PATENT TROLL ALERT: attention affiliate programs

both of the above actually have prior art in BBS's. Simple to defeat I'd think

Patent laws can be ridiculous....

Did someone say 50

i agree.. seems that the patent examiners get star struck when they see Jeff Bezos name as the inventor.. or, they never used BBS before and thought the web was the internet.

There are already patent re-exams requests with the patent office over their famous "one click patent"


Fight the 12 click!

and expensive.. that's why it's cheaper for everyone if we can help amazon with this one.


Fight the $$$!

off the top of our heads ... Terry from Tropix (ft. lauderdale area) .. not sure of dates but he sold out to someone else in 96 or so
The General down in Oz

You know who says there was an Internet provider in Toronto that was doing a BBS port to the net - and did adult too ... and yes it was 95 and he's SURE he did affiliate program, just can't recall the name *sigh*

I'll shake more trees to see what I come up with

Some background on this BTG patent troll company:

http://www.computerworld.com/governm...om=story_picks

"BTG gets the majority of its income from licensing and royalty revenue, Burrows said. BTG holds some 3,500 patents in its portfolio and brought in revenue of about $90 million in the last full year"



Fight the new, new, new economy!

May want to try these guys to see who the first affiliate programs they listed were:
Refer-It
AssociatePrograms.com <-- this guy looks like you can get info on his researches then.

Edit: spelling

Probably Robin Nixon.

Not sure how to get a hold of him other than to do a post at Serge's old board (he is Robin there) I think he might be Robin WMHQ over here, not sure
on that though.

ya, his name has come up a couple of times.. read it on oprano.. and he did appear in that thread.. would be great to hear his input if he did start the affiliate program before this patent, and that the patent copied his innovative work.


Fight the 411!

Don't know if you saw this yet:

http://www.affiliatemanager.net/article17.shtml

also found a ref to s2.com having had an aff proggy in 1994.

S2.com (Summer, 1994)
PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October, 1994)
AutoWeb.com ( October, 1995)
KBkids.com ( January, 1996)
EPage.com ( April, 1996)


http://www.thehistoryof.net/history-...-programs.html

great digging.

the amazon attorney said that they were already aware of CDNOW, but given a year of their searching, they seem to not have the silver bullet that they are looking for.

They probably have alot of circumstantial stuff to help prove that the patent was obvious ..but nothing like an actual affiliate program that was documentable to go in for the slam dunk.


Fight the sports analogies!

either history has thumbed its noses at the adult industry as the early pioneers, or adult copied mainstream.

Fight the say it isn't so!

Yup -Good stuff - Had found this post from Brad Waller on geek talk
Thread

Here's the post/Thread from there - cuz I think the google link won't work:


I hope this does not get too long, as I've been doing stuff online for quite a while. Back in college, I remember getting an ARPANET account was a really big deal. I got access for some work back in 1985 or so and got to know email. My job out of school was in engineering, so I got email access in the late 80's or early 90's and got hooked on newsgroups and email lists. In fact, I'm still on one of those first email lists.

In 1993, my future partners showed me this cool thing called a Web browser and we all thought about what we could do with it. Our first idea was to collect ski maps from everywhere and have an online ski map site. The next idea that was actually partially developed in 1994 was online yellow pages. We were too early for this, as nobody understood why they would even want to pay money to get placed on a Web site. That, and adding in the content was very time consuming for us.

In October, 1994 we launched EPage Classifieds. This was a breakthrough because we made the site automated so that our users would provide the content. We originally charged for every ad, but that soon morphed into only charging for upsells and commercial ads. Back then, we only accepted checks in the mail, but we got started with online credit cards pretty quickly, and have had our Merchant account since 1997.

We knew that we could not expand on our own efforts, so we created a program in 1995 that allowed anyone to get a 20% discount if they placed enough ads. The idea was that these people could attract advertisers offline and place ads for them, and they could not only earn that 20%, but they could earn far more if they added on their own fees. Most advertisers would not know how much we charged as they did not have Internet access, but if they did, they would see our list price and not know that their agent was able to keep the 20% discout. This worked pretty well and we had about 80 active agents at the peak of the program. This was effectively an affliate program, although nobody had thought of that yet. The advantage here was that we did not have to write commission checks.

