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One Click Patent News
Agro writes "OpenTV is is trying to broaden one of their set-top box patents to include one click shopping. They say their claim predates Amazon's by "more than three years." The press release is posted here. I can't decide if the filing is the worst part or the fact that OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer." As well: Darrin Cardani writes "This article on Yahoo claims that OpenTV thinks that Amazon's 1-click patent infringes on one of their patents filed 3 years earlier."
Right, then they get to pay OpenTV instead, and how much do you want to bet that he isn't going to get his money back from Amazon?
(for that matter, OpenTV might be inclined to charge him retroactively for his unlicensed (by them) use of the ... ahem ... technology)
DNA just wants to be free...
Unless you are a cable operator its not bloody likely that you will ever buy anything from OpenTV anytime in the future.
Note: I am an OpenTV employee.
Do you ever feel like there are people watching you? You're not alone.
I don't like CIPO. How about CHIP OFF? (CHief Intellectual Property OFFicer)
That falls under my patent on "'Lawsuit-related business practice' related business practices"
Aha! That is in conflict with my 'Being bloody stupid' buisness practice. My lobbyists have been notified and as soon as the appropriate laws have paid thier wat into the statute books, the feds will be kicking down your door. Your only hope is to spend a few $ thou' on lawyers to hopelesly outgun me for a few years, until I have no money left. Or you could just do an OJ Simpson and hope the jury is comprised of ignorant morons. In fact, these law things are silly, I think I'll train my accountants into an eliete ninja force to crush all me competitors. I am going to call them The middle-aged mutant ninja accountants! Ph33r!
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Having been interested in the whole debate and read most of the articles and discussions on it, it seems the faults of the patent system are really apart of the big business corporatism. These issues all come from the problems related to placing $$$billions in the hands of a few and expecting them to act in a fair or an uncorrupted manner, which nobody seems capable of! They always get bent on crushing the competition and extracting more money from the customers (i.e. everyone) to pay for their power and control.
As for solutions, its up to the government allow or not allow something like this to happen... So, its actually a direct problem with the peoples' inability to monitor our(US)/their own government and have it perform the way we want it to work.
All power in any real "free" country comes from the people, anyway. Corrupt people tent to ignore everything but lots of money and concentrated power pools.
One neuron said to another, acetylcholine!
Genes can -not- be patented. 'Discoveries' of natural things can -not- be patented. 'gene patents' is media shorthand for 'have patented the process of extracting or synthesizing the gene sequence'.
... but I doubt it. I think it's 'obvious' even to the patent office that math can be done with a pencil and paper...)
Similarly to 'algorithms cannot be patented'; you can't stop people from engaging in public key cryptography if they do it with pencil and paper. (Or maybe you can if you patent 'a process implementing public key cryptography with pencil and paper'
So, software patents are on the -synthetic- process of a program running in memory, and gene patents are on the -synthetic- process of extracting/synthesizing genes. The 'natural' processes of thinking through a math problem or procreating are unpatentable.
The -scary- part of gene patents is the same thing that is scary about -all- medicinal patents. What if you have a deadly disease but have no insurance and cannot afford the inflated prices of the exclusive manufacturer of the treatment? (As happens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with AIDS right now... ). Anyway. Don't dilute important issues just because the media is too lazy to describe things properly. (They do, you know, at least once every few weeks have an 'in-depth' discussion of gene-patents, and the first question is always 'how can you patent a gene?' followed by the explanation I just gave. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by NPR and the BBC... )
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
One would think that Apple would have first shot at the one click patent.
flinging poop since 1969
more-than-one-click shopping existed for a while. Logically, less clicks is better.
One Click Shopping is like patenting "Method for Building Larger then Average Gasoline Tank"
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
What?
I am a developer for digital TV. Our company has bought stuff from OpenTV - a SDK license and a box from Pace (but bought through OpenTV).
:wq!
