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Patents

Prior Art for Hyperlink Order Tracking in Email? 44

Posted by Cliff from the the-'many-eyes'-concept-on-something-other-than-code dept.
Davesbud asks: "I'm trying to invalidate a patent that claims to have invented 'placing a hyperlink in an email which in turn provides the recipient with order status or tracking information.' I am searching for any web pages, articles, newsgroup/forum discussions, brochures or the like, published before December of 1997, that describes this idea. You've seen this if you've ordered almost anything online or shipped by FedEx or UPS. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks."
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Prior Art for Hyperlink Order Tracking in Email? More

Prior Art for Hyperlink Order Tracking in Email?

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  • This is answering a question with a question... but how public does a work need to be in order to constitute prior art?

    I can't help with this one, but there've been a few /. discussions before where I was using the patented process, but only within an academic environment, or on a company intranet.
    • US Patent law traditionally offers the patent only to the first inventor -- any recorded prior art invalidates it. There are some details about the two distinct points in time the law recognizes -- the moment when you conceived of it, and the moment when you reduced it to practice, i.e., made a prototype or proof of concept. Reduction to practice before the other guy may decide the case, particularly as in many bogus patents the "inventor" never reduced it to practice.

      The more bureaucratically oriented E

    • Re:What constitues prior art? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Katharine ( 303681 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:51AM (#8606868)
      The "deal" that the grant of a patent expresses is that in exchange for sharing the invention with the public, the inventor gets exclusive use of the invention for a limited time. If the public already knows about the invention, then there is no point to granting a patent to someone as a reward/compensation for disclosing the invention. That's why prior art invalidates patents.

      In order to qualify as "prior art," public disclosure of an invention potentially doesn't have to be very public, if it was known or someone was using it in the US (I assume you are asking about US patents) before the "inventor" trying to obtain the patent invented it. See 35 USC 120. [findlaw.com] Prior art can also be public disclosure after invention but more than a year before the patent was filed.

      A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
      (a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
      (b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or
      . . . .

      A useful basic article entitled "When is something prior art against a patent?" can be found at
      http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/ [iusmentis.com].

      • A patent number would certainly be helpful . . . . While a (35 U.S.C. sec.) 102 reference would be great, combining references under section 103 [cornell.edu] (while more difficult to win on) to show obviousness to one of ordinary skill in the art seems much more likely. E-tailers have been sending email confirmation and updates for a while, but the realtime tracking of a package by the shipper is what enables the email hyperlink tracking to which you refer. It seems obvious to email the tracking link once that has
    • umm... hate to ask this question about patenting hyperlinks and all, but uhh... do we have a link to the patent he's talking about?

      kind of useless to talk about this if we don't have the full patent info to look at...

  • Burn down the fucking US patent office. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is absolutely retarded.

    Nothing in the history of commerce has posed such a threat to technological progress as the patent system. It's outlived it's usefulness - and is doing nothing but hampering innovation while being abused by those who want to make a quick buck. It deserves to be killed.
    • The patent system is useful for drug companies. Only by gaining a monopoly over the drugs that they have invented can progress continue. These drugs have ridiculous R&D costs, hence their high purchase costs. When generic versions are made available, the generic manufacturers can sell the same thing without having to pay for any R&D at all. This is why the patent system exists.

      When there are companies dedicated to purchasing patents and suing people, however, you know something is wrong. Just like
      • "Patents are necessary to cure sick people" is a Republican myth. A new drug that works comes out once a decade -- these companies are making fat profits off the ones that merely didn't kill enough people to fail FDA approval. A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect, but then so would eliminating patents completely.

        • Re:Burn down the fucking US patent office. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:35AM (#8606776)

          but then so would eliminating patents completely.

          A limitation of patents to only drugs that make people live longer would have a good effect

          Oh great. No new pain killers. Or cures for non-fatal diseases like macroreticular degeneration. Or psychological disorders like bipolar disease.

          but then so would eliminating patents completely.