We also found that we got a lot of requests from niche sites for their own category. We had people asking for categories for RCA Video Disks, Corvettes, Baseball Cards & Collectibles, Ford Taurus SHO, etc. So, I had the idea that we provide these people with what they wanted. After all, if we did not, then they could just set up a simple page on their site and do it themselves. Why not effectively become our own competition? So in April of 1996 we started offering co-branded classifieds for other web sites. We now host over 28,000 such sites, and our very first site is still with us. While not the first affiliate program, this did launch before Amazon, and at this point could likely be the oldest affiliate program out there.

After a while, people seeing these co-branded sites wanted more. We had requests for fully custom sites with other's look/feel, categories, prices, etc. We modified our code for this, and in 1998 started offering custom sites such as the one we host for PieceUnique. Over the years, we found some resistance from clients worried about "the competition" hosting their classifieds, so we spun off this fully custom solution to AdConnect.com.

Finally, our last business actually started in 1999 or so. I had an idea for a better advertising solution. We had contracts with 24/7, DoubleClick, and other big firms, but I saw lots of inefficiencies and poor earnings compared to what I thought we could get. We came up with a very ambitious plan for a massive solution (these were the heady days of VC dollars falling from the sky) and set up a business plan and started shopping it around. About that time, the bottom fell out of the market and the idea was left sitting for a few years. Earlier this year, we revisited the idea to see if we could do a simpler version, more like phpAdsNew does but with integrated payments.

We still had contracts for advertising that did not pay all that well, and I spent way too much time dealing with potential advertisers and setting up campaigns to run from those few who had the budget to place an ad into our rotation. The smaller version was made to deal with these problems only, and leave off all the other cool ideas we had back in the beginning. We made a system that allows anyone to set up default ads (including AdSense, affiliate banners, etc.) for their site and then set a rate for advertisers to pay (per day or per view) if they wanted to get on that site. After six months or so of work, we got AdJungle off the ground in Beta ealier this year, and it is in full swing now. Now, advertisers can place campaigns for a few dollars on lost of sites, and it all happens without manual intervention.

We have ideas for five or six different things, and are trying to figure out what is next...


__________________
Brad Waller | VP, Business and Affiliate Development
http://EPage.com - Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdConnect.com - Fully custom outsourced Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdJungle.com - Manage & sell your site's advertising - now with PPC text ads

BTW the link he's referring to about the first site is this:
haCEDMagic

and now for something somewhat related..... a new t3report should be out by Internext.. it's the T3Affiliate Report geared towards affiliate programs.

The report shows affiliate domains linking to the program. Clicking on a domain will reveal all the web pages of the affiliate, highlighting which pages their affiliate link is on, and which pages not on.

Each page has incoming stats of backlinks, along with keyword filtering. A BBW sponsor website could use the keyword filtering to highlight which pages of their affiliates used the keyword "BBW" and which of the pages had incoming links that used the word "BBW". This would help to spot the qualified traffic, and to see if the affiliate is maximziing their traffic to the affiliate program.

The Affiliate Manager can literally call up the affiliate and suggest to be on specific pages, due to their analysis of the incoming links and words used on those linking relationships.

This T3Affiliate Report builds upon the competitive intelligence of the current T3Report at http://www.t3report.com/adult

I will be at Internext on the 7th, but going for Affiliate Summit convention that is right after internext to pitch to mainstream.

I am sure this affiliate patent will make for interesting conversation chatter.

and now back to your regularly scheduled thread...


Fight the commercial!

redirect? What redirect? We used SERVER STATS as counting mechanism,
no violations here
;)

Also...I have document, FM's flash movie,
proving that I invented SHAVING! I'll apply for patent and sue you all son of a bitches who SHAVE, which is about 120% of all programs.
Get your check books ready!
;)

Anyone contact Paul Bakir from Adult Check? They started in 95/96 but the coding may have been done prior to that. There could be proof somewhere.

