Saturday, December 6, 2014

This is not a kiosk?

From Judge Mayer's dissent in DDR Holdings:
This is incorrect. DDR’s claims do, in fact, simply take a well-known and widely-applied business practice and apply it using a generic computer and the Internet. The idea of having a “store within a store” was in widespread use well before the dawn of e-commerce. For example, National Leisure Group, Inc. (“NLG”), one of the defendants here, previously “sold vacations at . . . BJ’s Wholesale Clubs through point of purchase displays in the 45 BJ’s Clubs along the Eastern Seaboard.” Br. of Defendants- Appellants National Leisure Group, Inc. and World Travel Holdings, Inc. at 4. DDR’s patents are directed to the same concept. Just as visitors to BJ’s Wholesale Clubs could purchase travel products from NLG without leaving the BJ’s warehouse, the claimed system permits a person to purchase goods from a third-party vendor, but still have the visual “impression that she is viewing pages served by the [original host merchant].” ’399 patent col.3 ll.23–24; see ante at 3 (explaining that DDR’s claimed system “permits a website visitor, in a sense, to be in two places at the same time”). Indeed, any doubt as to whether the claimed system is merely an Internet iteration of an established business practice is laid to rest by the fact that one of the named inventors acknowledged that the innovative aspect of his claimed invention was “[t]aking something that worked in the real world and doing it on the Internet.” J.A. 03208.

Representative claim 19 of the ’399 patent recites:

19. A system useful in an outsource provider serving web pages offering commercial opportunities, the system comprising:
(a) a computer store containing data, for each of a plurality of first web pages, defining a plurality of visually perceptible elements, which visually perceptible elements correspond to the plurality of first web pages;
(i) wherein each of the first web pages belongs to one of a plurality of web page owners; (ii) wherein each of the first web pages displays at least one active link associated with a commerce object associated with a buying opportunity of a selected one of a plurality of merchants; and
(iii) wherein the selected merchant, the outsource provider, and the owner of the first web page displaying the associated link are each third parties with respect to one other;
(b) a computer server at the outsource provider, which computer server is coupled to the computer store and programmed to:
(i) receive from the web browser of a computer user a signal indicating activation of one of the links displayed by one of the first web pages;
(ii) automatically identify as the source page the one of the first web pages on which the link has been activated; (iii) in response to identification of the source page, automatically retrieve the stored data corresponding to the source page; and
(iv) using the data retrieved, automatically generate and transmit to the web browser a second web page that displays: (A) information associated with the commerce object associated with the link that has been activated, and (B) the plurality of visually perceptible elements visually corresponding to the source page.

In other words, according to Mayer J.,
Every night,
When the little boys and little
other surfers of the Internets things
go to sleep ...

Little elves appear in a big ole' warehouse and build a whole new BJ "store", and a kiosk in the store and ship the whole mere little ole' "store" things to wherever next our little boys and little other surfers of the Internets things will be the next day.

Joy to the world.
All the boys and girls.
Jeremiah really was a bullfrog
and a good friend

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