          So who is going to spend a billion dollars developing a new drug without patent protection? It's the most idiotic concept I have seen in a LONG time.

          • One of the big reasons that drugs cost so damn much is that they are developed with trial and error methods. That't right, they develop a chemical. Then they go "Is it good for disease #1. Nope. How about disease #2. nope .... (years pass) ... How about disease #65536. Nope. Oh well, let's try the whole thing again with potential drug #2."

            Genetic engineering will change all that. We'll be able to do this: "Hey, this bad protein is doing this bad thing to this other thingy. And I've figured out that if I had a molecule that looked like this (pulls out a model of a molecule) I could make the bad protein stop doing the bad thing." Then the monkeys in the chemical factory would make the molecule.
            • If I had moderator points, I'd mod parent "Insightful".

              I'm about to go to Graduate School in Bio-engineering, and this is exactly the case.

              Traditional drug development methods are literally trial-and-error on a MASSIVE scale.

              The new understanding of biology due to the advances in the past, hell short as a, decade are poised to change that. Already, we can use NMR and x-ray structures of enzymes and receptors to narrow the initial trial-and-error search.

              Soon, we'll be able to bypass that to a greater de
          • Maybe we should have a patent that allows the drug companies to recoup the development costs and earn a tidy profit of whatever we can decide is fair-- what's fair? a couple hundred %? After they earn a certain amout the patent should expire. This might work better than the current make as much as you can in so many years model.
      • How about compulsory licensing for generic drug companies? Same sort of solution as to the whole music-sharing thing.
      • They have higher AD COSTS then they have R&D costs. The drug cos also get quite a lot of 'free' research that the US taxpayers fund.

    • I believe patents are needed for inovation. Why would you spend millions on R&D when someone can later copy your idea and work and sell for a fraction of the cost?

      What i do think is the problem is allowing patents to be granted for ideas that are really just unique premutations of common and patented knowledge. Example:
      You should be able to patent a new networking protocool which allows 1Tb transfer speed over phone lines (i know this doesnt exist) but you should not be able to patent using this tec

      • Actual the Patent system is brokent eh exsiting rules in place allow for your very distictions. The problem is that the patent office doesn't look for uniqueness, nor really look for prior art. The Net is so vast that they can't look fast enough though google should be helping. Worse it considers the internet something new and everything with it has to be unique and that is as far as it goes.

  • Here (Score:1, Troll)

    by autarkeia ( 152712 )
    How about:

    SELECT order_number FROM order WHERE customer_email = thepatentofficeisretarded@uspto.gov

    Seriously, this can't be defensible. It's a database lookup. I mean I know USPTO is fucked, but this is ridiculous.

  • Can't prove it but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fryan33 ( 470018 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:54AM (#8606892)
    My first online purchase was Lollapalooza tickets in June of 1996. I seem to remember such a link in the confirmation email. I remember that the Lollapalooza.com site was one of the first big shockwave sites I had ever seen and we ordered the tickets from the site but I can't remeber if it was ticketmaster or the promoters themselves. Either way check ticketmaster or the wayback machine for Lollapalooza.com

  • check mwave.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@@@gmail...com> on Friday March 19, 2004 @01:02AM (#8606925) Journal
    I remember ordering some stuff from them for the first time in early 1998 and them emailling me UPS tracking info, they may have been doing it prior to 1998 obviously. You may want to ask them?
  • I'm sure there will be hordes of Slashtrolls repeating this, but doesn't this pretty much qualify as obvious? You'll probably not find a paper written about it because it's too dumb to actually write a paper about. Since URLs are plain text, it's pretty obvious to send URLs in any plain text transmission medium, like e-mail, fax, instant message, text file via FTP, dial-up BBS, etc. (I didn't say it wouldn't be dumb, just obvious.) Once you've established that sending a URL via e-mail is obvious, the pu
    • It might be more than just sending a URL, but might require actual html anchor tag, aka one-click.
    • Sad to say, but the 'obviousness' test is no longer considered. In order to prove that something was obvious, you have to show prior art. In other words, it has to have already been invented. THIS is the main breakage of the patent system today. That's why everybody is patenting everything no matter how obvious. It's cheaper to get the patent than to litigate it after somebody else has been granted the patent.
  • I seem to remember that it was quite common for an email to include a link to track the status of online submissions (adding yourself to a group, posting something, or creating a webring).

