
    Window to Pay for the Gasoline Recieved."

  • Exactly. It's rather more complicated to reduce the number of steps. Not necessarily enough to be patentable, but the implementation details are much different than 10 click shopping.
    --
  • You are exactly right. If we don't like how patent law is happening, we should make sure we make our case to the government. If the government doesn't listen, vote someone in who will. We need to take our country back, instead of letting the few people that do vote decide who we're going to give our country to next. (Shameless Political Plug) Look at Harry Brown [harrybrown.org]'s platform. Even if you don't agree with him, his principles are what I think we need to get back on track. Give us back our freedom. We need the government to be there to perserve freedom, not to decide how we live our lives down to the very smallest detail. I know that last bit was a little off topic, but it honestly is how I feel about patent issues, mp3s, etc. Sueing, patent law, etc has gotten out of hand because we have let the government set up a system that allows for it to get out of hand. All I'm saying is, if issues like this make your blood boil, vote this year and at least try to make a difference!
  • For example, not one of the organizations concerned about world hunger ever talks about doing the dirty work of making sure governments don't import the food or resources that undeveloped countries need in order to begin to grow.
    The Hunger Project [thp.org] does. To quote from their Principles statement: [thp.org]
    • A human issue. Today, ending hunger is not primarily a technical or a production issue, it is a human issue. Hunger persists because we, as human beings, have failed to organize our societies in ways that assure every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life.
    You've identified a big (but little examined) problem:
    Our society runs on the presumption that the way that we do things is for the greater common good. For example one of the central principles of lasez-faire capitalism is that 'In working for his on good, a man will necessarily also work for the benefit of society'. If that was true, we wouldn't have any problem with drug dealers and contract killers. ("Just makin' a buck makin you kick the bucket").

    Having recognized that distinction, there are a couple of general paths you can take: You can ignore it and pretend that all is OK; you can work to correct things; you can give up and die. Unfortunately, you seem to have taken the pessimistic path.
    `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

  • I continued the discussion on #slashdot on irc.openprojects.net

    The gist at the end was that yes I was a bit harsh, but I needed to start from the other extreme and work backwards to a solution.

    Maybe companies shouldn't be dismantled. However, I'm tired of shareholders "getting away with murder".

    As for the business of doing things for the greater good, Ayn Rand said, "Do not expect a moral man to idly stand by and remain a totally moral man in a society where the looters rule and force is the deciding factor".

    As much as I hate Ayn Rand Societies, I have yet to find anything wrong with her philosophy of exchanging work for wealth and focusing on goals instead of groupthink.

    Don't forget that we don't actually have laissez-faire capitalism. Patenteers aren't practicing anything even resembling it. The patenteers work to stop others from working which doesn't guarantee that they will profit since they don't actually do any work afterwards.
  • What i'm getting at is that it's just 'progress' - it's not an idea, just a change to an old one. There's no actual innovation- there was nothing to patent, at all, just a method of doing somethjing slightly better then a competitor.
    ----
  • Here's how the patent listed in OpenTV's press release describes the viewer's shopping experience. This language will determine whether or not OpenTV is entitled to broader claims to "one-click" shopping.

    When a viewer wishes to order an item, a button is pressed on the TV remote control. This button signals the client computer 22 to display a series of instructions and menus necessary to solicit the information necessary to place the order, e.g. the item number, name and address of the viewer, the method of payment, the credit card number (if needed), etc. These instructions are generated in the client computer as graphics which are overlaid on the television video image. It is also possible for a computer generated voice to be generated and combined with the television audio either by voice-over, or by replacing the television audio. The viewer responds to the instruction by providing the requested information via the TV remote control. When the information requested by the on-screen display and/or voice instructions has been entered by the viewer, it is sent to a central computer via the modem in the client computer. An order confirmation may be sent in the other direction from the central computer.


