Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Riggler]

Hello,
   When you lawyers are drafting claims to a website that does something special, how do you claim such a thing?   Does anyone have any expeirence in this?

  Allow me to clarify, like amazon, if you go on it an select a CD, they will generate other CDs that a person who bought your CD gets.  If that is patentable how woudl one claim it?

[Wiscagent]

One way is to start with some specific step-by-step examples, and then generalize the process.  Don't worry too much about using correct "patent-talk" at first.  In your example the steps might include something like these:

- identify a customer;
- record purchases the customer makes and in a data base associate the purchases with the customer;
- use [some kind of algorythm] to forecast the customer's likely future purchases

Once you have a few rough claims in bullet point format, then go back and identify the steps that are common to several of the proto-claims and identify what steps are required to differentiate your invention from the prior art.

At that point you are ready to start writing formal claims.

[JimIvey]

That's pretty much what I've been doing for a living for 15 years.  I could try to distill it into a simple formula -- and maybe I will.  But there's just too much to it to post here (without some sort of specifics to make the answer fairly simple).

As for the "others who bought that also bought these", it wouldn't surprise me if they have a patent on that (or at least a published application).  I'd look for that as an example of how at least one practitioner thought it could be captured in a claim.

Regards.