Oh the irony!  Around the same week that Amazon.com was hit by a glitch in the system where the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books on the website were dropped, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the company with a patent that they filed about 4 years ago.  The patent is titled “Automatic identification of unreliable user ratings.”  A hacker nicknamed Weev claimed responsibility for the Amazon.com sales ranking and reviews glitch.

Ironically, the Amazon.com patent for Automatic Identification of Unreliable User Ratings invention focuses on providing a feature that automatically detects product ratings from being gamed by flagging inappropriate content.  All of the gay and lesbian novels in the Amazon.com system were flagged as inappropriate content by the glitch that the hacker put together.  Once it was noticed, bloggers and Twitter users got upset and coined a term called “AmazonFAIL” in response to the situation.

[via TechDirt]

Over this past weekend, Amazon.com removed the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books. Bloggers and Twitter users were furious so they coined a term, “AmazonFail.” Mark R. Probst first blogged about the incident after he received a message from an Amazon representative when he noticed that his rankings had disappeared from “Transgressions” and “False Colors” which are two new gay romance novels.

In the message from Amazon, they said that they exclude adult material from searches and best selling lists. However the “adult” classification was not being applied to an edition of “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” according to Probst.

This past Sunday, about 20 Amazon employees were told that several novels were being improperly flagged as adult. AmazonFail was being more used than the words “Easter” and “Jesus” on Twitter.

“People got pulled away from their Easter thing when this whole thing broke,” stated an Amazon employee. “It was just a screwup.”

[via WSJ and SeattlePI]