    It is also possible that permanent information about the viewer (i.e. the name, address, method of payment and credit card number) may be preentered once by the viewer, so it is not necessary to solicit that information each time an order is placed. The information is stored in permanent memory in the client computer. In such a case, when an order is placed, that information is retrieved from the permanent memory, appended to the item number and transmitted to the central computer. It is further possible that, by means of time codes, or other commands, inserted into the data stream, the client computer will know which item is currently being offered for sale. In such a case, the viewer will be able to order it by simply pressing one button on the TV remote control. In response, the client computer can combine the previously received information related to the item currently being offered for sale with the previously stored personal information related to the viewer, and transmit the order to the central computer and receive the confirmation in return.
    (U.S. Patent 5,819,034, column 8 line 34- column 9 line 2)


    IAAPL.
  • Because companies are owned by shareholders, CEOs have TO DO STUPID THINGS. The public is pretty much the most ignorant, moronic, opinionated, species on this planet.

    Consumers are morons. The only people who should have shares are those who actually have a clue or know someone who has a damned clue.

    Then you'd see things less evil.
  • In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the first book in the trilogy), this concept is mentioned as well.

    When Arthur is being brought up to date on the events surrounding Earth, Magrathea, and the mice by Slartibartfast, he mentions that Arthur should be careful not to bow his head at the end of the tape, or else he'll buy whatever it is that they were selling.
  • I'm sorry, but prior art for everything exists, as a BSI project no less.

    Everything2.com

  • You can use Rand's quote as an excuse to become immoral, or you can use it as an excuse to get into action creating a more egalitarian society. The later is the path chosen by people like Ghandi. If you don't like the world the way it is, and you're not willing to work to improve it, then all you really have the right to do is stew in your own juices.

    Change, however, occurs communally. As you get others of a like mind working togeher, people join you because they agree wih the vision you have expounded - they are enlivened by the future you are creating. It's how the Open Software movement worked and it's how most other positive change is going to occur in this world.

    If you want to change the world, then get at it, and tell us about THAT. If all you want to do is bitch and moan, then line up with people to scream at the moon about your broken dreams.
    `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

  • Not neccessary. (Besides, there's all sorts of politicians who seem to think that rather than have government programs to help the poor and elderly, people should just buy shares with money that'll mysteriously appear if the rich don't pay taxes anymore, but I digress...) All you need is to remove laws that allow shareholders to sue a company that doesn't do whatever stupid thing it takes to keep share prices & dividends up. Almost certainly won't make a difference in practice, but at least the evil fucks who make the decisions to screw the masses and rape the planet for an extra 1/2% profit will have one less excuse...
  • Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.

    Wasn't it in "Stranger in a strange land" when Michael Valentine Smith is "kept" in an hospital room I think the bed is a waterbed. I will have to check though.

  • "Change, however, occurs communally."

    On what planet?

    In any case... what in the world gave you the idea I was sitting on my ass?

    I have a few things planned.

    As for bitching and moaning.. it's a discussion. I made a comment I expanded it I refined my position. Are you calling THAT a waste of time?

  • My bad, you are definitely correct. I work in the testing labs and sometimes forget that anything else exist.
  • Wow, given the general stupidity of the way patent laws are implemented, where the largest corporation wins, I suggest that in a patent war between two varge corporations, there be one simple method of reaching a descision:

    Thunderdome!

    "Two Chief Intellectual Privacy Officers enter! once Chief Intellectual Privacy Officer leaves!"

    --

  • The patent system exists for a reason. Would their (or anyone) getting or not getting this patent actually change anyone's business plans? Would it accelerate progress?

    I think the answer is clear.

    No. Whether they got this patent or not, their business would not change. They haven't "given the world" anything such that we should give them exclusive use of this "discovery".

  • We can let hemos and company know that we all realize how many ridiculous patents there are. We almost don't care except for the humor matter. Tomorrow Rob will post saying Amazon is suing OpenTV to invalidate their patent then OpenTV will sue Amazon for suing them and then B&N will sue OpenTV for their patent on suing Amazon. WHO CARES!!! It's a ridiculously screwed system. Oh well stupid rant.
  • Makes me wonder.. Amazon came out with patenting One click around an year back. Why didnt these guys come out sooner ? Or did their CTO wake up one day all of a sudden and realized that "heck.. we did that before" :).. Well I think Amazon shouldnt worry too much about someone else stealing their patents. The whole damn thing could be closed down in an year if they dont find some dumb VC to fund this behemoth :)
  • Yeah, and I have a patent for one click patent issuing... man...

