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Originally Posted by AlienQ
... One of them owns a coffee Shop in SF he went by the name LWZ. The originator of Mozilla.
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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!