Prior art??
Must have skipped USPTO's mind, empty as it is!
Next thing you know someone will get a patent on bipedal movement at a slow pace. Another one might be fertilization of human eggs by (well, you get the picture...).
You sometimes have to wonder if the US Patent and Trademark Office is augmenting its staff with a few barely trained gibbons – and its latest patent does nothing to ameliorate that view. On March 18, the USPTO granted a patent to Amazon for photographing people and products against a white background. To answer your next …
"They didn't go as far as checking their own driving licences, though."
Looking at all of the photos of iPhones and such on Apple's website, I'm left wondering who will file suit first, Apple or Amazon. Wait a sec....there are apparently thousands of tens of websites with photos taken against white backgrounds. I'm not so sure people in Washington DC have white backgrounds on their driving licenses, but perhaps USPTO workers have no internet access.
Actually their rules specifically require photos be 'taken against a plain cream or light grey background'
An outrageous and shabby ploy to avoid paying the appropriate fees to Amazon no doubt.
"I already have a work around. I have a patent in the works for taking picture of a white box, with an object in the foreground. It's brilliant."
Hey, you do realise you could take that picture to the equally moronic bullshitters in the art world and it'll be exhibited in the Tate Modern for 2 months with an accompanying booklet using lots of long words only a thesaurus knows about in incomprehensible sentences that don't actually mean anything.
The photo would be blurred.
Patentese requires something along the lines of "A portable or mobile transmitter and receiver unit for use in a duplex radio telephone system including at least one base station transmitter and receiver arrangement and one or a plurality of said portable or mobile transmitter and receiver unit(s)".
As silly as it may be the Patent office is only there to record and to act as the most basic of filters. The courts decide on the validity of a patent if there is ever a challenge. It helps keep the cost of the patents low, at least initially. I am in no way saying this is better or worse, personally I don't care, but that is how it was explained to me. Honestly I think it damages the credibility of the entire system, but it has been mentioned to me that you have to have credibility before it can be damaged.
As silly as it may be the Patent office is only there to record and to act as the most basic of filters. The courts decide on the validity of a patent if there is ever a challenge.
That might be how the USPTO sees it (although it shopulnd't!), but the courts take the opposite view: a patent that has been granted by the USPTO is presumed valid, and is not invalidated by the court without a significant amount of work.
This leads us the the disconnected situation we currently have in the US - both the courts and the USPTO believe it is the other's responsibility to decide on the validity of patents, so no-one actually performs the function.
IMO, if the USPTO isn't properly determining whether something is patentable or whether it is covered by prior art, it is nopt doing its job, and is in urgent need of reform. Yeah, like that's going to happen :-(
Vic.
It's just as well IBM didn't get that patent, Halliburton would have had to sue them....
Techdirt.com : Halliburton Tries To Patent Form Of Patent Trolling
It costs just enough to make this a big boys game. In 1997, my late partner filed to USPTO the original de-duping (not the word used at the time..) patent. And although lauded by Rand Corporation and the European Patent Review office and allowed in Mexico, Russia. Singapore, Australia and South Africa I spent years of my life responding to the same boiler-plated inane USPTO 'Office Actions' or whatever they call them. Their 'rebuttals' never changed despite my detailed responses.
All major non-US corporations we approached were very very interested, until their US-linked 'major' shareholders got to hear of this 'threat to national security' (remember that to some people cipher compression IS encryption... especially when no passwords are ever generated or needed!). We ran out of money, upto $20,000 a year just keeping alive the patents that we did get. Then my partner strangeley died suddenly in the midst of negotiating with a large U$ dominant player when he came up with a means of compressing pure binary streams on the fly on top of what we could already do.
Their 'inane' patents policy is not serendipidity. The more the US can dilute the global IP registers with trash, especially trash that costs lot to counter, however inane, when the time comes they can tie up the rest of the world in confusion when they start to finally lose their economic 'leadership'.
is for every country on the planet to set up trade agreements with each other, rescind all trade agreements with the USA and put them under severe sanctions (as they are also fond of doing to others) until these idiots come to their senses.
With the burgeoning development of China and India, the USA is no longer the only, or even largest, tech-product market any more. There are 300 million of them. There are over 6 billion of us. It's high time we locked them out and left them to stew in their own idiotic intellectual-property soup for a while.
There are patents just as stupid as this in the EU, and I saw an article that listed some whoppers in China.
It is only newsworthy because it is Amazon, as they are other large tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) are watched by both the media and Wall Street for clues as to future products. If some random LLC incorporated in Indiana was granted this patent, no one would hear about it unless/until they tried to sue a big name company for infringement.
Really stupid patents like this are issued to nobodies every day, and unless that nobody goes under and their assets are purchased by a patent troll with the will and resources to spend millions suing big companies we never hear about it. Thankfully.
I have yet to see patents so patently absurd awarded in the Netherlands or indeed the EU. I have one patent to my name, and the process appeared to be quite thorough. There may certainly be the odd one that slipped through (would love to see one), but not the spate of silliness coming out of the USPTO.
Note that the USPTO gets funded based on how many patents it awards not how many it processes. That is a perverse incentive if ever there was one.
I have yet to see patents so patently absurd awarded in the Netherlands or indeed the EU. I have one patent to my name, and the process appeared to be quite thorough.
I've got quite a few patents to my name. I thought they were all junk, but compared to the patent described in the article, mine are all shining examples of true invention...
Vic.
Don't forget the person who patented the wheel in Australia!
www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html
..........what is more, relatively simple and cheap (except from the point of view of the trolls) to implement. Indeed it really would put the onus on firms (whether they are non-producing entities or just another example of "BigCorp" taking the piss) to sue the USPTO if the patents office refuses to issue the patent. The brilliant thing about that would be that the corporations concerned would automatically have to accept their patent being tested in court whether they liked or not, or swallow no patent being granted. Genius level - see icon.
Unfortunately, paying them by the application (nearer, I think, to the actual case) would be little better than paying by the patent approval. Patent examiners can be much more "productive", and accordingly earn better performance ratings, awards, and promotions by approving applications. Disapproval is likely to bring the applicant back as many times as it takes to modify the application so as to obtain approval, thus slowing the process down. Approval is quicker and easier, so patent office action would be biased that way even if payment were based on total throughput.
It would be better to fund based on disapprovals, perhaps also returning the application fee to those who are granted a patent and charging a new fee for each amended application.
I suggest this page on their site (or any of the other Rotovision books)...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Photographing-People-Portraits-Fashion-Pro-lighting/dp/2880466520
although I suspect they already have it and photocopied the lighting diagrams to put in the patent.
I am going to patent 'displaying something in one or more colors on something in one or more other colors'
and after that I am going to patent portions of the electro magnetic frequencies. So stop using your eyes unless you pay me. And if you look at something you have to pay me double.