I think it's time shareholders were required to obtain some sort of certification. It's no longer corporations' fault or the Patent Office's fault. The value of a stock will rise whenever some company pulls something like one-click or IBM's mock wheel patent, regardless whether that IP ever actually leads directly to profit. Nevermind the fact we're not talking about products or inventions but solutions. It's like patenting a particular book used to hold up an unbalanced table.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"one interaction"?
/how/ the server side is implemented.
How about:
. Putting your card behind the bar
. Shopping someplace you have an account card
Both of these patents should really be covered by "obvious usage" if they don't merely cover
.. The same way you can perhaps patent how you achieve lift with a new wing or engine, but you can't patent flight as a result of not being on the ground.
One-Click as a user-interface feature as a means to conducting commerce probably has hundreds of 'proveable earlier uses' predating either of these patents.
Oliver
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Probably won't help. One will sue the other (or both will sue each other), but it will never make it to trial. They'll settle out of court with a cross-licensing agreement.
(Aside: ...which does not strengthen the patents against other challenges, legally. A patent becomes neither more nor less valid simply because it's been licensed, one time or several.)
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Very unlikely. It probably won't even get to trial. Much more likely that they'll just cross-license the patents to each other.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
No. To understand this, it's important to understand exactly what a patent grants you. If you have a patent, that means you can prevent anyone else from making or selling your invention. It does not give you the right to make or sell it yourself. (If you could have made/sold it before the patent, you still can, but that right doesn't come from the patent. Conversely, if you couldn't have legally made/sold your invention before, you still can't.)
To be precise, your action in making or selling an invention which someone else has patented is an infringement upon that patent. Getting a patent itself never infringes another patent, because just getting a patent isn't making or selling anything.
A common example from the pharmaceutical industry: Company A patents drug X. Company B can still patent the combination of drugs X and Y (in a single pill, for example). Just getting the patent isn't making or selling X, so that's fine.
Now, company B cannot sell their X-Y combination without the permission of company A, since that would infringe on A's patent on X. Likewise, company A cannot sell X-Y without the permission of company B. (Of course, A can still sell X alone.) If company C wants to sell X-Y, it must have the permission of both A and B.
Now, if B had tried to patent X alone (not the X-Y combination), with A already having a patent on X, the application will (at least in theory) be rejected by the patent office.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
See for a definition of online/on-line. Read definition 2 in the American Heritage dictionary, and definition 1 in the Free On-Line Dictionary of computing as well. It's plugged in, it's turned on, therefore it's On-Line.
Law is the buisness of pedanticism. IANAL but I am pedantic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From what I've seen from looking into filing a patent (IANAL), the person filing is supposed to check for previous patents.
Personally, I hope that:
1) OpenTV sue the $#!+ out of Amazon.
2) Amazon has to pay fines/licensing fees up the wazoo.
3) OpenTV's patent is declared obvious or nullified by the Berman-Boucher bill passing.
BTW, slightly off-topic, but if you read the B-B bill, the $200 fee to challenge the obviousness or prior art of an idea can be waived "if such waiver is in the public interest".
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
It the responsibility of the patent filer. That is why patent attorneys make butt-loads of money. They have to research all related patents then determine if you'd have a leg to stand on in court.
-tim
Patenting of software and business practices is not going away. The simple truth is that many companies primary asset is their intellectual property and wouldn't exist without protection. I do not think that the incentive to patent does much to drive the creation of new technology. It basically creates a windfall for whoever can get a patent. You create a company that owns nothing but a good idea and a patent and you have something very valuable. However, in a capitalist system such as ours, the patent laws are going to be set up to protect business not to encourage innovation. However, the system clearly needs work, and sooner or later you have to expect that it will be fixed. You still have to wonder how the patent office approves one-click shopping, even under its current guidelines. You aren't supposed to be able to patent anything that is as obvious as that.
