IP: Results of 1-Click patent prior art bounty posting

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 08:28:35 -0800
>From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim@oreilly.com>
>Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I)
>X-Accept-Language: en
>To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
>Subject: Results of 1-Click patent prior art bounty posting
>
>Dave, I thought your readers might be interested in the results of the
>$10,000 bounty I posted on prior art that might invalidate Amazon's
>1-click patent.
>
>The short answer is that we didn't get an exact match for all the claims
>of the patent, but we got lots of evidence that the idea was obvious,
>including a 1993 Doonesbury cartoon that laid out the full idea in the
>context of a virtual reality headset, plus three prior patents for
>1-click shopping schemes in other media (interactive television, two-way
>radio, and an older datacomm network).  The most disturbing thing to me
>was that none of the three existing patents we found was cited by either
>Amazon or by the PTO.  Given that all three of the submissions that came
>closest to matching Amazon's patent were themselves already in the
>public patent records, one does have to call into question the current
>"don't ask, don't tell" policy of both the PTO and patent applicants
>when it comes to searching for prior art. An affirmative requirement on
>applicants to search for, disclose, and explain prior art would go a
>long way towards reducing the clutter of frivolous patents that
>inventors and entrepreneurs now need to wade through.
>
>The full story, and links to the prior art that was found, is at
>http://www.bountyquest.com/infocenter/1click.htm
>
>I've also written some commentary at
>http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/patents/2001/03/14/bounty.html, but
>there's a link to that from the bountyquest page, so it's probably
>easiest to start there.
>
>--
>Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
>101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
>+1 707-829-0515, FAX +1 707-829-0104
>tim@oreilly.com, http://www.oreilly.com



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/