Yes, and this re-examination was initiated by the PTO director too! [The PTO can order re-exam on its own action (as opposed to action by an outside party)]
It may sadden you, but the patent was invalidated based on at least two pieces of prior art (patents in this case) that were both stick shaped dog toys.
If you were also curious about the gory details of its re-examination process, you can pull it off of the patent application information retrieval (PAIR) service ( http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair ) -- enter the reexamination request number off of the re-exam certificate ( 90/006301 ) and click on "image file wrapper" and then you can see all of the actions undertaken.
These cases are very tricky. Patents in general are. The question is: Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones OR do they only hinder innovation?
Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)?
The paten question is no triviality and should not be treated as such. Don't think "oh why don't they just revoke it". Perhaps what is wrong with our system is the time given, 7 years in software terms may as well be a lifetime, while 7 years in physical product terms is hardly anything. Thats the problem with our system. And copyright is a whole nothing monster. They mingle often, but are not the same.
Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones
I think everybody knows the answer to that one and it's as asking if the US went to Irak on valid concerns for WMD: official answer is Yes; and when that will change hell will freeze.
> Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)?
The fact that anyone would even ask this is a far more dire social commentary than an oddly unoriginal patent. If something has a $0 cost outside of basic education and consistently saves lives, but you patent it and make money off it, what kind of person are you?
On the other hand, you may just want to patent something to prevent exactly that from happening. Holding a patent does not require you to make money off of it, but it does prevent others from doing so. It's a bit sad that one has to go this far, but there you have it.
You want to ensure the technique remains available to anyone freely: patent it and publish it along with permissive licenses.
Fantastic. Only four years in which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit.
My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid?
If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation?
I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap.
... which is just another example of that which has long been implemented (and sometimes long been patented) still managing to attract protection. However, at least when there is a significant pre-established publication of the idea the 'try to' becomes rather more significant than the 'sue' and they can be got rid of rather more easily.
Yes, and really it wasn't much of a problem for us. The company still has a monopoly on the laundry-webserver business, though, and overcharges other people horribly.
Hmm. If this sort of thing is happening with any regularity the other side of this argument is that there needs to be a clearer, simpler way for patents to be struck down. If it's not valid for one it's not valid for any and any other position is dangerously close to extortion.
According to Jeff Bezos, the 1-click purchase wasn't obvious at all, especially when you have a large supply chain system at Amazon. This is mostly due to edge cases like, what if the user cancels the order and the book is already making its way through the warehouse being packaged? What if the number of orders change while the book is being selected from the warehouse?
From what I remember, when a user clicks on the 1-click purchase to buy an item, it actually queues the purchase for a certain amount of time before being acted on by the warehouse, and there are things in place to back it out if the user decides to change the purchase.
That argument would be plausible if Amazon was patenting a particular logistical implementation of 1-click purchase. ("This is a specific device which allows canceled orders to be tracked and routed back to inventory...") But they patented the entire concept, which would prevent even companies with trivial logistics from allowing 1-click purchasing without paying Amazon royalties.
And indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly, Bezos defended the broad patenting of all types of 1-click purchasing. Here is an excerpt of O'Reilly's description of their conversation:
> First off, Jeff wanted to explain why he thought 1-click was original enough to patent. It has nothing to do with the implementation, which he admits is fairly trivial to duplicate, but with the reframing of the problem. At the time he came up with 1-click shopping, everyone was locked in to the shopping cart metaphor, because that's what you do in the real world. You pick up an item and take it to the counter to buy it. On the Web, he realized, something very different was possible: all you had to do was point to an article, and it was yours...
>What's more, Jeff went on, small inventions can often seem extremely obvious in retrospect. The patent literature is full of this kind of thing. The significance of an invention isn't how hard it is to copy, but how it reframes the problem in a new way.
> This may be true, I replied. But it is hard to believe that if Amazon hadn't introduced 1-click ordering (if they were indeed first to do it), that someone else wouldn't have done this. It beggars the imagination that this is so significant and unexpected an innovation that others should be prevented from using it. Patents are meant to promote the common welfare, the idea being that certain ideas won't be developed without government providing a degree of protection. Is this an idea that required that kind of protection to be developed?
I read the article you linked. It gave a different flavor than I thought. It seems there are a couple issues mixed together here.
The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it.
My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds.
That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it.
And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.
Then why did anyone that wanted to allow their customers to purchase items with a single click have to license from Amazon? If the real innovation that they were protecting was the way that the back-end system was implemented, then why is the front-end piece being (aggressively) licensed out? Something smells fishy about that explanation. It reeks of the MS justification for their patent portfolio (it's defensive only! really!), only to contradict their statements later on (suing TomTom over FAT32 patents; making (empty) public threats against infringements by Linux; etc).
> which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit.
That is not how patents work. Your statement is ridiculously ignorant fear mongering. There's real problems with patents, you're just fueling the forces that wish for status que by letting them label paten reformers as kooks.
Just like the title of this post, your comment can be misleading.
USPTO sends an action and attorneys respond to that action [1]. Which means a case can go on for years if attorney (for clients) has deep pockets [2].
A patent grant was not designed to be end-all be-all for that patent. For example, it can be found invalid at anytime by uspto (re-exam) or by the courts.
An examiner only has hours to read/understand/search/write a response but in any case this was really bad mistake that should have never happened.
1. Attorneys have usually 3-6 months and USPTO has usually upto 4 months to respond to attorney.
2. Using request for reconsideration and continuation among other things.
