Amazon has patented the milkman, etc.

https://plus.google.com/104716271353648708358/posts/Q7xrJaMru93

by DanielHimmelein • 13 years ago

94 58 13 years ago

plus.google.com

Fargren• 13 years ago

"What is claimed is:

1. A computer-implemented method(...)"

Mmm, I'm to young to have seen an actual milkman, but television never depicted them as "computer-implemented"

itsprofitbaron• 13 years ago

Yet if you carry on reading that section it also says, "identifying a product, a quantity to deliver, and a frequency of delivery"[1] - all delivery systems do that on a computer, even the milkman.

The patent they've been granted is extremely broad especially when you consider that a majority of delivery companies actually do what the patent says.

For instance, you can request a delivery slot and the majority of delivery systems identify the product, the quantity to deliver and the frequency of delivery. The patent they have been granted covers all aspects of that.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

ffk• 13 years ago

You'll be pleased to know you haven't missed your chance yet!

I used to see Michal the Milkman trucks driving around near down town Palo Alto a few blocks away from where Steve Jobs used to live!

http://www.michalthemilkman.com/Moo/Home.html

nhebb• 13 years ago

Schwan's has been delivering dairy products for 60 years. You can set up recurring deliveries online (i.e., computer implemented).

http://www.schwans.com/

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

And yet, Amazon only sells condensed milk and powdered milk, not fresh milk. [1]

I really do like their 'Subscribe & Save' service though [2] (which is what the patent describes).

[1] http://amzn.to/14KeLIH

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/

_dark_matter_• 13 years ago

I don't know, this milk is pretty amazing.

http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

Doesn't appear to be eligible for 'Subscribe & Save', but I love the meme anyways.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html?_r=...

lelandbatey2• 13 years ago

Ummm... What?:

http://fresh.amazon.com/product?asin=B000PRDZSM&qid=1425...

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

"We currently offer home delivery to a limited number of Seattle neighborhoods"

Nice for some folks living in Seattle, otherwise not very relevant.

comex• 13 years ago

@FOSSpatents tweeted about this:

"The grant of this patent to Amazon renders me speechless. http://t.co/bMh7qwkh "Recurring Delivery of Products". prior art = milkman"

Usually he's rather supportive of most of the tech patents HN likes to deem "obvious", so if even he finds this astonishing, perhaps there really is something wrong here :)

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Florian Müller finally admitted a few months ago that he is a paid shill.

ketralnis• 13 years ago

Source? Relevance?

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

A lot of companies file patents to cover their asses against patent trolls, not to enforce them. I would imagine that this is something similar.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

I disagree. Amazon has a history of enforcing terrible patents they own - ie the one-click patent.

Pfhreak• 13 years ago

Can you provide another example? A single large suit over 10 years ago doesn't really indicate a 'history of enforcing patents'...

interviewer• 13 years ago

A "history"? Does your history consist of a single patent lawsuit 13 years ago? Also subsequent to the lawsuit Jeff Bezos went on public record as identifying that as a mistake. http://oreilly.com/news/amazon_patents.html. After which he spoke to congress about how to change the US patent law to fix it.

As an author on 25+ Amazon patents (not the one referenced by the post) I will tell you three things:

1/ The US patent system is broken. Everyone knows this. 2/ Every company has to protect itself by filing patents. This is just a reality of the system that we have. 3/ A company that turns its focus away from its customers and instead focuses on other companies is either a parasite (hello patent trolls!) or has lost its way.

My 0.02.

Nux• 13 years ago

fuck patents.

rohern• 13 years ago

Thus a public system intended to engender fairness and creative behavior profitable to all society is made its own negation.

newishuser2• 13 years ago

If there was ever an argument against broad software patents it's this. Also if there ever was an argument that the patent system is a money making sham, it's this.

Prepending existing ideas with, "A computer-implemented method" does not make them patent-worthy and everyone in the entire world knows it.

ewillbefull• 13 years ago

Enjoy what a federal judge hearing CLS Bank v. Alice thinks:

> Judge: Why don't we actually look at a claim? Why don't we start with claim 26 of the 375' patent. It begins, "a data processing system to enable the exchange of obligations between parties, the systems comprising: a communications controller, a first-party device coupled to said communications controller, a data storage unit having information stored, a computer coupled to said data storage unit, said communications controller that is configured to do the following"

> Judge: That doesn't just sound like somebody saying a "method" with maybe a computer, I mean there are four separate physical tangible components of a system articulated.

> Lawyer: Your Honor, you're right. There's a computer, a hard drive, and a telephone.

robot• 13 years ago

I think the inventors listed should be matched with likes of Edison and mocked. If society mocks them the social pressure might work better than legal means to avoid such non-sense.

So better make a web page with Amazon's hall of fame of inventors and add them to this list.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

An actual milkman would be great, Berkeley Farms makes the best Eggnog (my opinion) but trying to find it in stores is getting harder with the Safeway monopoly. I emailed their bizdev team in hopes of establishing a way to get deliveries but alas, to no avail.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

So we're at the point where the actual patents are entirely pretext. The words written on them are now completely irrelevant. They're just proxies for money.

monochromatic5• 13 years ago

No, we're still at the point where alarmist headlines from people who don't know how to read a patent get lots of karma. We've been here for a long time now.

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

You seem rather strident in your defense of this patent. What exactly are they claiming, beyond scheduling milkman-like deliveries with the added text "with a computer"?

