Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Ludicrous Amazon Patent

Someone needs to be fired over this - I cannot believe this got passed.

Amazon Patents Counting Book Pages To Figure Out Unnumbered Page Numbers

"The USPTO has issued Amazon a brand spanking new patent for Determining Page Numbers of Page Images, a process which the e-tailer explains involves 'extracting all numbers that are exactly one different than a number found on an adjacent page'." Basically, they've figured out a way to look at pages in a book and see if some of the pages don't have numbers, and then use basic addition and subtraction to figure out what the actual number of those pages are.

Stuff like this drives me crazy, I cant believe people in the USPTO aren't being marched out the door when stuff like this is breaking in the news.

The only thing that did make me smile in the comments was;


can you patent math?
by Mike on May 1st, 2007 @ 4:10pm
So, by looking at a book with a certain number of pages in it, the use a process to find out that the book actually has 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25 pages in it?



Well are you geeky enough to work that one out? email me to let me know if you got it.

Cheers,
Dean

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