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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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 !

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.

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

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

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.

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