    Also, shouldn't any old Bug Tracking system that would email you a link to watch the status count?

    Then again, what about all those URL-watchers that would email you whenever a link changed? Those, I know, I was using back in 94 or 95.

    • Re:Tracking Status? (Score:4, Informative)

      by malachid69 ( 306291 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @02:32AM (#8607334) Homepage
      Not sure how accurate it is, but the FedEx Tracking Site [fedex.com] shows a copyright of 1995. Perhaps ask them directly when they started doing the email notification?

      You made me really curious, so while typing this up, I pulled up one of my old archives. My page was last updated on Aug 28 1995. The first link on it was to the GNA (Globalwide Network Academy) Project at MIT. I remember this project, because at the time I was responsible for going through schools request and accepting/denying them. You might consider contacting them about this issue, as I was receiving emails telling me to go on and check the status of this or that -- I am sure the schools did as well.

      Hope that helps.

  • Links or URLs? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can't include a link in a plaintext email. Some mail readers turn URLs into links, but the message itself doesn't contain links. This might let you sidestep the issue entirely.

    You can include links if you're using HTML mail, so the patent would still be a problem in that case.
    • Actually I don't see how that would be legally different. HTML email is still plain text, it just has extra headers, MIME boundaries, and MIME types. Not all email clients respect the html encoding just as not all convert text to links. I don't really see how it could be legally different.

      Chris Benard [talkingtoad.com]

      You can't include a link in a plaintext email. Some mail readers turn URLs into links, but the message itself doesn't contain links. This might let you sidestep the issue entirely.

      You can include lin

    • Doesn't this mean that they would have to patent the idea of html mail?

      Erik

  • ComputerLand (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I worked at a ComputerLand store in the mid 1980s, they used a computer-based order tracking system. It ran on early IBM PCs, running dumb terminal software that connected to a DBASE system at the CL Headquarters.
    The way the system worked was unique, as far as I know. CL HQ was essentially a freight aggregator. Computer and parts shipments from vendors were warehoused at HQ. Every day orders were placed to HQ, and you could dial in and check your order status, and receive detailed information on stock/backo
  • In the meantime, whi not side step the issue and provide a link to a page that provides a link to a status page?

    Or provide a link to a page that provides links to lots of status pages (past orders).

    Then you can examine the patent at your leisure.

    Sam

  • WTF (Score:2)

    by dacarr ( 562277 )
    Having had a UUCP connection until shortly before that date, I haven't seen it, but how could they patent emailing a database lookup URL? I mean, give me a break.

    Then again, somebody did try and trademark Linux.

  • Really, what does 'hyperlink' and 'email' add to the claim? People doing phone orders have been using 'confirmation numbers' since the beginning of time. Does doing such a straightforward adaptation of a standard business practice to a new medium really warrant a patent?

    Prior art is definately useful, but it seems to me that once you've made the jump to selling things on the web, anyone with half a brain would come to the conclusion that some sort of confirmation/tracking be implemented. Last I checked

    • Re:why prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Russ Nelson ( 33911 )
      Alas, "painfully obvious, even to a retarded 3-year-old" isn't sufficient to break a patent. It should be, it's written into the law, but the case law is such that you can't win a patent defense using obviousness anymore.
    • Remember:

      First a patent is afforded an assumption of validity, including the assumption that the invention is nonobvious.

      Second, the question of nonobviousness is presented to a jury, most likely mainly made up of people that have only used AOL and have NEVER done anything remotely similar to programming.

      Third, an obviousness or 103 rejection, requires the pieces of prior art that teach or suggestion that these pieces should be combined AND in their combination, each and every element of the invention is

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