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The patented technology seems trivial. The owner has already sued 42 companies. I assume their settlement requests are small enough that it wouldn't make sense to defend a case. Perhaps someone would stand up to Plaintiffs if there were proof of prior art.

Anyone out there implement this idea before Mar 12, 2004? I was thinking the web archive could be a source of proof.

The patent is US 7,356,606.

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  • Your last line, I fear, makes this sound a little promotional. That's alright, your question is definitely on-topic here, but I'd appreciate it if you could disclose a relationship you have with that website, if applicable.
    – Matthew Haugen
    Mar 11, 2015 at 19:56
  • You know you're right, it does sound a little promotional. Maybe I've been spending too much time writing marketing emails. I have no relationship with these websites.
    – kalu---
    Mar 11, 2015 at 23:36
  • XML Islands / Data Source Objects (DSO) and the associated transforms were introduced in the mid-late 90's. I'm sure a read of the W3C's and Microsoft's documentation will give you a date about a decade before the priority date. Amazon also appeared in 1994, but I'm not sure how their early web stores were implemented. So the question is whether that specific abstract algorithm for implementing a web store is valid, post Alice. There's only one way to find out.
    – arober11
    Sep 13, 2015 at 1:25

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I realize this is getting a bit old, but ...

  • http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106.txt -- (C) 2001 -- defines the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML) which references an XML version in section 2.3; practitioners of the field would know they could encode XML into HTML/HTTP, so claim 1 may be invalid

  • https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616 -- 1999 - not exactly what you'd want, but the definition of HTTP 1.1 shows a "query" field to a URI/URL, which is where you'd encode variables (claim 2); the syntax for a query is not defined there (i.e. the ampersand delimiter that is used today isn't specified) -- if you were a practitioner of the field, you'd already know how to do claim 2

  • claim 3 (ignoring extra information) ... this is really the default in programming: unless you actively use some data, it would be ignored; not sure how to fight such a nebulous claim

  • http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/ -- 1999 -- defines HTML 4.01 and sect. 17/Forms includes "hidden" fields; could invalidate claim 4 since this would be obvious to any practitioner (i.e. you'd have to know this spec to be a practitioner so you have to know how to do claim 4)

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This patent essentially describes an internet store front built with Apache cocoon. http://cocoon.apache.org/

I don't know the first release date, the first mailing list entries I can find are from around 1999.

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