

New Amazon patent: sending video of orders being boxed - cwan
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/03/amazon_patents_new_customer_service_video_of_orders_being_boxed.html

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maxtilford
I bought a nice hat from <http://www.kleinbottle.com/> and he sent me pictures
of it being packaged up, so this sort of thing has been done before. I've no
idea about patentability though.

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WildUtah
The Patent and Trademark Office prohibits holders of business degrees and
software engineering degrees from joining the patent bar or being patent
examiners. Those practitioners are required to have other kinds of engineering
degrees only (plus a law degree).

Partly as a result, patent examiners do not consider commercial software and
business practices to be 'prior art' and patent examiners do not search, even
on a superficial level, business magazines, case studies, ACM journals,
commercial computer magazines or such materials in 'prior art' searches. The
PTO considers that anything in those fields can be patented including common
established techniques and obvious combinations.

There has been some talk lately about submarine patents that apply to Theora
or H264. One other kind of patent that is likely to apply to both is patents
that have not been applied for yet. The PTO seems to have no trouble at all
granting a monopoly on existing practices. Microsoft lost hundreds of millions
of dollars over in-place editing of linked objects, a technology that had been
running on windows for years before another company applied for a patent on
it.

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nitrogen
This, if true, completely flies in the face of the expectation that patents
are not obvious to, and can be read and understood by, a person skilled in the
art. No average software engineer could implement a system based on reading
its patent, and no average software engineer would think these sorts of
patents are inventive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_in_the_art)

He who has the gold makes the rules. Corollary: he who makes the rules gets
the gold.

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nitrogen
That's pretty obvious, because I came up with a detailed system for doing the
same thing and I don't run a shipping business. This is an idea whose time has
come (i.e. an inevitable product of today's world, manifest as a new idea
popping into the minds of dozens or hundreds of people everywhere), because it
seems a lot of people have been doing the same thing.

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teyc
There is a digital camera shop that does this as well. I think they have been
doing it for a long time.

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tomsaffell
This is an April Fools - right?

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klaut
I really truly hope so!

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gojomo
Next thing you know, each of those blabbering simpletons in the Windows 7
commercials -- "making things faster was _my_ idea!" -- will be awarded their
very own patent.

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madair
When will the madness stop?

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smallhands
ok all this drama just given me as idea ..... i am to patent "WALKING INTO A
SHOP THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR" and sue any shop owner that violate.

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alexkay
Certainly a cool idea and a nice feature, but how on Earth is this patentable?

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kjbekkelund
It is a business method patent. From Wikipedia: A business method may be
defined as "a method of operating any aspect of an economic enterprise". It is
mainly in the US, Australia, Japan and Singapore that business methods are
usual. In Europe this is not regarded as being inventions, and are therefore
not patentable.

More info on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent>

Oh, and _of course_, there is a lot of discussion going on about these kind of
patents.

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euroclydon
The supreme court is currently reviewing the legality of business method
patents in the Bilski case. I have a Google news alert for it, because if they
rule broadly enough, many software patents could be overturned.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski>

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schammy
What a fucking ridiculous patent. While the effort behind pulling the actual
process off may be quite difficult, the obviousness of being able to do this
should not be patentable.