If that's all there is to it, then why would you defend such an outrageous patent? If that's not all there is to it, what else is there?

monochromatic5• 13 years ago

No, that's just the abstract. Claim 1, for example, reads as follows:

    1. A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of
    products, the method comprising performing instructions under the control of
    a computer system for:

    receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and
    a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of
    the one or more list items identifying a product, a quantity to deliver,
    and a frequency of delivery;

    periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having a date
    and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the delivery slot, the
    order being generated in advance of the date and time for delivery such that
    the order has a period of time of pendency prior to the delivery;

    creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order
    based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each
    list item in the recurring delivery list;

    receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item of the
    recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency of the order;

    in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system,
    whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item;

    in response to determining that the order includes an order item corresponding
    to the first list item, modifying, by the computer system, the order
    item corresponding to the first list item based on the change made to the
    first list item of the recurring delivery list; and

    providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment system
    capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered
    substantially on the date and time for delivery.

Now, I consider myself a creative person. But I would have a hell of a time trying to read that claim on a fucking milkman.

Learn to read patents, people.

edit: Formatting is really hard apparently.

arbuge• 13 years ago

It looks like a longish and important claim, but it still seems to me to describe trivial stuff that shouldn't be patentable to begin with. It's just a sequence which is pretty obvious to any clear-minded person once the business requirement is stated. It's one wildly broken patent system that grants patents on this kind of stuff.

hermannj314• 13 years ago

it still seems to me to describe trivial stuff

It is patent number 8,370,271. With numbers that large, it probably has to allow trivial stuff.

I'm just glad that on November 2nd, 2029, society will be able to use a computer system to manage a list of items to be delivered. We have only to thank the brilliant minds at Amazon and the framers of our Constitution, otherwise such an important contribution to science and the useful arts may have been lost for generations.

j-g-faustus3• 13 years ago

It still doesn't sound very impressive if you translate it to plain English:

    A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of products, 
    the method comprising performing instructions under the control of a computer
    system for:

Create a list on a computer.

    receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and
    a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of 
    the one or more list items identifying a product, a 
    quantity to deliver, and a frequency of delivery;

Listing where, what and how often to deliver.

    periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having
    a date and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the 
    delivery slot, the order being generated in advance of the date 
    and time for delivery such that the order has a period of time of
    pendency prior to the delivery;

Each day, create a list of the deliveries to be made today

    creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order 
    based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each 
    list item in the recurring delivery list;

For each delivery, list which items to deliver.

    receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item 
    of the recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency 
    of the order;

If the customer updates their order, change the delivery.

    in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system,
    whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first 
    list item;

Compare the customer update to the delivery stored in the system.

    in response to determining that the order includes an order item 
    corresponding to the first list item, modifying, by the computer 
    system, the order item corresponding to the first list item based
    on the change made to the first list item of the recurring 
    delivery list; and

Change the deliverly list in the system to reflect the customer update.

    providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment
    system capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered 
    substantially on the date and time for delivery.

Give the list of "today's deliveries" to someone who can actually make the delivery.

I still fail to see how this differs dramatically from pretty much every delivery service ever. The delivery guys may not create these lists themselves, but their dispatchers do.

The only thing that differs from say UPS is the 'recurring order' part - say "send me three lettuce every Friday". But grocery deliveries have worked like this for quite a while.

notintokyo• 13 years ago

Also, wouldn't all those hundreds of "box of the month"-style subscription sites where you can pick a product to send and get it periodically be prior art?

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

Reminds me of one of the first computer systems ever used in business, back in the early 1950s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

"One of its early tasks was the elaboration of daily orders which were phoned in every afternoon by the shops and used to calculate the overnight production requirements, assembly instructions, delivery schedules, invoices, costings, and management reports"

glesica• 13 years ago

Sounds pretty obvious to me. I get my pet supplies delivered in exactly this manner by Petflow. I have to assume that their ordering system is implemented using a computer...

newishuser2• 13 years ago

Dude... everything in that claim is what a milkman literally does. Literally! Especially if that milkman uses computers.

vacri• 13 years ago

Monthly standing orders in computer systems go back at least to the early 90s.

How does this patent get granted in light of prior art and obviousness?

cynwoody• 13 years ago

There is abundant prior art on this one.

E.g., one casualty of the dot-com bubble was Streamline, an online grocery delivery company. They called their version of the invention Don't Run Out. Fast Company raved about it in this article dated July 31, 1998:

    What happens when customers depend on you - and you deliver?
    They decide to depend on you even more. One of Streamline's most
    popular services is called Don't Run Out. Families identify
    their must-have items - milk, toilet paper, diapers, pet food -
    and authorize the company to replenish their stock of each item
    automatically. Today almost every Streamline household uses
    Don't Run Out. The average household has standing orders for
    more than 10 items. "It's extraordinary," says [Gina] Wilcox. "The
    consumer makes a purchase decision once, and we fill the order
    throughout the year. It redefines brand loyalty. It redefines
    marketing."

http://www.fastcompany.com/34524/streamline-delivers-goods

MrQuincle• 13 years ago

The big question is, how to solve it? How to improve the communication between programmers and lawyers? How to lessen the burden on the people that provide patents? How to involve the vote of the general public? Can there be a class of 'defending' patents instead of 'attacking' ones with which you can sue? Can there be specific IT judge educations?

Amazon has patented the milkman, etc.

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