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A Patent On Virtual Re-Gifting
from the enjoy... dept
Almost everyone does it, though, most people won't admit it. It's regifting. You act very happy and appreciative towards the absolutely awful gift that some random person gets you, and then put it on a shelf somewhere until you can turn it around and give it to someone else (who, hopefully, isn't in any way connected to whoever gave you the gift). Now, someone has come up with a system to make the regifting process completely virtual. That is, when someone buys you a gift at a certain online store, before they ship it out, the store drops you an email telling you that the gift is on the way - and give you the chance to keep it, or pass it on to someone else. Since the gift needs to be sent out eventually, the system can be set in a hot potato fashion (whoever has it after five days gets stuck with it or if no one has accepted the gift by the 3rd hop, too bad). Of course, under some anti-spam laws, this system could be responsible for spam, since it sends emails to people who have no prior business relationship with them. Also, I wonder how many people will actually use such a system. Most people like for gifts to be actual gifts where the person has to open them to find out about them - and not read about them via email first.
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Depends on the culture
Some cultures make such a big deal out of gift-giving that there is a big underground economy of re-gifting. If there was an efficient tool for re-gifting, it might have saved face for San Jose when they received a bunch of live carp from their sister city Okayama. Since nobody knew how to take care of the fish, they just dumped them in a water fountain, and the fish died.
Now, if someone could invent a tool for turning down invitations, it might make travelling to Iran easier.
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Ack, that was http://www.digitalroom.net/index2.html
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may not be spam
Of course, under some anti-spam laws, this system could be responsible for spam, since it sends emails to people who have no prior business relationship with them.
Anti-spam laws usually apply to mass mailings. In this case I think you could make a legitimate claim that each email is really different from all the others because it refers to a different gift.
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Re: may not be spam
Anti-spam laws usually apply to mass mailings. In this case I think you could make a legitimate claim that each email is really different from all the others because it refers to a different gift.
Actually, that's not true. One of my problems with all these anti-spam laws is that they never seem to apply to mass mailings. The California law specifically says that *any* unsolicited emails are spam.
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