Wait, that can't possibly mean what we think it means. They have a patent on URLS like "www.a9.com/San Francisco Hotels"? Yup, that's exactly what it means. Amazon claims that what differentiates these URLs from others is the lack of special formatting language like "search?q=."
Now, there are at least two basic problems with this as far as we can tell:
- Generally you're only supposed to be able to get a patent for things that aren't obvious.
- We're pretty sure there will be a lot of companies who can show "prior art," meaning they had URLs following this format long before Amazon filed for the patent in 2004.
[via Slashdot]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-24-2007 @ 10:02AM
Guido said...
so amazon is trying to patent .htaccess ?
Reply
10-24-2007 @ 11:51AM
James said...
Next up, "A Method for Displaying Text and Images On a Remote Computer". You laugh now, but...
...
Oh wait, Al Gore invented the Internet already. My bad.
Reply
10-24-2007 @ 5:07PM
Conda said...
patenting the methods of mod_rewrite, what will they think of next?
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10-24-2007 @ 7:01PM
Michael Neel said...
Insane... the CGI protocol defined "PATH_INFO" years... decades ago.
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