As I said above, yes. The company was Web Power, Inc (yes, the same Click Cash folks) and they ran a search engine -- I still have one of the original banners on one of my machines.

I don't remember the dates, though, and it could have been in 1996 as those early years on the web are a blur.

I also used a sponsor program that Seth Warshafsky from IDG ran but the checks bounced so I dropped them .... I had the bounced checks around here but can't lay my hands on them at this moment.

I might have to bring back the D$ Show and interview these guys.

Fight the interview!

Good luck finding the silver bullet.

I think Alien invented this affiliate thing back in 94.

I was a Validate affiliate way back then just found a file for Guard Duty from validate dated 9/23/96. I know they had an affiliate program back then. nchecking for files now

I received an IM to check out FatPaychecks.com

Their website says they have been in operations since 1995.

i sent email to their contact email. Anyone have a direct contact with anyone over there?



Fight the web-555-1212!

I received a second confirmation that Al might be a good lead. Anyone have contacts with him to inquire if he might have some prior art?

1996 is late, needs to be before Sept 1995.. but maybe they were in development, etc.


Fight the inquiry!

Found some old thread from him in October 1995 - probably had something prior to that.
http://baby.indstate.edu/CU-SeeMe/de...t_95/0635.html

any luck?


Fight the bump!

Lots of great digging GFY... feedback is that they have found similar leads via google. None of have turned out to be the silver bullet... the focus should be on adult industry.

Looks like Robin or Al might hold the key.... if not, it's not looking to good.. that maybe this company Infonautics really did "invent" something unique.

I am sure the defense patent attorneys will just have more of an uphill battle to be able to fight on the grounds that passing a value to a CGI script is within HTTP and CGI specs and therefore is not novel.. but tieing it to tracking clickthrus from affiliates might be the part that still sticks as being "novel", and these guys may end up owning all affiliate programs.

yikes.


Fight the 911 on the 411!

leads anyone? bueller?


Fight the bump!

I thought Prodigy Internet was the first to use that concept. I was in grammer school in 1990.

if a BBS had an affiliate program, it would have been something like a "coupon code" or a "referral code" that you would have typed in.

the "affiliate" woudl be someone who did the marketing to tell people which BBS# to dial, and to enter their code on signup.

This patent basically said that by linking from one site to another and embedding an identifying code, then that would essentially replace the need to type in a code.

so the BBS example, even if found, would not be prior art, since it was not clicking on a link.


Fight the sysop!

unfortunately, it's not the same thing and if there is no proof that others did the embedding of the "coupon code" within the link, then that's why they got the patent approved.

there are certainly ways to work around this patent.. .. folks like amazon can't just change their affiliate program mechanism now since they are on the hook for past infringement.

those those being sued, could change the way the affiliate link is handled, but then there will just be another patent troll that says they have "the" patent on affiliate programs (and there are several of them on the books).


Fight the sigh!

crack dealers have been piecing off little rocks to smoke to fiends for referring sales ever since the 80's crack fever?

The power of GFY.

do they have a patent on the Sad Banana?

Serge is impressive.

At anyrate.

Mozilla and Netscape's Cookie API had already defined the principal foundations for referral based sales. THough the API did not address ecomerce specifically but it did certainly describe exact applications just because ecommerce would be factor is irrelevant.

The factor is a matter of carrying unique identifyers. WHich is why COOKIES were invented in the first place by the US government and Netscape.


Back in the day and to this day there are two direct methods.

1 Method is cookie based.
2 is unique session ID's.

Cookie based tracking was rampant and one can most certainly look to Netscapes Cookie API where it completely describes the concept in a very open manor.

I do not see that this "Patent" would be any threat whats so ever and will be laughed out of a court room with great ease.
My initial concepts were founded in not only Unique Session ID's carrying an affiliate number in cookies but also included cookie reference on referred click through by domain.

My inital concepts were to have the cookie referr to the URL referred and not the AFF ID number.

Both methods worked and worked well.

That is REALLY stupid, good luck getting money for a concept that is old as dirt. I think they moved way too late now they look like jack asses.

