Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet

&quot;A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.&quot;<p>- Letter to Oliver Evans, (16 January 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) Vol. 13, p. 66.

If these weren&#x27;t depressing they&#x27;d be funny. For those who don&#x27;t know the patent &amp; trademark office (PTO) defines &quot;obvious&quot; as described in a prior patent or, sometimes, an academic paper. Even if everybody in the field has been doing the same thing for years it isn&#x27;t &quot;non obvious&quot; unless somebody wrote to the PTO about it. But since it&#x27;s obvious in reality those nobody except crooks bother to.<p>The whole system is rigged in favor of &quot;people&quot; who write up patentable junk -- those who have the time to write it into patents -- whereas people who actually build things are busy perfecting the trade skills the patent system was made to protect.<p>OK - tirade over. Back to my new app. My wife dreamed it up and we&#x27;re writing it together. When finished and released, if it does well, some fat slob -- who never wrote or programmed anything useful in his life -- will show up to shake us down.

This is another example of a patent with a specific scope being given an incredibly broad title.<p>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.

What I find confusing: This is not a technical invention. It&#x27;s not a device or process. And where is the &quot;inventive step&quot;?<p>It&#x27;s a monetization strategy, and not a particularly clever one at that. Since when is the idea of charging money for something a patentable invention? Absurd.

Interesting how much of the commentary here is on the patent being silly, rather than the implications of the monetization technique that the patent describes. We are allowing people to pay a fee to have their expression privileged over others. We are monetizing the salience of information, a betrayal of the very spirit of the Internet (or, at the least, the techno-utopian ideal of the Internet).<p>So yeah, patents are silly. But perhaps what&#x27;s in the patent is equally troubling.

Question: If I build a start up here in Bolivia, it gets big among Latinamerican users - can I take a huge giant shit on the US patent system? Or does the patent system apply if my website application code is hosted on US servers?

I should get a patent on &quot;making money by asserting patents&quot;. Then I would only grant myself a license and hence have the only patent left that can make money.<p>Seriously. The way out is a blanket &quot;No software patents&quot; statement from congress; or along the line of what Twitter is doing where all inventors have to agree if their patent is used offensively (although lawyers at my company tell me that such a restriction actually has no legal standing).

Couple of years back I&#x27;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, they will go out of business just from the expense of litigation or at least trolling would not be as much lucrative. Obviously this plan has its own risk: this non-profit group can start attacking legitimate patent holders to keep them out of the game. But even bigger issue is that lot of large companies are already in bed with largest trolls themselves such as IV. I don&#x27;t see other great ways to curb trolling. The effort like Ask Patent can prevent some bad future patents but it would be very hard to get law in place that cancels bad patents that have already been granted.

For me the most interesting part in this patent was a &quot;PATENT CITATIONS&quot; section. Most of the patents in this section are quite obvious as well. Like Amazon&#x27;s &quot;Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network&quot; basically describes every E-Commerce site on the internet.

I&#x27;m confused about how something like this actually affects us in the startup world. Should I stop trying to innovate because everything I could possibly think of is already patented.. or simply disregard the existence of these patents?

Sometimes I think that obviously ridiculous patents like this are a good thing. They&#x27;re so absurd that they&#x27;re nearly satire, and satire is often an excellent critical weapon. How out-of-control does the system get before judges and lawmakers clearly see that it&#x27;s not operating as intended? Not much further.

This is hilarious, actually. I like that the same guy also has pending action on the lucrative &quot;methods for making slip resistant file folders&quot; market.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/patents/US20120217211" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;patents&#x2F;US20120217211</a>

So they are patenting the &#x27;just my 2 cents&#x27; ?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_two_cents" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_two_cents</a><p>Although I didn&#x27;t properly RTFA, there are may ways in which one can hook narcissistic gamblers in forums or news sites. The price of the comment can be set in a bid-like fashion with people raising their bids and paying more and more to keep their comment first. They can also pay to upvote or downvote comments or plain remove them. You can have comment wars with real money in no time :).<p>Bitcoin sounds like a perfect fit for such a system, allowing anonymous comments as well. But haven&#x27;t I seen something like this somewhere already - reddit tips , for instance ?

Google his name... <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;tbm=pts&amp;ei=HaH1UffJBMqf0QXJ94GIBg&amp;q=Roddy+McKee+Bullock&amp;oq=Roddy+McKee+Bullock" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;tbm=pts&amp;ei=HaH1UffJBMqf0Q...</a>

The title is obviously overreaching, but the content of the patent seems to be extremely broad, as well. I won&#x27;t claim to have read more than the brief description, but it appears that this patents paid, user-specific formatting for any type of web content.

FYI, if you want to learn more about a specific patent, you can read the examiner&#x27;s reasons for allowance at the public pair website (<a href="http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;portal.uspto.gov&#x2F;pair&#x2F;PublicPair</a>)<p>Looking at that site, the reasons for allowance are the claimed features of:<p>&quot;...displaying to a reader, who can leave a reader comment in response to said online information, an offer associated with said online information, said offer being an offer to alter a reader comment from said free default format to a distinctive format for a fee&quot;<p>*with a priority date of 6&#x2F;6&#x2F;2009

So, the incredibly ridiculously generic claim 1 has been granted? I really have no more words to express what I think about software patents.

To spell it out, the precise problem with this specific patent is the ambiguity of the terms used in the claims. &quot;Online information&quot; and &quot;reader comment&quot; can describe the content of any one-to-many data relationship presented on the web.

I would like to patent a method for making money by filing completely obvious and trivial patents, pushing it through the PTO, and then suing everyone in sight. I am almost certain there is no prior art for this, right?

I was expecting John von Neumann to be listed as the inventor:<p><i>The system also includes a processor for executing the computer executable instructions, and a memory for storing at least the computer executable instructions.</i>

Bollocks! Ok, if one has to defend against this patent, how to go about it?

So essentially like VIP membership of any dating site out there.<p>Or advertising in general.<p>On the other hand, if we implemented this across the board, we could do away with these cumbersome comment voting systems!

Okay, so they own a patent... It takes $ to enforce, protect, and win a litigation for. Once won, they then have to collect... Taken voice - &quot;Good Luck&quot;

I honestly couldn&#x27;t tell if this was a troll or not

I see a broadly titled patent like this one as a mechanism scaring small companies into settling. I wonder if it is worth building systems anymore.

The title&#x27;s of patents are often misleading. Also, prior art allows this patent to be easily (and cheaply) fought in a lawsuit

I wonder if there is a patent on robbing a bank?

...providing to said reader a preview of said distinctive format comment...<p>Said US Patent system is, said, such a, said, bullshit.

That&#x27;s it! I&#x27;m going to finally file that patent on how gas passes through a butthole!

What about a patent to use patent litigation to make money? The you can sue the trolls ;)

discussion can be started here: <a href="http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/US8296192" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;tagged&#x2F;US8296192</a>

Is this funny or sad? I&#x27;m more confused after actually reading it.

So this is a patent for self payed advertisement for your own comments?

Cmon guys, this is not a patent on making money on the internet, it&#x27;s just ONE method of doing it, and to be honest it&#x27;s a good idea. Don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good idea, but I bet the 138 upvotes here aren&#x27;t from readers who understood that.

Question: why doesn&#x27;t prior art entirely rule these out?

So this is a patent for sponsored comments?

Seems like its easy to find shitty patents. How about we link to ones we think are well-deserved? Are there any well-deserved patents relating to the web?

Is there a patent of patent system yet?