I have no connection to the airline industry whatsoever. I’ve never worked for an airline, I’m not rich and have no intention of buying an airline, and I’m not a VP at Delta. In fact, I only fly about three or four times a year.
Given my almost total lack of connection to air travel, do I have the “standing” to patent an “idea” about air travel? Or does one have to have some nominal ability to implement an idea if one wants to patent it?
Let’s say, for example, that I hop in my time machine and travel back to 1990 to patent the idea behind Orbitz (i.e., multiple airlines making their fares searchable via a single portal). Would the airlines have then been required to “buy” the Orbitz idea from me, an average Joe, before they would be allowed to roll out the product in their industry? Or would they, because it’s their industry, trump my silly little patent? Or would I never have been allowed to apply for the patent in the first place, because I am not in the air travel business?
Simple answer: it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the industry or not. I can invent and patent a better embalming table tomorrow whether or not I’m an undertaker.
However, you can’t really patent a business model, AFAIK. You can only patent the underlying technology.
None of that is required to patent something. Two guys in Virginia patented the idea of using a laser to play with a cat. They had no standing in the laser community nor (AFAIK) in the Cat community. I don’t know if they had a laser when they started out (although they later used one to make a film of the idea in norder to persuade the patent examiner to grant the patent).
Of course, the patent would have fallen at the first touch, if these guys ever tried to enforce it. I don’t know how you’d far with trying to patent Orbitz.
By the way, when I first read this, I thought you were talking about patenting the soft drink with the gelatinous globules in it. Confused the hell out of me until I realized what you were really taking about.
There’s also the issue of “prior art”. My layman’s understanding of this says that a patent can be successfully challenged by showing that the idea was described by someone other than the patent holder prior to the date of the patent. I doubt it would be really tough to show that somewhere at some time products from more than one supplier were accessible through a single channel.
There’s also the issue that the WWW, as such, didn’t exist in 1990. And almost the only access to the Internet (which I’m not sure was even called that in 1990) was on major college campuses. I remember when university computing passed out Mosaic (ancestor to Netscape) somewhere around 1993. Before that, it was all text, not even tables.
Someone will correct me if I’ve got the dates off.
Wide access to the WWW started around 1994. But the Internet was available well before that to large numbers of people in email, FTP, gopher, newsgroups, etc.
Very true, but that was text, not graphics - unless you count ASCII graphics (are there still ASCII graphics newsgroups? I haven’t checked in a long while) - nor tables. I find it hard to imagine displaying flights without cells (spreadsheet or database). And I don’t recall clickable links before Mosaic. Of course, SAABRE operated in a quite different manner, on AA’s own mainframes, with dialup for travel agencies. They used an earlier generation of mainframes, too, and proprietary software (of course). Their model was copied by other airlines, not too far down the road - its efficiencies gave an enormous advantage to those with access.
I do recall the horrible monitors from the early 80s - the green screens with no radiation shielding (pre-UL certification; that only came when PCs became a consumer product - university and business employees were helpless; we used what was available), and the purple auras everything had after I’d been on the computer for much more than 30 minutes - probably what started the cataracts now growing in my eyes. Computer science students then were still using printers, not monitors, to see their input. The latest equipment was in University Computing and senior faculty labs.
I began using email in 1983 (I think; could have been 1982), and was a subscriber to the SF-Lovers Digest (still have one of the early tees - the one with a cyborg. Through most of the 80s, I participated in discussion groups on university mainframes that included members from other universities, and businesspeople who had accounts with various universities.
When I did get Mosaic, it was only because I had a PC with a fast enough processor and enough RAM to support it. Plenty of faculty at the large (>30k students) university (but not a “research institution”) I was then at counted themselves lucky to have an 8086 or 8088 all their own, and not sharing one, or having a secretary do the WP for them (I speak, of course, of departments that weren’t among the hard sciences).
You cannot patent an “idea,” period. It is considered a mere mental abstraction.
In recent years, there has been acceptance of so-called business method patents (only, AFAICT, in the U.S.). This is heavily disputed and may in the near future be reversed.
Even with such an algorithm-related patent, you are required not only to have an idea, but to (at least mentally) figure out how to implement it. E.g. “faster than light travel would be cool” – not patentable. “I’ve developed a practical method for faster than light travel” – possibly patentable.
N.B. that the cat/laser thing is not necessarily probative of what is “patentable” if by “patentable” is meant “legally and properly patentable.” Just as people fairly routinely receive credit cards for their dogs, people occasionally sneak goofy-ass patent applications through the system. Speaking of faster than light travel, I could probably within a few minutes dig up several patents purporting to cover this (the ones I’ve seen are worded in obfuscatory language so you have to think about it for a few minutes to realize what mumbo jumbo they are, and the particular patent examiner did not do that thinking). Such patents would be challenged and (one hopes) invalidated if ever asserted.
And yes, SAABRE had a working version of Orbitz long before Orbitz. I think AA may in fact have patents that it has asserted based on SAABRE.
Depends on what that “single channel” is. There are thousands of patents on business methods whose sole point of novelty is that they work through a computer on the Internet.
Oh, yeah. At work we submit defensive publications all the time. We write up an article, and it’s published nationally, with the author anonymous. There are industry journals that are dedicated to these types of articles (no, you won’t find them on the news stands).
Just to expand on that a bit: the employer has a policy of extensively publishing research/ideas which they, themselves, decide not to patent, but which they (or someone else) may want to use. The publication serves to memorialize that the idea was extant as of the date published, so that when some opportunistic later would-be patent applicant tries to monopolize concept X by patenting it, Balthisar’s publication is a ready reference for saying: “too late, it was already known in 2008, and I’ve got the journal to prove it!”