I'm thinking of opening a sourceforge project to write software which will, given a complete list of objects, problems, methodologies, nouns,adverbs buzzwords, makey-upey words, and adjectives will generate syntactically correct descriptions of how to do anything to anything, using any damn method. :)
Then I'll publish them all and we'll be done with this patent rubbish.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
This would be an ideal situation, as it would make parties responsible for their greedy actions, as well as giving them a well-deserved slap in the face.
AC comments get piped to
Maybe I am wrong here but i don't think OpenTV are going to be going after amazon. They seem to be trying to get the patent on using a one click shopping technology in set top boxes. This means information is stored within the box for quick use on any site (I think) which is different to how amazon just store the info for their own site.
It just seems that OpenTV are trying to cover against amazon ever going after them for infringing a patent with technology theyve been using for years.
Of course I could have missed the point completely and be way off, it has been known to happen :)
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Let us watch the patent system go up in flames, in one big f*ckfest of debilitating litigation. Instead of weening, let us all start filing absurd patents too. I'm claiming the zero-click, the two-click, three-click, say n-click processes for myself!
What? You've figured out a way to patent something with a single mouse click? Now that is an idea worth patenting!
__________
No one should be allowed to prevent someone from working. .. That's why there's a time limit. Should anyone be allowed to own highways so that anyone can put up road blocks?
Whether it's any benefit to society is irrelevant. Society is definitely not beneficial to society. It's hypocritical for anyone to ask for all decisions to be based on whether there's benefit to society. For example, not one of the organizations concerned about world hunger ever talks about doing the dirty work of making sure governments don't import the food or resources that undeveloped countries need in order to begin to grow. It's all one bloody (speaking figuratively of course) pointless crusade like the bloody (speaking not so figuratively) drug war.
The problem is that we allow a vocal uneducated group known as The Shareholders(TM) to control what companies do. I think that if a company is publicly owned beyond a certain percent it should be dismantled. A piece of land would be horribly ruined if many people shared it as it would no longer be managed properly and would fail to perform its function in agriculture. Similarly after many stab wounds a human being dies.
Take any machine and give too many people control and it falls to pieces.
Public shareholding is too communistic in my opinion for it to work. That why the system fails.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Independent invention by ONE other party
does not prove something was obvious.
Independent invention by ONE HUNDRED other
parties would prove it was obvious.
-jon
One Click Shopping is not like patenting
"Method for Building Larger then Average Gasoline Tank"
this implies that all the click's were the same and you are just reducing the number of times
you have to do the same thing. each click is a different step and they were eliminating the
some of the steps.
One Click Shopping is like patenting
"Method for Filling a Gasoline Tank Without Requiring the Operator of the Vehicle to Exit
the Vehicle, Open the Gasoline Filling Cover, or Requiring the Operator to Roll Down their
Window to Pay for the Gasoline Recieved."
-jon
You are exactly right. If we don't like how patent law is happening, we should make sure we make our case to the government. If the government doesn't listen, vote someone in who will. We need to take our country back, instead of letting the few people that do vote decide who we're going to give our country to next. (Shameless Political Plug) Look at Harry Brown's platform. Even if you don't agree with him, his principles are what I think we need to get back on track. Give us back our freedom. We need the government to be there to perserve freedom, not to decide how we live our lives down to the very smallest detail. I know that last bit was a little off topic, but it honestly is how I feel about patent issues, mp3s, etc. Sueing, patent law, etc has gotten out of hand because we have let the government set up a system that allows for it to get out of hand. All I'm saying is, if issues like this make your blood boil, vote this year and at least try to make a difference!
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
IAAPL.
Because companies are owned by shareholders, CEOs have TO DO STUPID THINGS. The public is pretty much the most ignorant, moronic, opinionated, species on this planet.
Consumers are morons. The only people who should have shares are those who actually have a clue or know someone who has a damned clue.
Then you'd see things less evil.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the first book in the trilogy), this concept is mentioned as well.
