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Continuing fun with software patentsContinuing fun with software patentsPosted Feb 27, 2003 18:00 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)Parent article: Continuing fun with software patents The Amazon patent here isn't really a software patent so much as a web site design patent. Since it all follows from claim 1, which specifies that the topic is an item for sale, the patent is actually on providing a per-item comment system for an online retail site, not on having a comment system or having an online retail site; it just looks like it could cover comment systems in general because of the style that patents are written in. As far as I know, Amazon was the first to add a comment system to their catalog, and, while it seems obvious today, that's just because Amazon's been doing it for years. In fact, online retail and comment systems both existed for long enough before Amazon started doing this that it must not really be obvious. Amazon's patent, therefore, is as good as any patent. Of course, the whole patent system may well be a bad idea, since empirical evidence suggests that patents do not promote innovation (at least when the patented item could not remain secret). And I think the idea that Amazon wouldn't have come up with such a system had they not thought they would be able to prevent other people from copying them 4 years later is ridiculous; they invented the design so that they could use it, and thereby make their customers more likely to buy things.
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Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 19:26 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] >And I think the idea that Amazon wouldn't have come up with such a system >had they not thought they would be able to prevent other people from >copying them 4 years later is ridiculous...Those are very good points. And the other half of the reason that Amazon would have invented this with or without patent protection is that it was cheap to invent. Patents do the job only where 1) it costs money to invent, which money cannot be recovered if others are free to copy the results; or 2) the inventor could profit from the invention without disclosing it to anyone. I'd like to point out that even (1) is not an original intent of patents. A patent is fundamentally a deal between the public and an inventor, where the inventor tells the public what he invented and the public gives him some exclusive rights to the invention in return. "Patent" is Latin for "laying open."
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