  • This is getting out of control (Score:4)

    by xtermz ( 234073 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @09:36AM (#728644) Homepage Journal
    I think its time for some major action on the part of the consumer. If the gov't doesnt take away our rights, the corporations will. Granted, we'll have free speech...but first you'll have to download the and pay for the program to write with, pay the access costs to upload, bypass all the ad banners and EULA's , and then face corporate censorship if they dont like what you have to say. People, we need to rally up and start writing letters to the different branches of our govt, most importantly congress. The patent office needs a major overhaul, and the supreme court needs to make some major decisions as far as copywrites are concerned. Plus, we need some sort of tort reform so these people cant rake innocent developers through the coals because they create soemthing neat. Enginuity is now a 4 letter word in the corporate mindset. They want to own everything. Im convinced the government wont be the ones limiting our freedoms, it'll be corporate america

    "sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
  • Please don't anyone be fooled into thinking that this is in anyway an attack on Amazon. This is a company that agrees with Amazon's idea, and hopes to usurp it.

    Scratch OpenTV off your christmas card list.

  • I'm just musing here, but there must be some technology for disabled people that allows them to click on some device to indicate "I want to buy one of those" to a clerk. Make sense?
  • The Amazon patent used cookies and computer networks explicitly. I don't know how this works, but I'm pretty certain that it doesn't invlolve adding a web browser to a television set.

    In this case I think Amazon just have to claim "sufficient innovation" to stop OpenTV's patent from infringing on theirs.

  • Query for "Bloom County" fans! ... (NOT O-T) (Score:5)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @10:14AM (#728648) Homepage Journal

    (No, this is NOT offtopic.)

    Sometime between 1984 and 1988, a week-long strip of "Bloom County" comics by Berkeley Breathed, involved prior art for this disputed 'one interaction shopping'.

    I've not been able to find this strip. Please, if anyone is a Bloom County fan, and has the older anthologies, search for them.

    The plot: Opus the Penguin has gotten addicted to Virtual Reality Home Shopping. An unwieldy helmet and computer hookup gives Opus a VR shopping experience. Opus' friends try to dissuade him before he goes bankrupt.

    The key strip: Opus explains that they have his credit card on file, and the VR system takes simple gestures to make purchases. The punchline was, as Opus gestures blindly with a pointing finger, "Oops, I think I just bought a forklift."

    If we can show any example of a concept that includes networked, shopping, single gesture and completed purchase, we can nip this stupid Amazon/OpenTV patent dispute in the bud.

    Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.

  • Hey,

    OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer.

    Aha! They plan on sueing people for infringing on patents? That falls under my patent, USP#1829904768237501765824609105 on 'Lawsuit-related buisness practice'!

    Where did I put my Chief Intellectual Property Officer???

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Has the patent benefited mankind? Does it have to? (Score:5)

    by d.valued ( 150022 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @10:16AM (#728650) Journal
    Patents are NOT determined by 'whether humanity gets a new benefit that nothing else would give.'

    Patents are SUPPOSED to be given for a new product that is useful and non-obvious to an expert in that particular field.

    For example, discovering that an altered form of Vitamin C acts as an immunoamplifier (I am not a doctor.. yet.. so I don't know what the term for the opposite of an immunosuppressant is) and makes the body tolerate organ transplants would be patent-worthy.

    Public-key cryptography, the practice of a two-key system was a new thing 28 years ago, and it was non-obvious to experts (who denied that it was possible to have a secure cryptosystem with a pair of keys), so it was patent-worthy.

    But, a great number of software patents are NOT patentworthy. The GUI Apple built in 1984 was patentable; I mean, no consumer hardware could support a gui on so little! But Microsoft patenting Win32? No way.

    I also feel that patenting genomes is wrong, because PEOPLE ARE NOT PROPERTY. Patenting parts of genes could easily lead to 'licensing fees' for human beings.....

    philosophy on the half-shell ]=[ d.valued
  • Dude, don't use "prove" in your subject and then say "it's not conclusive".

    And no, I don't think that helps the argument tremendously. 35 USC 103 says that to be non-obvious, it has to be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the field. While I think that's the case, I don't think that 2 patents proves that to be true.
    --

  • I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.
    Why would he? He wanted the feature on the website, and the only way legally to have it was to license it. Obviously, he thought the feature was worth whatever fees they are paying. If the patent is invalidated, Apple won't have to pay Amazon any more, so all the better! (Although they may have to start paying OpenTV if they want to keep using it).

