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Amazon Sneaks One-Click Past the Patent System
theodp writes "By changing the word 'a' to 'the' and adding the phrase 'purchasable through a shopping cart model,' lawyers for Amazon.com have apparently managed to reinstate two of CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click Patent claims that were rejected a month earlier. 'Patent Owner's Rep was informed that the proposed addition to the claims appear to place the claims in condition of patentability,' writes the USPTO in its Ex Parte Reexamination Interview Summary of the 11-15 conference call that was held with five representatives of the USPTO and patent reformer Amazon."
No, absolutely not. The previously rejected patent is not a different patent from the one that is apparently now being allowed...actually, I think it is just specific claims that were rejected and now modified versions of those claims are being allowed. In any case, none of the prior iterations of the patent can server as disabiling prior art for the final version of the patent. Even if there were previous patents from Amazon that had parts of the invention, this one could have been filed as a continuation of the earlier patents to avoid prior art issues. With the latest changes and allowance by the USPTO, this one looks good, meets the requirements and is very likely to stand.
The real news is that this revision was just a means to an end, and apparently the patent office fell for it...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Will the last sane person in government please switch it to runlevel 6? But run rm -rf /home/uspto first please.
The present system of patents is totally broken. It appears to exist for the promotion of lawsuits and legal fees rather than achieving true innovation.
would that be a normal web developer or a normal database admin? because, the db admin will not be surprised regardless of the amount of data you throw at a button.
anyways, we can use one click checkouts as long as they have nothing to do with the shopping cart model right?
gentlemen I'd like to introduce the shopping 'list' model, which differs from the shopping cart model in that all items *must* be 'listed' on the page the shopper is browsing, allowing them the immediate convenience of seeing their purchases at any given time, furthermore I'd also like to patent the one click to "hand your butler the shopping list" purchasing model, where the butler is an AI avatar that essentially completes your shopping, the actual process of filling your shopping cart and checking out, for you. fuck you amazon! now we have a butler, do you have a BUTLER?!? hmm, this actually wouldn't be bad if the butler was capable of shopping at more than one site, and finding good prices on stuff, just for good measure I'll copyright this post.
all references to 'shopping list', 'one click butler avatar', and the term "fuck you amazon! now we have a butler, do you have a BUTLER?!?" are copyrighted by cyphercell (843398) © and will be defended to the full extent of the law if my lawyer thinks it's worth it
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Where is the abuse of the system here? Amazon is playing by all the rules set forth by Congress and the Patent Office. If prior art is found that reads on their claim, they amend the claim by adding more limitations (making it more specific) so that the claim overcomes the art rejection. The new limitations generally come from the dependent claims and must have adequate written description in the original patent application.
The /. posting is very misleading. First, the claim was amended with a further limitation "purchasable through a shopping cart model," to an already lengthy claim. The change of "a" to a "the" cleans up the antecedent basis problem (i.e., which shopping cart model is the last line referring to, the same one of line 3, or a different one). Second, this claim is still not in condition for allowance! The patent examiner looked at the new limitation and agreed that it probably overcomes the art currently rejecting the claim. He still gets to closely re-read the art of reference and conduct additional search before he can determine whether the claim is allowable.
And finally, I want everyone to look at the claim, not the title of the patent, and then, without impermissible hindsight, get to work finding prior art to read on the claim. Just saying that a single click of the mouse is obvious makes you look dumb. That's your homework for this week, now get to work!
Let's see:
There. Fixed that for ya.
HAND.
Of course, if you have a shopping-cart ordering model, then it's not a one-click buy.
...
Let's break that down with some specifics:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising;
1) a web browser
2) a web page about an item
3) where pushing "buy now" causes the web browser to send a "buy this item now" message to a web server
4) a web server
5) receives te request
6) looks up the purchaser's credit card number
7) creates an order for that purchaser in the order processing system which
8) Processes the order
9) all without a shopping cart
I suggest that the only potentially novel thing here is #3. And, I suggest that #3 is obvious -- the only reason that nobody was doing it before hand was that nobody had previously considered the problem of reducing the number of clicks it takes to get somebody to buy something.
Is this really news? The ex-parte re-exam with the prior art uncovered by the New Zealand man invalidated all claims except those that mentioned a shopping cart; this was reported weeks ago.
Back then, the PTO said that were Amazon to amend the rejected claims to include a shopping-cart limitation, which was not found in the newly uncovered prior art, those claims would probably be admissible.
The "news" appears to be that Amazon did what the PTO suggested it to do...
So I'd like to make an argument here, and see if I actually get any constructive responses: I really don't think that it was obvious or anticipated by any prior or *at the time that it was filed.* It was filed on September 12, 1997. How many people on here remember the state of internet commerce back in 1997? This idea was pretty innovative at that time. (Now that it's been used for 10 years, it's pretty obvious.)
Vending machines are one click shopping models. Put your money in, then click the button for the item you want. Amazon includes the "putting your money in" step when you sign up for an account; there's no reason you couldn't put $1,000 in a vending machine and come back whenever you wanted something and get a "one click" shopping experience. Patenting an existing business model just by doing it on the Internet is silly, otherwise every single type of financial transaction (or any other action really, including talking, writing, imaging, video, audio, etc.) could be patented simply because it was done over the Internet for the first time.
Second, as early as 1990 "pay-as-you-go" services like AOL and Compuserve already had content that could be purchased simply by clicking on them. They may have even had software downloads that could be purchased directly in forums, but I can't remember.
If your e-commerce site leaves out any one of those 9 clauses, you're not infringing. For example, if you're using a shopping cart ordering model, you're not infringing (look at part 9 there, you have to have a shopping cart ordering model to be within its bounds).
If Amazon wanted to be a bully, they could easily sue people. They can definitely afford lawyers. Microsoft doesn't even need to say which patents it thinks Linux infringes on in order to threaten people and win (see Suse and Linspire). Additionally, would you trust your business model to the whims of a jury who can't tell a shopping cart with a "Checkout" button apart from a "One click Purchase" button, or some random judge in Delaware or Texas of similar technical ignorance? I'm not slamming the states, just the fact that those states are used for incorporation for a reason; they're very friendly to big corporations.
"One Click" shopping is an e-commerce technique, which allows a customer to purchase products via the Internet without repeatedly entering personal information such as name and address. At the time it was introduced it eased the frustration of on-line shopping.
The problem is, the whole reason cookies were created was precisely to enable on-line shopping:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt
So soon after the RFC was *announced* Amazon requested a patent for doing what the RFC was specifically designed for. If you ignore the sleeziness of the action, it would be virtually impossible to find prior art since no implementation was possible before the standard was approved. And even if an early implementations of cookies existed, since Amazon was one of the few e-commerce site out there at the time, there would be virtually no chance of finding another prior art implementation.
Now you could go to the real-world analogy of going to a friendly store and pointing at a bunch of things and saying "Charge it", but since it's done by "a computer" it magically turns into a completely different thing.