Dont fucken forget the fact that NETSCAPE was a government entity in the early day.

That Odd ball company are the guys that most probably founded the first concepts of Unique identifyers on the internet.

The World Wide Web was designed as a militaristic defense under the concept that no matter what was blown up in a post nuke era the internet and its users would manage to communicate. It was devised as an intelligence instrument and this intelligence instrument relied on unique identifyers to track information.


So in essence FTP get ahild of old Netscape guys, I know a few of them. One of them owns a coffee Shop in SF he went by the name LWZ. The originator of Mozilla. He can easily describe the concepts of unique tracking on the internet.

Correction LZW was his handle.
Old Netscape people would describe him as the only guy that wore black everyday, listened to Morrisy and painted himself white during board meetings.

Infact in old Compiles of Netscape 1.0 you can find his Easter Eggs.

Quite an extreme character but very intense and intelligent.

Here is an actual document from 1995.

http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

Well not exactly but Again look at Netscape or get ahold of them they may have tons of archival stuff.

I invented the use of arm nerves to transmit signals from the brain to the hands to access internet content. Think I can get something out of that?

If memory serves me correctly...

If the government releases something for public use such as the Internet ( In this case ) If Netscape derived the fundamentals to unique identifyers that bizzar patent claim is Bye Bye.
But then I am a guy that laughed when Amazon touted its one click purchase blitz.


What a joke.

what about what i do with my hands AFTER said content is acquired?

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/netscape.htm

also look at w3c foundation.

i believe you would then be violating one of microsoft's patents about using the body as a conduit for signals between devices.. that have a touch connection through the body.. really, i read it a while back.


Fight the simpsons already thought of that!

um.. no.

Arpanet which then later evolved to the internet, was designed to not have a central point of failure.

the World wide web was created by Tim Berners-Lee to allow the interexchange of information across distances in an interconnecting "web" manner. he didn't file a patent for his invention because he wanted everyone to share in its growth.. in hindsight, he should have patented it and just not enforce it except to stop idiots from patenting things that shouldn't be granted.


Fight the history lesson!

Umm Yes.


The global Internet's progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defense. This is an important fact to remember, because the support and style of management by ARPA was crucial to the success of ARPANET. As the Internet develops and the struggle over the role the Internet plays unfolds, it will be important to remember how the network developed and the culture that it was connected with. (As a facilitator of communication, the culture of the Net is an important feature to acknowledge.)

http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa-Introduc.html

Here is some more:
http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/WebBrowserWars.htm

Here is a timeline:

http://www.internetvalley.com/archiv...timeline-1.htm

The originator of mozilla? Do you mean Mosaic? And that was Marc Andreesen back in the days at U of Illinois champaigne-urbana. I remember using Mosaic back in 1993...wasn't much to connect to and the web pages look so rinky-dink compared to what people like alienq do today.. but much nicer than gopher, veronica, WAIS, etc.

Cookie sessions have nothing to do with the affiliate program patent. Subsequent patents by other people may have used cookies for tracking purposes.. but they first relied on a link from one website to another that contains some kind of identifying marker.

The argument that Amazon would need to make is that passing of identifiers was a normal HTTP GET function, that the receiving end was a CGI script that programmatically could do what you want.. ie. redirect, keep stat counts etc..... the uphill legal battle is to explain how the patent was "non-obvious" ... but if no one can demonstrate that the use of an identifying code in a URL that was intended to track clickthrus from another website, then it shows that this patent was unique and novel, and would be the foundation patent for which all affiliate programs and patents would have to pay licensing to.

The U.S. patent system grants patents for the "first to file".... so yeah, it does suck, and exposes a major flaw of patents in hi-tech that people around the world could have been developing similar ideas, but if you can't find published facts, then the patent stands and you get nailed with patent infringement.


Fight the patent!

Ahh so they went the unique session ID way.
There are MANY veritable ways to do that as well.

Well...
Thats different.

The bit about Andreeson, the guy I am talkin about reported to Andresson.
They worked together on Mosaic.

So I stand corrected on that