Google Patents Telling Time 267
theodp writes "Will Google's battle against Microsoft and Apple over their use of 'bogus' patents result in greater scrutiny of its own IP holdings? Take Google's new patent on 'Electronic Shipping Notifications' (please!), which might pique the interest of Amazon.com, UPS, the USPS and others in the shipping business, since providing customers with guesstimates of what time The King of Queens will show up at their door with Christmas presents could now constitute patent infringement. From the patent: 'The broker sends an electronic message, such as an email or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.' To help the USPTO understand its invention, Google supplied this diagram."
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I wonder if they are intentionally patenting the absurd simply to point out how broken the system is. I know some people don't like ads, but at the end of the day, ads displayed on websites by the choice of those websites as a means of generating revenue is not evil. Trying to make the ads more targeted so as to be meaningful to the user is not evil. It is actually really kind of good. The deal is they take what I want to do anyway and use it to be able to get marketers that I might want to actually hear from to pay for what I want to use and show me other things I may want to use. That is not a bad deal for me, it is in fact far better than the classical model of throwing any old thing in front of me regardless of whether it could have anything to do with my interests and wasting my time while giving me almost nothing for it.