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Re: Wordsworth
"But from a brief inspection, it looks to me like Amazon got very broad protection here, and I don't agree with your deprecation of this patent as not that big a deal." There are two issues at work here. 1. Claims are merely summaries of the formal material presented elsewhere. So a claim is, prima facie, not the actual claim being made but a summary relying on pages of supporting art and prior art citation later in the patent. 2. A claim is the set of all behaviors made in the claim, so even if you describe something that, in its parts, is non-unique and obvious, the collection may be unique and non-obvious. With respect to method 10, I do have the ecommerce history behind me but don't let me say "don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs." I'm not trying to be a knowledge bully or one of those guys who claims to know everyone and everything. Nonetheless, I've known Jeff Bezos since late 1994, known the company's functions since early 1995, and worked at Amazon.com from Oct. 96 to May 97. I've followed and worked in ecommerce from June 1994 when I launched a Web development company. The affiliate program they developed was unique in its nature and implementation, in my experience, until well after they deployed it - at least a year, maybe more. Many aspects of their system weren't duplicated by others until much later. Most innovation came originally from Amazon.com, but I believe that BeFree or maybe another firm could claim a patent on the method of self-reporting affiliate sales, as Amazon.com reporting was terrible until just several months ago. (They used email to report weekly sales instead of a self-serve feature tied to a database.) With my intimate knowledge of the insides of their affiliate program coupled with my pretty decent contemporary knowledge of similar systems, I'd say that they can rightly claim that claim #10 (not to mention the others) was an innovation that, before they did it, wasn't done in that manner. It wasn't obvious, because it didn't happen until they pioneered it. Many followed; they burned the path. But, let me finish by saying that I think it's ridiculous that a simple set of actions as they describe is patentable. Blame Congress, the courts, and the USPTO. Amazon.com is right to assert their rights to this invention in order to forestall claims against them later that they violated others' rights. This would be possible if they hadn't filed the patent. Also, Jeff has clearly stated, but not yet codified, his intent to allow most businesses to use these patents they've made; their intent has been (and I believe it) to prevent companies in direct competition with the scale to beat them from employing their business methods. But Jeff has said on multiple occasions that he has no desire to invoke the patent against mom and pops. I hope they codify that more clearly, but a patent (as I understand it) doesn't have to be uniformly prosecuted, unlike trademark. It's more like copyright: you own it regardless of what you do with it, but what's the point of owning it unless you're trying to prevent litigation against yourself or prevent someone else from using the invention.
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