Flames of 101 Stay Unkindled for Amazon

I was starting to lose hope for some of the patent applications I'd written that were more on the Comiskey end of the 101 spectrum. Fortunately, yesterday's issuance to Amazon.com renews my faith that an allowance is still possible.

U.S. Patent No. 7,672,868 Creating an incentive to author useful item reviews Assignee: Amazon.com 1. A method in a computer system for evaluating a creator of item reviews, comprising: causing the display of one or more item reviews submitted by the creator to a plurality of viewers; soliciting, from the viewers to whom an item review is displayed, an indication of whether the review is helpful; receiving and storing any solicited indication provided by the viewers to whom item reviews are displayed, each indication being either positive or negative; and applying, by said computer system, a formula to obtain a score for the creator based upon the stored indications that considers, for each review submitted by the creator, the number of viewers to whom the review was displayed that subsequently ordered the item identified by the review.

Commentary: Okay, it's not quite on the level of Comiskey's arbitration method. But is it that far off? The "applying, by said computer system…" -- the only possible tying to a machine -- was added by Examiner's Amendment in a first action allowance. The Bilski elephant just sat quietly in the room. Nor was 101 raised in the parent, U.S. Patent No. 7,428,496, a pre-Bilski issuance on extremely similar claims. What was raised there, however, was a head-scratching restriction requirement, leading to the divisional filing of what became the patent at issue:

This application contains claims directed to the following patentably distinct species: Species I: Directed toward determining an author score based on a net number of positive and negative indications received for each of the reviews submitted by the author. Species II: Directed toward determining an author score based on the number of consumers to whom a review was displayed that subsequently ordered the item identified in the review.

"Independent and distinct," eh? Regardless, Amazon chose to not traverse, and now has two patents for its user review system (which I admit to finding very useful).

Speaking of user review systems, it is interesting that Internet recommendation engine Yelp appears to have no patents or published applications to its name. Do you think it could have avoided some of its recent troubles if its approach and algorithm for reviews were "patent pending" and publicized? Perhaps that would, as the WSJ blog suggests, let Yelp "find a way for [its] sales team to more clearly express to business owners how its filtering process works." Just sayin'.

[Actually, it looks like Yelp really should know about such patents. U.S. Patent No. 7,590,562 for the somewhat-related, "Product recommendations based on collaborative filtering of user data", is assigned to Google. But the inventor is listed as Michael Stoppelman, brother of Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman. A former Google employee, Michael apparently has now joined forces with brother at Yelp.]