Cmon guys, this is not a patent on making money on the internet, it's just ONE method of doing it, and to be honest it's a good idea.
Don't think it's a good idea, but I bet the 138 upvotes here aren't from readers who understood that.
Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
111–120 of 137 posts
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#112This is another example of a patent with a specific scope being given an incredibly broad title. This patent is actually on selling web site commenters the ability to have their comment appear in some kind of distinctive format, which might be a different font, or it might be appearing before the other comments.
...which still should never have been granted a fucking patent. That is absolutely block-headedly idiotic.
wow, axman6, it's like you're the patent holder or something.
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#113Couple of years back I'd proposed a cure for patent trolls: Large tech companies form a non-profit group and preemptively attack patent portfolio of companies that they mutually agree to be trolls. The entire business model of trolls hang on a fact that they will be the first attacker so their litigation expenses are small. If a patent troll gets spammed with 100s of lawsuits for bad patent grants at the same time, t…
Part of the definition of "patent troll" is that the troll undertakes no economic activity other than launching lawsuits. Therefore, a troll cannot be sued preemptively.
One can certainly file preemptive law suits to seek declaratory judgement that any granted patents are invalid and/or unenforceable. This had been done by some companies who felt there was risk to their business from certain patent owners.
A troll typically holds 100s of patents and always on look out for opportunity to cash them out. If they are preemtively slammed with 100s of lawsuits for each patent they hold, their legal resources would be overwhelmed without possibility of huge rewards. It would be hard to imagine that they would be able to keep shop open for long time when everybody is attacking them for no apparent reason.
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like the way Livejournal lets users with paid accounts choose which userpic appears next to a comment? I believe they've been doing this for years...
No, because that's not paid per comment.
right, I should file a patent based on each comment _line_ or _character_.
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#115That's it! I'm going to finally file that patent on how gas passes through a butthole!
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#116I honestly couldn't tell if this was a troll or not
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#117So this is a patent for sponsored comments?
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not at all how the prior art base of the USPTO, nor any other patent office, is defined. The problem is that these are the most easily searchable bases of prior art because their fields necessitate it: academics are required to find everything piece of related are on what they're researching when producing works like a PhD thesis, and as such huge databases of academic work exist which are easily searchable; p…
imho, i say that the claims of the patent has to first be examined by a person skilled in the arts, without first reading the actual patent. If the person skilled in the arts is able to discern the inner workings of the patent _without_ having read the patent itself, then the patent can be deemed obvious and thus cannot be valid.
Uh what? So you're saying that if a PSA can understand the definition, it's not inventive? That's ridiculous. And you can bet that many patents are indeed examined without a reading of the description, it's often not necessary. The claims are supposed to stand on their own, and only when comes to matters of determining the exact scope of a term in a claim would you refer to the description most of the time. Also the description should give enough information about a topic that someone who's not an expert in the art (and this is distinct from someone who is skilled in the art) can fully understand the invention, but but apart from the clarifications I mentioned earlier, it plays little role.
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have some prior art? People on HN love to use terms like prior art without knowing what they mean. You actually have to show that a) it's been done before, or at least something similar enough existed that the difference is not inventive and b) the document(s) was available publicly before the priority date of the application.
I don't personally, but I reckon a day with way-back machine may be enough to establish prior art. That's the problem with overly general patents, unfortunately. Also good to know I've finally become one of the "people on HN" though for having a bit of common sense! It's good folks here, and I'm glad to be part of the community.
Give it a go, see what you can find.
There are some problems with the wayback machine when it comes to patents. One of which is that if their robots are blocked using robots.txt, they will remove all previous content that would also have been blocked (or at least, the content can be removed by the author though some means). This is pretty shitty when the best citation is something from the inventor themselves, and they go and delete all history of the content.
Re: Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specific scope? Like hell! This could apply to any Internet content.
It's a far, far smaller scope than "Making money on the internet". Which would imply, for instance, eBay or World of Warcraft. Neither of those cases could be considered prior art for this.
A massive subset of everything is still very large.