| Dear Friends, I am writing this mail because I
think there is an urgent need to fight a threat to
entrepreneurship in India and abroad. Amazon has patented
the "affiliate program" which in my opinion is
a very obvious idea and therefore a completely ridiculous
patent. I think this is an *extremely* serious threat to
the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate. This threat
must be fought head on in every court Please write to me and let's do something to fight this menace. regards,
It is absolutely clear that the Patent Laws in USA can be very easily abused. The patent office is said to have opined that disputes if any can be settled in a court of law. However once a patent has been granted it would be very expensive to fight against it particularly in the US courts. For all practical purposes we have Campaign against Amazon gathers momentum to rule out this remedy. Secondly, if the Amazon case is any indication, every
web strategy will be subject to patenting. For example,
the shopping cart, auction process, e-trading process,
e-banking process, e-ticketing process, web casting
process, can all be patented. One patent case on an India
company is sufficient for the e-commerce initiative in
India to fold up. If companies in India such as Penta
four, TV 18, The matter therefore calls for drastic action. Nothing short of a revolt can protect the just budding e-commerce in India One way this can be sorted out is through a
clarificatory legislation such as "Trade mark,
Patent and Copyright for Electronic documents Act".
One of the features of this legislation should be to
create an Indian domain for legislative interpretation
which is to some extent insulated from the system of USA.
If there are conflicts as there are bound to be, they can
be taken up in the In the earlier rounds of WTO, I am not sure if Indian delegations have focussed on the Cyber Laws as much as perhaps the Pharmaceutical or the Agricultural patents. Time has come now to review the effect of WTO on Cyber business in India and start re-negotiating on some of the terms if required. For this purpose a suitable task force has to be immediately commissioned by the MIT. Venky's point is well taken. The Amazon patents are a
classic example of stretching laws to ridiculous
extremes. 2 quick - The USPTO is confusing social practices with
technological innovations. The fault lies with not just
Amazon, but also the - Commenting on this issue, an East Coast patent
attorney claimed (at a seminar on this issue in the
Research Triangle) Just a thought - what if the international community
retaliates by refusing to accept not just Amazon's patent
but also valid here's a related link..... - manish To: My Journalist Friends I absolutely agree with what my cyber-activist friend,
Venkatesh ("Venky") Hariharan and his
acquaintance, "Naavi|", have said in their
messages. Why Amazon fails the test Since it was a pioneer in this area, Amazon's Associate Program is still the world's largest and most successful affilate program.... The company's affilate program is one of the reasons why barnesandnoble.com has found it very difficult to catch up with amazon.com, eventhough it is a much bigger player offline... But trying to actually patent this idea is
ridiculous... It is sad that Amazon, being an e-commerce
pioneer, has not realised that Maybe, the idea is to "try and get away with it if possible"... In this, the company has joined Priceline.com (which has patented the concept of "name-your-price" auctions) and Sterling Commerce (which obtained a patent for online shopping carts)... Test of court Impact on India -- Arun
Natarajan, The death of the Internet? In our last edit we spoke of the importance of patents in today's world and lauded the Indian finance minister's efforts to beef up the patents office.We could not have spoken too soon, because in the last fifteen days, one of the most disturbing developments has been the granting of a patent on referral marketing to Amazon. We believe that these patents constitute a very serious threat to the ability of entrepreneurs in India and elsewhere to innovate. India should therefore refuse to accept the patents that the US Patents and Trademarks Office doles out using antiquated yardsticks. Amazon already has a patent on the supposedly unique idea of "one-click shopping." Another company, Priceline has a patent on the "name your price auctions" which has given it a stronghold that even mighty Microsoft and it's team of top-notch lawyers have not been able to break. To us, these patents are a knife wound that stab at the very heart of what makes the Internet so successful today-it's openness. Imagine if Tim Berners Lee had patented the idea of hypertext. Then try and imagine where Amazon or Priceline would be today! Jeff Bezos and Jay Walker are billionaires today because their companies were nourished on the openness that the Internet has enjoyed till recently. They did not have to queue up in front of Berners Lee's office to take a license before starting their respective ventures. The openness of the Internet has lead to what many consider to be the greatest explosion of intellectual activity since the invention of the Gutenberg press. The low barriers to entry and the rising tide of users-some 80 million at last count-are what made Amazon and Priceline such big brand names today. Their attempt to patent obvious ideas therefore represents a diabolical attempt to destroy the very openness that made them billionaires. This is greed taken to a cancerous extreme and will lead to the death of the Internet as we know it and love it. We therefore deplore in the strongest possible terms the current trend among companies to patent every incremental innovation that they can think of. Think of where our very own Indian start-up, chequemail, which is trying to patent it's "innovation" of sharing revenues with its users would be if Hotmail had patented its idea of free web-based e-mail. This mad gold-rush mentality will choke the medium and make it the exclusive preserve of fat cats who can afford to license trivial,obstructionist patents like "one-click shopping," "referral marketing," "name your price auctions" and zillions of other ideas. Imagine the barriers to entry if entrepreneurs have to waste their time on buying licenses instead of being out there in the marketplace, competing and innovating. Or imagine, if they have invested their sweat and blood in building a solid business and suddenly find themselves sued for violating a patent they didn't even imagine existing. Even companies with half-baked ideas are now looking at using patents as a barrier to competition. This is an extremely dangerous trend. Instead of fighting it out fair and square in the market place and winning on the basis of superior execution, companies want to create barriers by exploiting outdated laws. Entrepreneurs, and ultimately, customers will have to pay heavily for this artificially throttled competition. Look at Yahoo, for example, which has clearly built up a terrific brand because of their superb execution. They have no need to hide behind spurious "original ideas." Isaac Newton said that, "If I see
further than others, it's because I stand on the
shoulders of giants." Come to think of it, Newton's
Law of Gravity was a far more original and patentable
idea than the USPTO accepts as original ideas today. On
the Internet, the freedom to innovate is a non-negotiable
issue like human rights and the freedom of speech. After
the outcry over his company's patent, Bezos made a
statement saying that he has reviewed the issue and At JumpStartUp.Net, we are very firmly on the side of entrepreneurs and pledge to do everything in our power to fight this menace.
US patent Office set to improve Following the worldwide condemnation of the Amazon patent on affiliation process, US PTO has admitted that the system of awarding patents may need to be improved. In particular the examiners have been found wanting in assessing "Prior Art" status for a patent application. This may be overcome by refering to an expert committee in addition to the current procedure of search. |