One week after suffering a major blow to its infamous "1-Click" shopping patent, Amazon.com has been awarded what's sure to be seen as its latest bit of highly obnoxious IP. The company has been awarded a patent on the practice of "including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting."
According to the text of the patent, it covers a technology serving the following circumstances: "a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system."
There's smart conversation about the patent's flaws over at Slashdot, as usual, but the problems here are probably obvious. Filed in August of 2004, the practice no doubt touches on any number of "prior arts" and it's fairly obvious. Non-obviousness - which you can probably search for via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non_obviousness (if you'll forgive me for saying so, Amazon) is a key criteria in the granting of patents.
Amazon may in the end be one of the leading factors in the eventual overhaul of the internet technology department at the US Patent office.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1728
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
link to wikipedia should read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness
Posted by: mike | October 23, 2007 10:41 AM
@Mike - that's the item page, but more importantly for this discussion I'd say is that you can search for the term via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/Non_obviousness I just got to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/search_term in cases like that and if there isn't an item page with that exact name then it's one click to go to the search results page, which is also standard with the search string in it. That method seems to fall under the Amazon patent just issued.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | October 23, 2007 11:06 AM
Funny, I launched this functionality on my own site on August 2nd 2004 and fully documented it:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/smart-urls-and-smarter-404s
Posted by: Mike D. | October 23, 2007 11:10 AM
If you take a trip on the WayBack machine, you'll see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art existed prior to the patent even being filed. Idiots.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
Posted by: Derek | October 23, 2007 11:27 AM
Wow, this was news to me! What exactly will the effects of this patent be? I'm having a hard time getting my finger around all of this?
Posted by: Talking Books Librarian | October 23, 2007 11:29 AM
This was a topic of much discussion on RW a few months ago. With a goal of making URLs more standard, rather than proprietary.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/standard_urls_proposal.php
But, this problem is larger than just our current patent review process. Perhaps some of the patent lawyers could provide a nice review of the issues they are dealing with in this space.
Posted by: Abdur Chowdhury | October 23, 2007 11:53 AM
Who are the dorks at the patent office who believe this to be a unique feature? That's like saying I invented the practice of sitting in the shade when the sun is too hot. (Which I did, by the way, so you'd better stay in the sun or I'll be coming after you. The shade is mine, all mine.)
Posted by: Adam Jusko | October 23, 2007 12:32 PM
"Amazon may in the end be one of the leading factors in the eventual overhaul of the internet technology department at the US Patent office."
I highly suspect that may be their intention. I mean, they're a pretty cool and web-friendly company otherwise, no?
Posted by: Benjamin Kudria | October 23, 2007 2:14 PM
This is just plain wrong.
This needs to be a standard not a patent.
Posted by: Alex Iskold | October 23, 2007 4:28 PM
Weird patent.
Posted by: mark | October 23, 2007 6:13 PM
I have just patented using the name "Read/Write" with the usage of "Web" - please send me $2 million in unmarked bills or I will be forced to send over my powerhouse NYC attorneys :)
Posted by: Allen Stern | October 23, 2007 7:13 PM
Unbelievable. Seems like a direct attack on any REST-based architecture.
I wonder what Roy Fielding thinks about this patent. Seems like they are ripping off part of his thesis.
Posted by: Chris Andrews | October 24, 2007 8:46 AM
What the hell? How can this be patented? We need to file a case against amazon for creating panic.
Posted by: Chand | October 24, 2007 9:42 AM