When Arthur is being brought up to date on the events surrounding Earth, Magrathea, and the mice by Slartibartfast, he mentions that Arthur should be careful not to bow his head at the end of the tape, or else he'll buy whatever it is that they were selling.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
Wasn't it in "Stranger in a strange land" when Michael Valentine Smith is "kept" in an hospital room I think the bed is a waterbed. I will have to check though.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
My bad, you are definitely correct. I work in the testing labs and sometimes forget that anything else exist.
Do you ever feel like there are people watching you? You're not alone.
Wow, given the general stupidity of the way patent laws are implemented, where the largest corporation wins, I suggest that in a patent war between two varge corporations, there be one simple method of reaching a descision:
Thunderdome!
"Two Chief Intellectual Privacy Officers enter! once Chief Intellectual Privacy Officer leaves!"
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
The patent system exists for a reason. Would their (or anyone) getting or not getting this patent actually change anyone's business plans? Would it accelerate progress?
I think the answer is clear.
No. Whether they got this patent or not, their business would not change. They haven't "given the world" anything such that we should give them exclusive use of this "discovery".
We can let hemos and company know that we all realize how many ridiculous patents there are. We almost don't care except for the humor matter. Tomorrow Rob will post saying Amazon is suing OpenTV to invalidate their patent then OpenTV will sue Amazon for suing them and then B&N will sue OpenTV for their patent on suing Amazon. WHO CARES!!! It's a ridiculously screwed system. Oh well stupid rant.
I am 31337 or something.
Makes me wonder.. Amazon came out with patenting One click around an year back. Why didnt these guys come out sooner ? Or did their CTO wake up one day all of a sudden and realized that "heck.. we did that before" :).. Well I think Amazon shouldnt worry too much about someone else stealing their patents. The whole damn thing could be closed down in an year if they dont find some dumb VC to fund this behemoth :)
Rapid Nirvana
Yeah, and I have a patent for one click patent issuing... man...
I think its time for some major action on the part of the consumer. If the gov't doesnt take away our rights, the corporations will. Granted, we'll have free speech...but first you'll have to download the and pay for the program to write with, pay the access costs to upload, bypass all the ad banners and EULA's , and then face corporate censorship if they dont like what you have to say. People, we need to rally up and start writing letters to the different branches of our govt, most importantly congress. The patent office needs a major overhaul, and the supreme court needs to make some major decisions as far as copywrites are concerned. Plus, we need some sort of tort reform so these people cant rake innocent developers through the coals because they create soemthing neat. Enginuity is now a 4 letter word in the corporate mindset. They want to own everything. Im convinced the government wont be the ones limiting our freedoms, it'll be corporate america
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Scratch OpenTV off your christmas card list.
I'm just musing here, but there must be some technology for disabled people that allows them to click on some device to indicate "I want to buy one of those" to a clerk. Make sense?
The Amazon patent used cookies and computer networks explicitly. I don't know how this works, but I'm pretty certain that it doesn't invlolve adding a web browser to a television set.
In this case I think Amazon just have to claim "sufficient innovation" to stop OpenTV's patent from infringing on theirs.
(No, this is NOT offtopic.)
Sometime between 1984 and 1988, a week-long strip of "Bloom County" comics by Berkeley Breathed, involved prior art for this disputed 'one interaction shopping'.
I've not been able to find this strip. Please, if anyone is a Bloom County fan, and has the older anthologies, search for them.
The plot: Opus the Penguin has gotten addicted to Virtual Reality Home Shopping. An unwieldy helmet and computer hookup gives Opus a VR shopping experience. Opus' friends try to dissuade him before he goes bankrupt.
The key strip: Opus explains that they have his credit card on file, and the VR system takes simple gestures to make purchases. The punchline was, as Opus gestures blindly with a pointing finger, "Oops, I think I just bought a forklift."
If we can show any example of a concept that includes networked, shopping, single gesture and completed purchase, we can nip this stupid Amazon/OpenTV patent dispute in the bud.
Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.
[
OpenTV has a Chief Intellectual Property Officer.
Aha! They plan on sueing people for infringing on patents? That falls under my patent, USP#1829904768237501765824609105 on 'Lawsuit-related buisness practice'!
Where did I put my Chief Intellectual Property Officer???
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Patents are NOT determined by 'whether humanity gets a new benefit that nothing else would give.'
Patents are SUPPOSED to be given for a new product that is useful and non-obvious to an expert in that particular field.
For example, discovering that an altered form of Vitamin C acts as an immunoamplifier (I am not a doctor.. yet.. so I don't know what the term for the opposite of an immunosuppressant is) and makes the body tolerate organ transplants would be patent-worthy.
Public-key cryptography, the practice of a two-key system was a new thing 28 years ago, and it was non-obvious to experts (who denied that it was possible to have a secure cryptosystem with a pair of keys), so it was patent-worthy.
But, a great number of software patents are NOT patentworthy. The GUI Apple built in 1984 was patentable; I mean, no consumer hardware could support a gui on so little! But Microsoft patenting Win32? No way.
I also feel that patenting genomes is wrong, because PEOPLE ARE NOT PROPERTY. Patenting parts of genes could easily lead to 'licensing fees' for human beings.....
philosophy on the half-shell ]=[ d.valued
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
And no, I don't think that helps the argument tremendously. 35 USC 103 says that to be non-obvious, it has to be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the field. While I think that's the case, I don't think that 2 patents proves that to be true.
--
--
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Until you needed a drug that tok $millions to develop.
Please what do we have to do to get /. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???
First click here to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page, and watch the patent stories disappear.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Some people seem to forget that Albert Einstein was a patent officer while he developed special relativity theory.
If Einstein had paid his full attention to boring patents we wouldn't have a great new physics theory.
Therefore we should celebrate stupid patents as a sign of our talented patent officers spending increasingly more time on some really significant research. This might hurt us short-term a little bit, but long-term it will be more beneficial for humankind.
Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?
A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
They do roughly dick.
On their patents page they have some cute information. If you follow a couple links you can get to the patents FAQ which doesn't really say a damn thing about what they do.
Anyway, I poked around a little more, and found this very small (two paragraph) document entitled "Functions of the Patent and Trademark Office" which is more helpful. It relates the following:
Also informative is the document on "What Can Be Patented", "Novelty and Other Conditions For Obtaining a Patent", and most important if you want to bitch out the patent office, "General Information and Correspondence".
So basically, all the patent office does is it decides who gets patents, keeps a room around for you to search for patents in, presumably filled with sheets of paper upon which patents are printed, and perhaps some sort of limited government-grade (IE, crappy) database which you can (sort of) search. They'll also photocopy their documents for you (for a fee, probably an excessive one) and then it does all this stuff for trademarks, as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My grandmother should own the patent on one-click shopping. She presses the power button on her TV remote one time and it automatically opens to the Home Shopping Network.
------
James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
When someone files for a patent on something, and it turns out that there was, in fact, prior art that they were not aware of, not only does it invalidate the latter patent, but it also provides evidence that the patented "device" was, in fact, obvious.
It's not conclusive, but certainly helps the argument when several people came up with the same idea independently.
Well, I don't like it, but I can't help but smile at the thought.
Everyone warned Jeff Bezos that these patents wouldn't work. Tim O'Reilly did. We did here on /.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. This is exactly why software patents are so dangerous. Why they are bad for everyone-- including the patent holders. There are some cases where they make sense, but going wild is very risky.
I really, really hope that this claim goes through. Then, perhaps Amazon will get serious about stopping these ridiculous patents.
I'll soon have patents on the one-double-clic patenting process.
Send royalties to my Swiss account or be prepared to meet my lawyers.
Turnabout's fair play, I suppose. Jeff Bezos, just look what you started.
The idea is so basic that I doubt OpenTV is really the first entity with a patent covering "one-click" either. This could get interesting.
