Tag: USPTO

If you thought the crazy, Wild West days of the United States Patent and Trademark Office were over... think again! Google has been awarded a patent for its famous Doodles. The application was originally filed in 2001, some three years after Google began using custom logos on its home page. With the awesomely vague title "Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site" we can ...

As incredible as it sounds, the United States Patent and Trademark Office actually awarded Amazon a patent for the "Social Networking System." To make it truly ridiculous, the abstract on the patent reads as though it were succinctly describing Facebook. Amazon's reasoning throughout the whole process has been that, since they purchased PlanetAll in 1998, and PlanetAll is often considered to be ...

It must be a strange week to be an intellectual property lawyer for Amazon. Days after the US Patent Office threw out a patent for "one-click" checkout button, the USPTO has granted Amazon a patent for something that seems at least as obvious: placing a "search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting." Wait, that can't possibly mean what we think it means. They have a patent ...