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Amazon Wants Patent for All-You-Can-Eat Shipping
theodp writes "USPTO documents released Thursday show that Amazon is seeking a patent covering subscription-based shipping, aka Amazon Prime. Among the seven listed inventors is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been singing the praises of Amazon Prime to Wall Street."
So, it's almost guaranteed that they will grant the patent. Because a room full of cocker spaniels could exercise better judgement than the US Patent Office.
It's not a payment method, it's a subscription for flat-rate shipping. I find it quite creative, and very useful for those who buy a lot more books than I do. That said, it's not an invention, and shouldn't be protected by patent law.
What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient for Amazon to establish this program as being "theirs" and make it obvious that anyone else who does it later is an imitator.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I'm now on my second 'sample' of Prime. The first was given to my account, the second to my sibling's. In the course of those two, I have had such items as a 60-pound piece of exercise equipment shipped next-day to my home for $4 so it'd show up on my day off. I've ordered tons of books and had them shipped singly. And I have paid Amazon not a dime for the privilege, and wouldn't, ever.
Why? Because once upon a time, you could get free shipping and have something a few days later. Then, Super Saver started taking longer... and longer... and longer. They'd wait a week to ship an item that was 'ships within 24 hours'. I suppose this probably happened around the time that Prime was taking shape. But then, and this is the kicker, lots of items on the Amazon site started showing up as longer ship times than they'd had before. 'Ships within 3-5 days' or something like that for an item that used to be 24 hours. As someone who has a Prime membership, free or not, I found that irritating. But then the worst part:
They still often ship the items the next day. They just ship them by a method that will take longer to get there, even though you've used Prime for 'free second day shipping'. The excuse for this is that it 'still arrives within the delivery window', even though they're the ones who set the delivery window as being a week later for an in-stock product.
I'd rather they patented this, to be honest, because I don't want any other company copying it. I don't want to pay for the people who buy 'all you can ship' packages and then ship a huge piece of furniture on it, when all I'm usually shipping is small items. But I think that, patent or not, this will eventually either start costing a lot more or vanish entirely. The delays are a symptom of a system that doesn't work. They're having to cut corners now to afford Prime. They can't do that forever, because people won't pay for prime if *everything* starts taking a week to arrive with 'second day' shipping.
I don't want other companies doing this. I'm fine with paying for shipping if it's a reasonable price. Free is cool, too, because I know I'm still paying for it but it's packaged into the prices I'm paying, I don't have to add things to my cart to figure it out. I don't want to show up at other online sites where I shop to find that I suddenly have to shell out $80 to get things promptly because the 'free' shipping suddenly takes three times longer than it used to. It's not fair to the customers.
Having 'mini-patents' that only last a short period of time- say, 3 years- would be neat. In fact, all software patents and 'business method' patents should have this shorter limitation. 3 years is enough time for people to make a profit off software (if it isn't, they will probably never make a profit off it) and having limited protection might help companies feel safer about investing in new technology. Plus, it means that stupid stuff like this would only be an issue for 3 years, instead of 20 (and if Moore's Law holds, who knows what computers will be like in 20 years?)
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I use it. I buy on average about $3k in books per year plus other misc stuff off of Amazon. If they can expand their grocery inventory a little bit I'll probably buy some non-perishables that way too. Imagine getting him from work to find a box of grocery items on your porch that are ready to go right into the cupboards? Forget about that trip to the grocery store and the hours spent plowing up and down each isle looking for what's on your list, trying to remember what was on the list that you left at home, and being tempted by the flashy stickers and box labels on displays of non-so-good-of-a-deal special price displays. My 2-day shipping is free with Amazon Prime. If I need a book in a hurry it only costs me a couple bucks to have it the next day. I'm a fan of it.
where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient
In a capitalist society we call this window of protection "first to market".
Seriously, there's not need to create ANOTHER class of patents when the current system is in such obvious shambles. Such a "short-term" patent would also likely be abused heavily, with the patent owner adding small tweaks just before the expiration term to magically extend it, or something similar. Obviously available expoits would depend on the rules for such a patent class, but do you really trust those to be written well given how the current system is working? Again, no need for this, if you implement it first it will likely take your competitors about 6 months to reverse engineer and adapt to offering the same thing, no special short-term protections needed in that case.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --