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New Amazon patent: sending video of orders being boxed

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17 pointscwan16 comments

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.

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.

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...

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

Where did you get your information from? It runs counter to what I've learned from my non-law-degree-holding patent examiner relative.

I once bought an MP3 player, and the bill inside the package featured an ID number in extra-big letters -- for video documentation, as the small writing said. (They didn't offer me the videos except in case of dispute, though).

Since the player in question was a Frontier Nex IA, this must have been quite some time ago.

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.

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

This is an April Fools - right?

I really truly hope so!

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.

When will the madness stop?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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