It's like the idea of Mutually Insured Destruction with nuclear weapons, except the participants are a bunch of kids holding their fingers in the "gun" configuration.
Like as not, they'll stand there for a few seconds, there'll be a big argument over who yelled "bang!" first, and it'll degenerate into a big fistfight.
Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and the corporate world will back off from IP abuse, but I doubt it.
"Gimme another hit on the patent bong, Jimmy..."
I bet Steve Jobs (Apple was the first "one-click" licensee) feels stupid now, at any rate.
DNA just wants to be free...
Or does this responsibility fall on the prior patent holder?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
If the courts fail us, at least we can knock 3 more years off the 17 it takes this "one-click" patent to expire.
*sigh*
(Does this mean Apple will have to purchase the rights again?)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I can't say that this patent bothers me. In fact, few of these patent battles bother me. The fact that we have a patent system that allows these kinds of petty patent wars is what bothers me. When people see a chance to make a buck, and even more so when they have the chance to *exclusively* make a buck, they jump on the chance quickly and heavily. It's just human nature to want to aquire wealth. The worst part about this is that it just wastes peoples' time and money for them to sit around and argue over who had it first, and who has exclusive rights to it. Wouldn't it be better for all of the companies to just implement it, use it, and then come up with better implementations of it, and whoever climbs out of the rubble wins? I'm fully for a Darwinian capitalist economy. Survival of the fittest. If I come up with something, and Joe down the street hears about it, that's my fault for letting it leak. I had better do a better job at the same thing as him, or I deserve to choke. And our government should not be doing anything to go against this idea. It's a perfect example of capitalism at work. And call me old fashioned, but I love capitalism :D
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
This just goes to show once again that Bezos is and idiot. Where's the guy who patented using a laser pointer to play with a cat? I'm gonna try to get one for using one to play with a dog, then claim that my patent is completely different because I use a cookie to make the dog bark.
It was his decision to use the Amazon business method patent offensively rather than just defensively that set the ball rolling.
Stupid patents have exited for a while, but only now are corporations starting to really put a hurting on each other.
To use the playground analogy (again), it's like a bunch of kids playing in a yard with a lot of big sticks laying around. Occasionally a kid will pick one up and wave it around, and then forget about it for a while.
Then, suddenly, one of the kids (Jeff Bezos) picks up a stick and whacks another kid with it. Now, one of two things are going to happen:
OpenTV was just the second kid to pick up a stick (in this case, one that looks rather like the one Jeff had). Watch for more. And yes, I do think the coming state of affairs will be very much Mr. Jeffery Bezos's fault.
DNA just wants to be free...
Yes, thank you. I actually spelled Ensured incorrectly too.
DNA just wants to be free...
Okay, the filing is stupid. But why should IP not be guarded by a company? There are plenty of things that a company can do that need to be protected. Maybe you can find it funny that a company named "OpenTV" has a CIPO, but IP is a serious matter in the corporate world.
Sometimes I wonder if the line between honest desire to see free, open standards and anti-corporate hatred even exists in the minds of those who want to whack IP upside the head. I've had an idea or two that's patentable--but not in the software realm. I like my software open and my engineering design closed. =)
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-- Geof F. Morris
I read through the patent, and it's more of a method of TV applications than customer service. It apparently maintains that a client will continue to send data to the server to maintain a connection, much like dedicated LANs, but it never says anything about collecting customer data for expediting shopping information.
The only prior art I can see is the business method of a client connecting to a server repeatedly. I don't think it will have a chance to invalidate Bezos' patent.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
One wonders what their plan is. Could they be doing this to invalidate Amazon's patent? My guess is no, that they are doing it to try and fill their own wallets. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable (if potentially expensive) way for the software community to react to things like this--patent prior work and GPL it. Hmmm. Chief Intellectual Proerty Officer. CIPO. My guess is that that is read "CHEEP o."
-db