Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelhoffman | Hacker News Reader

This is another example of a patent with a specific scope being given an incredibly broad title.

This patent is actually on selling web site commenters the ability to have their comment appear in some kind of distinctive format, which might be a different font, or it might be appearing before the other comments.

View on HN

Are you trying to imply that claim 1 has anything, and I mean anything, inventive? BTW this was filed in 2011, not in 1996...

Not at all, only that it's not what people are going to think it is by looking at the title.

I assumed that nobody could think that the title could be what was patented ;)

As someone not familiar with how patenting really works, that's exactly what I thought at first, and reading patents isn't exactly a clear way to understand what is "actually patented" either. In this case when I read it I understood, but sometimes reading them leaves me MORE confuses.

Dan Shapiro has written a good post on this: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-read-a-patent-...

To summarize, he says:

1. Skip the title

2. Skip the drawings

3. Skip the abstract

4. Skip the specification

5. Find the independent claims, and read them

6. Back to skipping – toss the dependent claims (any claim that starts with “The _____ of claim _____” is essentially a refinement or detail of the parent claim).

2. Skip the drawings

Except if they are flowcharts !

Step-by-step beginner's guide to determining the scope of patents:

1. Read the claims.

:-)

2. if something doesn't make sense in the claims, you can refer to the description for clarification of what the scope of terms encompass within their scope.

Also, as an ademdum to 1., specifically read the independant claims (the ones which don't mention other claims) for the definition of the broadest scope they're seeking to claim.

I'm not aware of any existing examples of websites that let you pay for comment bling on individual comments, letting you preview your bling to get the style you prefer as described in section (b) of claim 1. So yes, it does seem novel (which is different to "inventive" but is the criteria required for patents).

There are plenty of comment engines that offer avatars or paid subscriber adornments but few of these are per comment, none are pay-per-comment, none offer different prices depending on the chosen style (the "dynamically adjustable" in the claim) and none let you preview the adornment at upgrade time (instead of at comment time).

The question is not whether the idea is good, whether the idea is radically different -- but whether you've seen this specific set of steps used before.

The idea doesn't need to be radically different, but it does need to be non-obvious.

Tumblr has "promoted posts", which do essentially this, but which were only introduced in 2012, after this patent was filed.

I can remember a number of marketplaces, including ebay and a number of forum/bulletin board based sites promoting certain postings to have a different border, background color, etc. I do not think that applying the same kind of filtering to include comments instead of topics is that inventive.

Fwiw, one of my relatives built a press release site. You could post press releases for free, and pay to put stars next to them. The more stars you buy, the higher it sorts. He sold the business for seven figures.

It's a little different from this patent because the "comments" aren't related to particular articles.

Still doesn't seem like a very novel idea worthy of a patent.

Novelty requires proof through a single disclosue (read document) which discloses all the features of the claim. It is not, as with most things in the law, left up to a weak oppinion or a feeling of "Hmm, I'm sure someone must've done that before!"

I think the novel part of it is the on-posting-comment payment. Which I certainly haven't seen implemented anywhere.

It's not. Prior art is newspaper advertisement. You can't patent something as new just because it's done with a computer, as everyone knows.

I bet this will be invalidated as soon as someone tries to enforce it. Easily.

But this viral market attempt suggest they will try to get money from some sucker troll before, which I'm all for.

This is not equivalent to a newspaper advertisment because a newspaper isn't online content (though it's close enough that an argument could be made on the inventive step). However, there is definitely potential that this is novel.

I was going to say that there is also no method of changing a user comment on a newspaper after it has been created, but on a second inspection of the claim, there's no requirement for this within the claim. And based on that, I think you may well be right that there is a good chance of invalidation, because the system boils down to a system where one can place advertisments on specific parts of a piece of online content and being able to pay more for a better looking ad.

Ok. I'll grant you the patent is slightly less hilariously stupid then the title suggested.

Specific scope? Like hell! This could apply to any Internet content.

Do you know how to read a patent document and assess the scope claimed? Because with a comment like that, it's pretty clear you don't. The scope is both quite clear and narrow/specific and most definitely could not apply to almost anything at all on the internet.

It's a far, far smaller scope than "Making money on the internet". Which would imply, for instance, eBay or World of Warcraft. Neither of those cases could be considered prior art for this.

A massive subset of everything is still very large.

Like the way Livejournal lets users with paid accounts choose which userpic appears next to a comment? I believe they've been doing this for years...

No, because that's not paid per comment.

right, I should file a patent based on each comment _line_ or _character_.

...which still should never have been granted a fucking patent. That is absolutely block-headedly idiotic.

wow, axman6, it's like you're the patent holder or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com