    --

  • Until you needed a drug that tok $millions to develop.

  • Please what do we have to do to get /. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???

    First click here [slashdot.org] to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page [slashdot.org], and watch the patent stories disappear.


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • Some people seem to forget that Albert Einstein was a patent officer while he developed special relativity theory.

    If Einstein had paid his full attention to boring patents we wouldn't have a great new physics theory.

    Therefore we should celebrate stupid patents as a sign of our talented patent officers spending increasingly more time on some really significant research. This might hurt us short-term a little bit, but long-term it will be more beneficial for humankind.

  • Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?

    A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • Please don't anyone be fooled into thinking that this is in anyway an attack on Amazon. This is a company that agrees with Amazon's idea, and hopes to usurp it.

    Who cares? We need more cases like this for patent office reform.

    If I save your life for my own twisted goals, I've still saved your life. Not that I've saved any lives lately.

  • Okay, besides checking if the patent is legal, shouldn't they also check if it infringes on sombody else's patent?

    They do roughly dick.

    On their patents page [uspto.gov] they have some cute information. If you follow a couple links you can get to the patents FAQ [uspto.gov] which doesn't really say a damn thing about what they do.

    Anyway, I poked around a little more, and found this very small (two paragraph) document entitled "Functions of the Patent and Trademark Office [uspto.gov]" which is more helpful. It relates the following:

    In discharging its patent related duties, the Patent and Trademark Office examines applications and grants patents on inventions when applicants are entitled to them; it publishes and disseminates patent information, records assignments of patents, maintains search files of U.S. and foreign patents, and maintains a search room for public use in examining issued patents and records. It supplies copies of patents and official records to the public. Similar functions are performed relating to trademarks.

    Also informative is the document on "What Can Be Patented [uspto.gov]", "Novelty and Other Conditions For Obtaining a Patent [uspto.gov]", and most important if you want to bitch out the patent office, "General Information and Correspondence [uspto.gov]".

    So basically, all the patent office does is it decides who gets patents, keeps a room around for you to search for patents in, presumably filled with sheets of paper upon which patents are printed, and perhaps some sort of limited government-grade (IE, crappy) database which you can (sort of) search. They'll also photocopy their documents for you (for a fee, probably an excessive one) and then it does all this stuff for trademarks, as well.

  • I'm just musing here, but there must be some technology for disabled people that allows them to click on some device to indicate "I want to buy one of those" to a clerk. Make sense?

    No, but actually, a soda machine essentially constitutes one-click shopping. You feed it some money (IE, establishing an account) and then push one button, and out pops a soda. Of course, this is a fairly poor, local implementation of one-click shopping, but I think we can at least definitively show it as prior art.

  • Women's sufferage, Black rights, Labour rights, Democracy (as we know it), the independence of India, The Magna Carta.

    All of these developments and more are the result of communal work. Yes, they had (a) person(s) who headed the movement, who gathered the people together and gave them a productive focus, but it was the community that got behind them and gave the power to the movement.

    Without a focusing leader the movement may have expended it's energy fruitlessly. Without the support of the people, the leader would have been powerless. All of those changes were the result of a communal effort.

    I challenge you to show me some majour developments in the history of man which only required a single person to effect.

    As for suggestiong that you were sitting on your ass, I said that if you weren't to share that. I found your pessimistic flame too close to a self-fullfilling and self-limiting prophesy. I'd rather hear what is going on than what's not worth doing (in your mind).
    `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

  • No, no, no. Obviously, the correct abbreviation for Chief Intellectual Property Officer is "ChIPO" (pronounced "cheep-o").
  • Right story, wrong comic strip. It's Doonesbury for May 5, 1993. All the old strips are available online [doonesbury.com], but the site doesn't appear to allow individual bookmarks.

    So Garry Trudeau seems to have invented 1-Click shopping. It's a little depressing that he's become more tech-savy than Scott Adams!

