Open Market owns personalization?

[Brian Behlendorf <br...@organic.com>]

Go ahead, laugh.

>X-Sender: chip@mailhost.organic.com
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>Date: Tue, 03 Mar 1998 12:46:52 -0800
>To: commerce@organic.com
>From: Chip Hall <ch...@organic.com>
>Subject: Open Market owns personalization?
>
>
>
>Open Market wins critical patents for e-commerce 
>
>By Margaret Kane and Jim Kerstetter, ZDNet 
>
>In an announcement that could send shock waves through the Internet world,
>Open Market Inc. said Tuesday it has
>won patents covering key aspects of electronic commerce. 
>
>The technologies covered by the patents include online shopping carts,
>session tracking, and real-time credit card
>transactions -- all three used widely by sites conducting online commerce,
>the company believes.
>
>CEO Gary Eichhorn and other Open Market (OMKT) executives said the company
>would try to get violators to either
>buy its software, or sign licensing agreements to use the technology. 
>
>Analysts said the patents, if interpreted broadly, could have an enormous
>impact on the industry because the vast
>majority of existing e-commerce applications employ technology that could
>be the intellectual property of Open
>Market. 
>
>"The best-case scenario would be that the patents are narrowly interpreted
>and they don't create a lot of extra drag on
>the market," said Scott Smith, an analyst at Current Analysis in Sterling,
>Va. "The worst-case scenario would be a
>blanket interpretation that puts an extra drag, an extra tax, on the
>marketplace." 
>
>Commerce firms alarmed
>Officials at other e-commerce firms expressed alarm when told of the
>patents and questioned whether Open Market
>planned to enforce them. 
>
>"That's incredibly broad," said Keith Miller, executive vice president of
>the Internet Billing Co. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 
>
>The first patent deals with credit card transactions over the Internet.
>Filed in December 1993, the Payment Patent lays
>out the key issues for using credit cards online and authenticating the
>users. 
>
>For software to be in violation of the patent, it would have to do three
>things: Conduct real-time authentication of the
>user and merchant; take place over the Internet, and bar someone from doing
>a "replay" of the transaction in order to
>scam the merchant. 
>
>Is SET covered?
>Much of the specifications for the Secure Electronic Transactions protocol
>shepherded by MasterCard International
>Inc. and Visa International Inc. perform the same tasks for online credit
>card use. SET was finished nearly four years
>after Open Market filed for the patent. 
>
>The second patent, Network Sales Patent applied for in October 1994, covers
>the electronic "shopping carts"
>metaphor that consumers use when picking out products from a Web site. 
>
>"The shopping cart claims are very general and very broadly focused," said
>Win Treese, director of security at Open
>Market. 
>
>While the first two patents deal with technology already in widespread use,
>the third covers the future. The Session
>Identifier Patent, filed in June 1995, makes it possible for a company to
>track Web site visits and usage, and allow
>"one-to-one" marketing -- an increasingly popular feature in e-commerce
>applications. 
>
>Treese said Open Market intends to enforce the patents. It is focusing its
>attention on software companies profiting
>from the patented technology and other firms that built it on their own but
>are now using it on their Web sites. Open
>Market does not intend to go after Web sites that have bought infringing
>applications from a software company. 
>
>Won't stifle competition
>Open Market officials maintained they are not seeking to stifle
>competition, or to drive their competitors out of
>business. But that doesn't mean the company, founded at the dawn of the Web
>in 1993, doesn't intend to make money
>off of its intellectual property. 
>
>"The fact is, we came up with the idea first," said Bob Weinberger, vice
>president of marketing at Open Market.
>However, he said, Open Market doesn't want legal battles and licensing
>issues to stifle the emerging electronic
>commerce field. 
>
>"We are definitely concerned and conscious about that and we are committed
>to making sure that does not occur," he
>said. "That would not be in our best interest or any one else's." 
>
>But the possibility of licensing revenues could have a tremendous impact on
>the company, which has yet to turn a
>profit. 
>
>Weinberger wouldn't say whether the company expects licensing revenues to
>become a major revenue source, but the
>news was well received on Wall Street, where Open Market's stock jumped
>almost 12 percent to $17.50 by midday. 
>
>The three patents are "further confirmation that our technology is unique
>and innovative," said Eichhorn. It's also a
>sign that it was one of the first on the market, said analysts. 
>
>_________________________________________Chip Hall__________________
>   Organic  .   Director, Business Development   .   415-278-5520
>	Cell: 415-519-1238				chip@organic.com
>				www.organic.com
>
>				
>
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specialization is for insects				  brian@organic.com

Re: Open Market owns personalization?

[Ben Laurie <be...@algroup.co.uk>]

Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> 
> Go ahead, laugh.

I would be, except I have a suspicion that the US Patent Office is
sufficiently bonkers that this may stand up...

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
Ben Laurie            |Phone: +44 (181) 735 0686|  Apache Group member
Freelance Consultant  |Fax:   +44 (181) 735 0689|http://www.apache.org
and Technical Director|Email: ben@algroup.co.uk |
A.L. Digital Ltd,     |Apache-SSL author    http://www.apache-ssl.org/
London, England.      |"Apache: TDG" http://www.ora.com/catalog/apache

Re: Open Market owns personalization?

[Brian Behlendorf <br...@organic.com>]

At 11:14 AM 3/4/98 +0000, Mark J Cox wrote:
>> The Session Identifier Patent, filed in June 1995, makes it possible for
>> a company to track Web site visits and usage, and allow "one-to-one"
>> marketing -- an increasingly popular feature in e-commerce applications.
>
>Sounds a bit like mod_usertrack/mod_cookies which allocates a unique
>session identifier to each user.  
>
>Unfortunately the date on the copyright says 6th July 1995 (it was first
>added to Apache 0.8.2).  I'll have to dig out my old logs to see when I
>actually wrote the code. 

I posted a proposal for a "State:" header to www-talk back on 2 Feb 1995,
which is substantially similar to what Netscape implemented as cookies in
Netscape 1.1.  So even Netscape could claim prior art, and I don't know
whether an unimplemented proposal for an idea could be prior art to that.  

Is the patent for the idea to embed a session identifier in a URL?  w3.com
was doing something like that back in 1993, too.

	Brian


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specialization is for insects				  brian@organic.com

Re: Open Market owns personalization?

[Mark J Cox <ma...@awe.com>]

> The Session Identifier Patent, filed in June 1995, makes it possible for
> a company to track Web site visits and usage, and allow "one-to-one"
> marketing -- an increasingly popular feature in e-commerce applications.

Sounds a bit like mod_usertrack/mod_cookies which allocates a unique
session identifier to each user.  

Unfortunately the date on the copyright says 6th July 1995 (it was first
added to Apache 0.8.2).  I'll have to dig out my old logs to see when I
actually wrote the code. 

Mark