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."

Comments

It's about time

[muellerr1]

I hope this is a precendent: maybe the patent system, broken as it is, will slowly get fixed over time by constant vigilant review of bogus patents.

Now we just need them to quit issuing the crappy ones in the first place.

Re:It's about time

[joe 155]

It does kind of prove his point though - people have to take out patents and protect them agressively because otherwise someone else can come and demand a slice of their business or threaten to take things away from them. I know this isn't the only reason why amazon has gone after this patent (no doubt getting at their competitor was a bonus) but it does show a fundamently flawed system

Re:It's about time

[swelke]

Re-exam is an old and well-established practice.

That may be so, but it's also a practice they haven't excercised much lately. I'd say it's an interesting precident that they're actually reexamining a high profile case.

Try learning for a change. You would be amazed at what you find out.

Try not being an ass for a change. You'd be surprised at how nice everybody else suddenly becomes.

one click...

[joe 155]

they guy is gettiong revenge because a book took too long - he doesn't even have any real interest in this "tech". Still, I really dislike the "one click" idea anyway because you cna end up buying things without realising thinking that you would actaully get to confirm and review the purchase - I think what amazon forced on it's competitor is better than what they use.
Further, this makes me wonder how on earth this actually got made into a patent anyway it is far too general and doesn't have any novelty to it; also, it's not really a "tech" is it, it's a button - and they've existed for ages

Who cares.

[Kadin2048]

People seem to be spending a lot of time concentrating on this guy's motivation.

I really don't understand why. Why should I care what his motivation is? The point is that he got the USPTO to re-examine a dumb patent. If it did it for the publicity or to hawk his blog or because he thinks it'll speed up the Second Coming of Jesus, I don't really care. Hooray for him, in any case; the point is that the action he took was good, irrespective of the motive.

I'm not going to fault him because he was doing it for publicity. Maybe if a few more people did what he's doing -- for publicity or whatever reason -- we'd have a few less shitty patents floating around.

In fact, if you want to hurt a company these days, you're better spent going after their patents than trying to take them to court directly, especially small-claims. So if there's a company you don't like, and you can get the dough together to force a re-examination of their patents, by all means please do so. I won't question why you're doing it, the point is that it gets done.

There need to be penalties...

[ZSpade]

There needs to be some risk for a company in getting a patent. Especially over-simplified ones like this. For instance, if it is later found out that a company received a patent on an obvious technology, business method, etc., then that company needs to pay a fine! It is obvious that they knew what they were doing.

Likewise, and especially, extortionist who obtain patents on obvious tech solely for the purpose of suing others need to pay fines, even bigger ones. Then they need to pay damages to any of the companies on which they committed this extortion on successfully.

Let's face it, fines and penalties are the only things that *might* scare large companies like this into thinking twice about getting that obvious patent, regardless of prior art or simplicity.