    Funny you should mention Heinlein. I once read a piece by another writer (I forget his name, but he was book editor of Analog Magazine [sfsite.com] back in the 60s) who claimed to have coined the famous word "grok" that Heinlein immortalized in his classic Stranger in a Strange Land [amazon.com]. Heinlein supposedly picked it up at a conference they both attended. But this other writer wasn't accusing Heinlein of plagarism. He considered his use of "grok" to be a fair use of an idea freely shared.

    __________

  • My grandmother should own the patent on one-click shopping. She presses the power button on her TV remote one time and it automatically opens to the Home Shopping Network.
    ------
    James Hromadka
  • When someone files for a patent on something, and it turns out that there was, in fact, prior art that they were not aware of, not only does it invalidate the latter patent, but it also provides evidence that the patented "device" was, in fact, obvious.

    It's not conclusive, but certainly helps the argument when several people came up with the same idea independently.

  • Poetic Justice (Score:3)

    by Wellspring ( 111524 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @09:38AM (#728666)

    Well, I don't like it, but I can't help but smile at the thought.

    Everyone warned Jeff Bezos that these patents wouldn't work. Tim O'Reilly did. We did here on /.

    Live by the sword, die by the sword. This is exactly why software patents are so dangerous. Why they are bad for everyone-- including the patent holders. There are some cases where they make sense, but going wild is very risky.

    I really, really hope that this claim goes through. Then, perhaps Amazon will get serious about stopping these ridiculous patents.

  • I'll soon have patents on the one-double-clic patenting process.
    Send royalties to my Swiss account or be prepared to meet my lawyers.

  • Turnabout's fair play, I suppose. Jeff Bezos, just look what you started.

    The idea is so basic that I doubt OpenTV is really the first entity with a patent covering "one-click" either. This could get interesting.

    It's like the idea of Mutually Insured Destruction with nuclear weapons, except the participants are a bunch of kids holding their fingers in the "gun" configuration.

    Like as not, they'll stand there for a few seconds, there'll be a big argument over who yelled "bang!" first, and it'll degenerate into a big fistfight.

    Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and the corporate world will back off from IP abuse, but I doubt it.

    "Gimme another hit on the patent bong, Jimmy..."

    I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.

  • Okay, besides checking if the patent is legal, shouldn't they also check if it infringes on sombody else's patent?

    Or does this responsibility fall on the prior patent holder?

  • If the courts fail us, at least we can knock 3 more years off the 17 it takes this "one-click" patent to expire.

    *sigh*

    (Does this mean Apple will have to purchase the rights again?)
  • Actually I was thinking CEW, 'Chief Extortion Weasel'. Or perhaps we could let companies come up with their own appropriate internal designations!

    Amazon could have a JBOCB, or 'Jeffy Boy's One Click Bitch'

    RAMBUS could have a WSJ-YLIN, 'We stole it from Jedec- You have to license it from us now'.

    Or for Xerox, 'NGNEODP', or 'Nice Guy, Not Enforcing Our Dumb Patents'
  • But that only solves half the problem. One Chief Intellectual Property Officer gets to live. How about: cliffdiving races. They both jump off a cliff and the first (or last) one to hit the ground wins?
  • I can't say that this patent bothers me. In fact, few of these patent battles bother me. The fact that we have a patent system that allows these kinds of petty patent wars is what bothers me. When people see a chance to make a buck, and even more so when they have the chance to *exclusively* make a buck, they jump on the chance quickly and heavily. It's just human nature to want to aquire wealth. The worst part about this is that it just wastes peoples' time and money for them to sit around and argue over who had it first, and who has exclusive rights to it. Wouldn't it be better for all of the companies to just implement it, use it, and then come up with better implementations of it, and whoever climbs out of the rubble wins? I'm fully for a Darwinian capitalist economy. Survival of the fittest. If I come up with something, and Joe down the street hears about it, that's my fault for letting it leak. I had better do a better job at the same thing as him, or I deserve to choke. And our government should not be doing anything to go against this idea. It's a perfect example of capitalism at work. And call me old fashioned, but I love capitalism :D
  • You might want to sit down for this one... I heard at least a hundred examples of other companies violating your patent on Lawsuit related business practice. You better go hire a whole team of lawyers for this one...
  • That falls under my patent, USP#1829904768237501765824609105 on 'Lawsuit-related buisness practice'!

