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Jakob Nielsen Defends "1-Click" Patents
danila writes "In his latest column the king of usability discusses competitive testing of website usability. Among other things he suggests that "Some tasks might be much easier on your competitor's site, and those tasks would indicate areas where you can learn from the competition and improve your design." Overall, a very informative and insighful article, if not for a small paragraph in the end. "You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new." How can you learn from competition if every potential improvement is already patented?"
If you read the article, Nielsen never mentions one-click patents. In my opinion he never even implies that one-click is patentable. The way I read his argument is that if you come up with a novel solution to a usability problem that requires enough work on your part as a company to even come up with, it deserves a patent.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
The IBM "patent" is from 1990
The Mac had a progress bar for copying files in 1984 or thereabouts. The IBM "patent" on progress bars is thus either invalid or rather limited in scope.