Slashdot Mirror
Amazon One-Click Patent to be Re-Examined
timrichardson writes "A New Zealand actor, frustrated by a poor shopping experience, has successfully requested that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review the correctness of Amazon's infamous One-Click patent. An examiner for the agency ruled that the re-examination requested by Peter Calveley had raised a 'substantial new question of patentability' affecting Amazon's patent, according to a document outlining the agency's decision."
prior art: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186176&cid =15364955
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
As the article points out, Peter raised the money necessary to pay the reexamination fee through donations. I don't know what his chances are of being successful, but it certainly shows that blogs can be useful in allowing more people to participate in processes that were previously mainly used by businesses. Maybe they'll raise the reexamination fee to keep up with technical progress. ;-)
Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith issued the following response Thursday: "Amazon.com remains confident in the validity of its 1-Click patent, which enables customers to shop conveniently without having to enter their shipping and billing information each time they purchase. We look forward to working with the examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and we welcome the opportunity to revalidate what we believe is an important innovation in e-commerce."
Who couldn't think of this stuff? There is no innovation in it all. While the current patent foolishness is problematic I think it will sort itself out in the end, because there are competitive business interests (read money) fighting over various positions on patents. Copyrights seem to be a far more dangerous issue to liberty focused individuals (read geeks) because all the cards seem stacked into the hands of the major copyright holders. The people never seem to get a fair shake anymore unless their interests coincide with that of a large corporate block.
- vphl
In the early-to-mid 90's I attended an "Institute of Technology" where, among other things, I took the level 1 databases course. In that course we had various projects to do, one of which was to implement an "online shopping site".
At that time, our design presumed that you'd set up your account with the retailer over the phone (mostly because we didn't want to get bogged down with the form handling, but also because the UI design was a minor part of this one assignment).
So, we did what was obvious (and what several other people came up with) -- have someone login (no cookies back then) and use the HTTP basic authentication link the session to the customer record in the database. Next to each item, there was a button that said "put it on my tab" and did just that, stuck an entry in the database saying you wanted it. There was a script that could run on a periodic basis and rolled up a list of what was on who's tab and built an order from it.
It seems to me that if a biology student taking a database class thought it was obvious then (to be fair, I had a partner who was an engineer), then it was obvious to anyone that did that sort of thing for a living. Do I have a record of the assignment? No. It never occurred to me to hold onto my old homework for more than a decade.
I work for a small startup company, we've been in existence 1 year and have only 15 people. Inspite of us working overtime everyday, we spend hours with our patent attorneys, filing patents for every small thing we do.
Reason: we might find ourselves suddenly sued by someone over infringement
We need to clean out this whole system, else all people will do is file patents and file lawsuits. Lets hope the Amazon re-examination is a precursor to bigger things.
What's important to note is why this particular patent, even more so than other software patents, is stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't patent *how* you accomplish something, just *that* you accomplish it. It would be like patenting "computing numbers quickly" rather than patenting "a specific chip that can compute numbers quickly".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Ahem *cough* and *cough*. Has it not occurred to you that perhaps you don't know anything about how the patent system works? Re-exam is an old and well-established practice. Try learning for a change. You would be amazed at what you find out.
Similar to the upcoming US election results