    That falls under my patent on "'Lawsuit-related business practice' related business practices"

    My lawyers have been notified.

  • Re:Query for "Bloom County" fans! ... (NOT O-T) (Score:4)

    by hugg ( 22953 ) on Thursday October 05, 2000 @10:45AM (#728676)
    I got a SINGLE GESTURE for Amazon.com right HEEERE :)
  • This just goes to show once again that Bezos is and idiot. Where's the guy who patented using a laser pointer to play with a cat? I'm gonna try to get one for using one to play with a dog, then claim that my patent is completely different because I use a cookie to make the dog bark.
  • Ah, yes, we've been discussing "no-click" shopping here for some time. We haven't implemented it yet, but one idea is to simply have items jump in the user's shopping cart and bill his card. Canceling, of course, would require many more clicks.
  • Actually it just goes to show you how bad a job th eUSPTO is doing. They have a big database of all the patents since 1970, in a searchable format. They scan them in and then they can search them. The search allow you to search 2 words that are either next to each other, in the same paragraph, or you can specify how far apart they are in words (5 words apart) and also if they are in the same patent. My guess is that someone did not do a good search. What gets me is that there supervisor let it through. Hmm I'd like to see that patent again to see who the smuck(s) were that let that get patented.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • How could Jeff Bezos have started this if their patent was filed 3 years before the Amazon patent?

    It was his decision to use the Amazon business method patent offensively rather than just defensively that set the ball rolling.

    Stupid patents have exited for a while, but only now are corporations starting to really put a hurting on each other.

    To use the playground analogy (again), it's like a bunch of kids playing in a yard with a lot of big sticks laying around. Occasionally a kid will pick one up and wave it around, and then forget about it for a while.

    Then, suddenly, one of the kids (Jeff Bezos) picks up a stick and whacks another kid with it. Now, one of two things are going to happen:

    • The whackee goes crying to the resident authority figure (the patent is seriously challenged)
    • The whackee doesn't (runs away, throws dirt, whatever), and pretty soon the yard is full of kids fighting each other with sticks. (this is what actually happened)

    OpenTV was just the second kid to pick up a stick (in this case, one that looks rather like the one Jeff had). Watch for more. And yes, I do think the coming state of affairs will be very much Mr. Jeffery Bezos's fault.

  • Uh, that would be Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD actually...

    Yes, thank you. I actually spelled Ensured incorrectly too.

  • I can't decide if the filing is the worst part or the fact that OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer.

    Okay, the filing is stupid. But why should IP not be guarded by a company? There are plenty of things that a company can do that need to be protected. Maybe you can find it funny that a company named "OpenTV" has a CIPO, but IP is a serious matter in the corporate world.

    Sometimes I wonder if the line between honest desire to see free, open standards and anti-corporate hatred even exists in the minds of those who want to whack IP upside the head. I've had an idea or two that's patentable--but not in the software realm. I like my software open and my engineering design closed. =)


    --
  • I read through the patent, and it's more of a method of TV applications than customer service. It apparently maintains that a client will continue to send data to the server to maintain a connection, much like dedicated LANs, but it never says anything about collecting customer data for expediting shopping information.

    The only prior art I can see is the business method of a client connecting to a server repeatedly. I don't think it will have a chance to invalidate Bezos' patent.

    Dragon Magic [dragonmagic.net]
  • Oh yeah, I forgot one last comment. I hate the idea of a computer storing my credit card information for a one-click order anyway. So I say let them have the patent, because I won't use one-click ordering anyway.
  • well, i guess OpenTV has only held assignment of the patent for about a year or so anyway (before it was Thompson Consumer Electonics Inc.). assignment data shows the patent has been assigned to OpenTV since late september 1999. ten bux sez OpenTV didn't even realize they had the patent until some patent agent or attorney noticed it cited in another application or something, who knows.

    ---
  • One wonders what their plan is. Could they be doing this to invalidate Amazon's patent? My guess is no, that they are doing it to try and fill their own wallets. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable (if potentially expensive) way for the software community to react to things like this--patent prior work and GPL it. Hmmm. Chief Intellectual Proerty Officer. CIPO. My guess is that that is read "CHEEP o."

    -db

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