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Asking For A Customer Review? Patented
from the yay-patent-office dept
Amazon has added to their stable of patents-that-should-never-have-been-granted with three patents that could potentially spell trouble for lots of companies. They've patented asking for customer reviews, searching across multiple categories and community based recommendations. That last one fits nicely with another patent they already have on their Purchase Circles offering. For the most part, Amazon has been known for getting these types of patents more for defensive, rather than offensive purposes -- but it should raise plenty of questions about why these types of patents deserved to be granted in the first place. How much money was wasted applying for them that could have gone towards real innovation? I'd ask you for your review of this post, but Amazon could sue me.
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enough is enough
The entire Patent and Copyright systems need to be smashed. It's out of hand what these criminals are getting away with.
I am tired of my tax and consumer dollars being wasted on patents that should never have been granted. Just as I am tired of being made to feel paying someone for some words over instruments is a privalige and that I'm a criminal suspect for wanting to play it on whatever device I choose to.
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Re: enough is enough
You think that's crazy? check this out...
from: http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1665
Microsoft has been granted a patent for "Time-based hardware button for application launch". To you and me, the mouse double-click.
US patent 6,727,830, filed 12 July 2002 and granted 27 April this year, is described: "A method and system are provided for extending the functionality of application buttons on a limited resource computing device."
so yeah... they pattented the double click.
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Re: enough is enough
Yeah, we mentioned that when it happened. :)
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ignore
Some countries started producing bird flu medicines although it's patented and they've not obtained patent rights, proceeded anyway to save lives.
Next step is that people should just stop respecting ridiculous patents and go on with their job.
If everybody did it, the system would die.
Am I anarchyst or whatever? Call me that.. but this entire situation is becoming ridiculous.
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This has got to stop...
How can this be patentable? Do the people in the patent offices not live in the same world? You can go to any number of web sites and see the things these patents are for. This is a joke? So much for innovation. A aptent should protect a real, new innovative idea from being used straight away by other people. If someone spends time and resources on a really, truely new idea, then a patent is a great way to get rewards for it. Patenting ideas that are quite obvious and not at all new is unbelievable. Why isn't anything being done about this?!? Yeah, i know... no one with enough clout cares enough.
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