Hmm...what is the definition of url in regards to the patent? One could argue that a URL specifically redirects based upon the content of the URL. Or that any CGI based program would therefore violate said patent, as the webserver does a certain thing based upon the url that is input.

Its an interesting case though...I'll be curious to see if anyone actually has docs/checks that date back that far. Come on you super cool 'i've been doing this '94' fuckers...prove it!

Google says Linkshare is the oldest affiliate program - 1996 it was founded but perhaps the idea and programming was done before?

BTW - from their site:
Since launching the Internet's first Affiliate Network, LinkShare has:

Created the largest network of affiliates of any program provider - over 10 million partnerships.
Been granted US Patent No. 5,991,740 for our proprietary affiliate tracking technology.
Announced an investment from Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and a joint venture in the Japanese market.
Become the first provider to achieve sustained profitability.
Been named the number one fastest growing technology company in the NY area 2 years in a row in the Deloitte and Touche Fast 50 program.

good digging... the problem is that the filing date for their patent is June 10, 1997....

maybe adult copied mainstream on this one??


Fight the things that make you go hmmmmmm!

It's the original filing date that counts of Sept 1995... took them a while to get the patent approved and they added on additional info to the patent during the course of the patent examinations.


Fight the never ending story!

Was anyone an affiliate to a program (adult or mainstream) backin 94-95?

You should have received a 1099. That might provide a lead as to what websites were around back then doing affiliate programs, that then could be looked up in the wayback machine or searching in newsgroups.


Fight the lets do the timewarp again!

Here we go again

They followed up with patent #5,717,860.. probabably to better fine tune it where they had any shortcomings from the first patent at:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...&RS=PN/5712979


Fight the sequel!

What's next? Patents for message board posts? Patents for 'LOL'

Amazon has an approved patent for user-posted mesages/comments about a product.

when you look at a product on amazon, and read those notes at the bottom, yup, they got that patented.

and i saw some patents and trademarks on emoticons somewhere :-)


Fight the patent this!

Thankyou B for the news !! yaaaaargh its neverending .

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!