more on Amazon patents cookies

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: James Seng <jseng () pobox org sg>

one word: asn.1

and

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 04:33:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Seth Grimes <grimes () altaplana com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Amazon patents cookies
X-X-Sender: ap2 () whirlwind he net
To: johnl () taugh com, Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

"I never heard of anyone doing schema-based data flattening into
cookies so this probably does meet the novelty and non-obviousness
requirements for a valid patent."

I worked for a now-defunct leading-edge Web development firm 1996-7.  I
and other programmers did this with Web-browser cookies only we called it
"pickling" because our shop was heavily into Python and that's the Python
term.  Here's how the Python Library Reference describes the function:

'"Pickling" is the process whereby a Python object hierarchy is converted
into a byte stream, and "unpickling" is the inverse operation, whereby a
byte stream is converted back into an object hierarchy. Pickling (and
unpickling) is alternatively known as "serialization," "marshalling," or
"flattening," however, to avoid confusion, the terms used here are
"pickling" and "unpickling."'

It didn't take any great intellectual leap to apply this technique to
cookies and we did.

                                                Seth


On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Dave Farber wrote:

>
> Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
> Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:56:08 +0000
> From: John Levine <johnl () taugh com>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Amazon patents cookies
> To: dave () farber net
>
>  >Subject: Amazon patents cookies
>  >
>  >United States Patent  6,714,926
>  >Benson                        March 30, 2004
>
> It's not patenting cookies, it's patenting a clever way to encode
> structured data in a cookie as a string, then recover the data
> structure when the cookie is returned, by using a code in the cookie
> to identify a data schema and then using the schema to decode the rest
> of the cookie.
>
> As always, you have to read the claims to know what's actually being
> patented.  There are certainly a lot of really stupid software patents,
> but I never heard of anyone doing schema-based data flattening into
> cookies so this probably does meet the novelty and non-obviousness
> requirements for a valid patent.
>
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl () taugh com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> http://www.taugh.com


--
Seth Grimes   Alta Plana Corp, analytical computing & data management
              Intelligent Enterprise magazine (CMP), Contributing Editor
grimes () altaplana com       http://altaplana.com    301-270-0795 

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