Slashdot Mirror
Ninth Anniversary of Amazon 1-Click Injunction
theodp writes "Nine years ago Monday, Amazon kicked off the Holiday Season by slapping Barnes and Noble with a court injunction barring BN from using a checkout feature that Amazon said represented illegal copying of its patented 1-Click technology. 'We're pleased that Judge Pechman recognized the innovation underlying our 1-Click feature,' said Jeff Bezos in a press release. But an Appellate Court wasn't quite as impressed with Amazon's innovation. Nor were USPTO Examiners who were asked to take another look at the merits of Amazon's 1-Click patent claims. Still, 1-Click lives on, although Amazon's lawyers are currently fighting two separate rejections by USPTO Examiners, burying USPTO Examiners in paper, and employing canceling-and-refiling tactics that some may find reminiscent of Eddie Haskell's chess end-game strategy. So much for Amazon-led patent reform."
You know, it's a bit of a shame this ever happened. Normally I'm a fan of Amazon but this kinda tactic has made me consider other places to buy from first ever since it happened.
I can't imagine I'm the only one who reconsidered Amazon purchases because of things like this.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
Amazon was dishonest in their "patent reform", but what about Tim O'Reilly? Why doesn't anyone mention his role in this mess?
And the 3 click... 4... 5... to 100 clicks!
Just imagine how difficult it'd be for your competitors if their customers had to click 101 times to buy anything.
God spoke to me.
All this litigation must be costing Amazon a fortune! Are they expecting to sue B&N and others to recover their costs and maybe make money if they actually prevail?!?
I thought methods couldnt be patented, and clearly this is a method. all underlying technologies are standard stuff...
do I miss the point?
This should be on The Onion, it's so ridiculous.
This is why I don't use Amazon.
Sorry, but the whole one-click patent is just stupid. Making out that a single click of the mouse is some kind of revolutionary UI paradigm is so completely far-fetched that I'm amazed the thing was even considered by the courts in the first place.
This is a triumph of litigation, not innovation.
I was an amazon fan too. But where did all the books go? .co.uk homepage right now I can't see a single book. They have knitwear, overpriced cables and other tacky junk.
On the
Dispatched and sold by Dogdy-Geezaz Ltd. Feedback Rating 96% WTF is this, an ebay clone?
I think I'll get my books from Borders from now on.
I've already patented the 1-hover purchase as well as the one-keystroke accessibility purchase. What other non-click methods can you think of?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Boy am I glad we have a legal system that's easily manipulated! It would be such a shame if someone had the authority to recognize underhanded tactics that circumvented the system's ability to mete out justice by burying it in tedium and procedure.
Actually, I guess that would be pretty authoritarian if someone could just say, "Amazon, we're ruling on this and we're ruling on it now, and to hell with all your rigamarole", but wouldn't it be refreshing, in a way!
I don't know how you could patent a kind of interface, though. Isn't that like patenting a particular way of arranging your furniture? It's definitely not an invention, it's a way of presenting an existing invention, no?
I think that should be copyright territory, like, "Whatever you do, you can't call your system a '1-click' system", instead of what they are saying which is, "You can't use an interface that resembles our '1-click' system or functions in a similar way".
Does that make sense?
Why doesn't the patent office just charge fees sufficient to fund enough examiners to get anything done in a month? Meaning, they should be allowed to charge whatever fees they need in order to, BY LAW, respond to anything filed in their office within 30 days. So if you send them 10,000 pages of documents, you have to pay $5 a page or whatever it costs them to employ an educated person to read and respond to said documents.
Doesn't the Bilski decision make Amazon's chances on appeal/re-exam pretty much dead?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Checkout in shops has always been subject to innovation. Remember the overhead pneumatic tube system to avoid having lots of cash registers and to protect against thieves? Supermarket tills have been constantly improved with innovations like conveyor belts and laser barcode readers. All of these things are patentable. Now consider the back office. Business methods are not patentable, but you don't let the competition into the back office to see how well you have integrated all your systems.
Amazon's problem is that their ingenious checkout system is in software so it cannot be patented, but also it is seen by the user so it cannot be a secret clever backoffice system. They fall between two stalls. This will inevitably discourage people from developing innovative POS systems in software, because it is far cheaper to reinvent something already known.
Solution? Yes, I have a solution. Reasonably, if a large department store introduced a pneumatic system, their competitors could follow them in around a 1-2 year timescale. What's more, they were free to visit the first one installed and look at its advantages and disadvantages. So why not allow software patents and business method patents but give them only a 2 year life from filing and a 1 year life from first commercialisation, whichever results in the earliest expiry? A year of leadership is a long time in retail.
In fact, short terms for different classes of IP seems reasonable nowadays, when books are usually remaindered in a year or so and and popular music rarely lasts more than a few months. As a first shot, how about:
At present, musicians get a ridiculously long copyright period even when they are just making derivative works, and this probably does more than anything else tobring the system into disrepute.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I just wanted to say that the provided "Eddie Haskell" link is completely unreadable; it looks like some of the spam I get. Couldn't you find anything better?
...do you ask of your legal team, is this really worth it?
...do you realize that the image you're portraying can have a negative impact on your business from a customer viewpoint?
I'm not even going to ask why Amazon feels that the single most overused computer movement (mouse click) is somehow worth millions to them to reduce it to a single click. Obviously, they don't get it.
Don't forget 1-swipe for those fancy new multitouch trackpads.
I'm not a security expert, but the recent Clickjacking attacks and the older Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks seem to cast doubt on the wisdom of allowing one-click order execution in general. The recommended techniques for avoiding those attacks involve requiring extra deliberate user actions to confirm that the get/post wasn't generated by a browser hack.
Amazon might do enough testing to be relatively immune, but most smaller sites would probably want to avoid one-click orders to reduce the hacking risk, patent or not.
I've never liked the way amazon likes to store the number of every creditcard you've ever used with them.. I've been waiting to read the story about how they've been hacked for years, I'm sure it's day will come...
By the way I hate one-click, as you never know what you left in your shoppingcart form last time, and I dont wnat doubles no more!!!!
If you have been waiting for years for Amazon to be hacked --- that tells me something about how well Amazon runs its business. If you don't check the cart before you check-out, that tell me something about you.
If you want to use your useless lawyers to something I would suggest suing some banks and fix so that you can deposit my income from you into a non-American bank account.
Another real problem is that it's expensive to order stuff internationally. Just a button with "Buy this from another country" (So that one can see if it's available from a closer Amazon and maybe possible to pre-order for really cheap shipping) would be great for me and my international customers. I personally often don't care if it takes a month to get some stuff, as long as it's cheap (Like the pirate-flags for $2) and the popular stuff is available from all Amazon shops so just ship from the closest.
It's also a pain for affiliates when someone reads their review of a book, and then buy it in Japanese from the Amazon in Japan and the affiliate gets nothing unless they register there too (which demands knowledge in Japanese).
All of this is more important for Amazon to fix than this stupid patent-fight.