Amazon gets patent on social networks | Hacker News Reader

Amazon gets patent on social networks

networkworld.com

19 pointsashish_0x907 comments

Here we go yet again. They did not patent "A networked computer system [that] provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users." That's just the abstract. Gotta read the claims, people. The claims are what tell you exactly what the patent covers.

To put it another way, compare and contrast the following statements:

Amazon's patent covers a networked computer system [that] provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users.

And:

Amazon's patent covers every networked computer system [that] provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users.

That actually is a good way of highlighting the distinction.

Did you read the claims? Claim 13?

"A computer system that provides a service to users over a network, [...] providing a user interface for users to establish contact relationships with other users of the service such that each user can have one or more contacts, said user interface enabling a user to identify other users of the service, and to selectively initiate generation of requests to establish contact relationships with the identified users"

You can make any claim look arbitrarily broad by omitting language from it. You cut limitations out of the middle with your "[...]", and you also cut stuff off the end without even mentioning that you had done so.

Might as well have said: did you read claim 13? "A computer system . . . ." OMG THEY CLAIMED A COMPUTER SYSTEM.

Um, not really. Please explain how the parts removed change anything? They listed off a bunch of capabilities of the system computer system, I quoted one of those capabilities.

It sure doesn't seem like there's anything you can develop these days that isn't infringing on something; but it also doesn't seem like these kind of patents are often enforced.

So as a developer, the right thing to do with software patents is simply ignore them until someone sues you, right?

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