As innovative as I think that company is sometimes, holy crap can can they be ridiculous at other times! It looks like Amazon was just awarded a patent for “including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.” Since when can you patent obvious stuff? You shouldn’e be able to patent mod_rewrite! Heck, just look at the search string in the URL wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness.

From the patent’s “Summary of Invention” section

For example, a user wishing to search for “San Francisco Hotels” may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system. The system may also support the use of Boolean operators and/or other types of operators within the search strings.

You’ve got to be kidding me. If the user is smart enough to know to type their search term in the URL, wouldn’t that qualify as an obvious act? And don’t even get me started on prior art. How funny is this, the Wikipedia entry for “Prior art” at the address of wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art goes back to July of 2004, prior to the patent even being filed!

amazon-wayback-prior-art

Tonight’s project for me will be to write a patent application for ‘a method of using a permanent liquid stain (example: ink) on a contrasting color canvas to be used in permanently recording combinations of alphabetical and numeric characters.’ The publishing industry will be mine!!!

Can we please overhaul the patent system now? Pretty please?