Amazon Patents Annotating Books, Digital Works 125
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Amazon a patent on its Method and System for Providing Annotations of a Digital Work, which covers 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.' This includes annotations received in a graphical or handwriting format, as well as highlighting of text."
I think I smell at least one example of prior art.
Re:Okular Is Not the Best Example (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell even the Newton [wikipedia.org] could even do that, just not very well.
So - You had a Newton? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bogus summary (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I've wondered about, as a non-lawyer, is how exactly the obviousness test works. Some solutions are obvious once you formulate the problem with sufficient specificity. Here the problem is something like: "How to make dynamic annotations by multiple authors, with different preferences about the distribution range for their annotations, usefully available to the user of an electronic work?" Given this formulation of the problem, the solution in this patent is pretty obvious.
But the problem itself isn't obvious. And there is an art to formulating a problem in such a way as makes a solution obvious. One could, after all, formulate the problem in a way that doesn't make this solution obvious: "How to do something really useful with an electronic work?" or even more specifically: "How to make an annotation system more sophisticated?"
And I know that when I implemented initial annotation support in the Plucker e-text reader for PalmOS in March, 2004 [plkr.org], nothing as sophisticated as this patent occurred to me.
So, is the obviousness test a test of the obviousness of a solution or of the problem or both?
Re:Bogus summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure but it should have failed the "obvious to someone skilled in the art" test.
That's not the test, that's the conclusion. The test - whether something is obvious - is whether one or more prior art documents, publications, or products, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element of the claimed invention. So, for example, if the claim recites "A+B+C+D" and you have one piece of prior art that teaches A+B, another that teaches C, and another that teaches D, then in combination, they teach everything in the claim, so the claim is obvious. If, on the other hand, no piece of prior art teaches D, then the claim is not obvious.
This is necessary because it creates an objective test, limited to what was known to those of skill in the art at the time the patent application was filed, which is required for due process. A purely subjective test of an Examiner saying, "without any evidence, I have a gut feeling this is obvious" would be almost certainly be improperly based on hindsight.
Re:This Patent is About Receiving and Serving (Score:5, Interesting)
So sending and receiving a digital file (after all, that's what the annotations are, at the end of the day) from a server is non-obvious? You can't say "well, nobody ever sent and received *this particular type* of file before, so I'm inventing!"
Fuck that. A file is a file, and syncing it with a server is syncing it with a server, regardless of the content of that file.
I think Wikipedia could count as prior art. After all, it's nothing but a system for storing/receiving annotations to a digital work, and then distributing them to users depending on various criteria. Annotating text is annotating text, whether that text is hypertext or an ebook...FFS most ebook formats ARE hypertext in a stupid wrapper.
Re:Okular Is Not the Best Example (Score:2, Interesting)
Now now, we know that prior art doesn't matter anymore. Remember our awesomely wonderful patent reform? http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/09/0042242/patent-reform-bill-passes-senate [slashdot.org]. Amazon is the first to file, so obviously they retain all the rights!
Of course I didn't RTFAs
It's more about controlled access (Score:4, Interesting)
Methods and systems for receiving and distributing annotations of a digital work include receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user. The user may be required to submit a valid authorization credential for the annotation. Annotations may be textual or graphical, and may be associated with particular content in a digital work. Indicators may be displayed to identify content in the digital work for which annotations are available. A user may exchange compensation or perform a specified action for access to an annotation. Some or all of the compensation received for an annotation may be distributed to the author of the annotation. Multiple annotations may be listed in an order based a criterion, such as ranking, price, or date of receipt. Users that purchase a digital work may automatically receive an authorization credential to receive annotations of the digital work.
Also, annotations for MS Office documents are stored in the documents themselves, not kept seperately. Authentication in MS Office documents is limited to encryption passwords, if you have the password to the document, you also have access to the annotations.
The focus here is on e-commerce related to the annotations. I can see it being used for educational e-texts. Certainly, an engine could also be sold to businesses of all kinds for sensitive document development and review.
I can also see it being used to patent troll against Microsoft and anyone else that has annotation and comment abilities in their applications.