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USPTO's 1-Click Indecisiveness Enters 5th Year
theodp writes "When it comes to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent, the USPTO is an agency that just can't say no. Or yes. It's now been 4+ years since actor Peter Calveley submitted prior art that triggered a USPTO reexamination of the 1-Click patent. Still no 'final answer' from the USPTO, although an Examiner recently issued yet another Final Rejection of 1-Click related claims (pdf), admonishing Amazon for making him 'sift through hundreds of submitted references to identify what applicant allegedly has already submitted,' which he complained is 'adding an undue burden' to his workload. Looks like Bezos' 2000 pledge of 'less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office' isn't working out so well in practice. Not too surprising — after all, Amazon did inform Congress that it 'has modified its specific [patent] reform proposals from the year 2000.'"
Gee, do I have to do ALL your thinking for you?
The topic here has brought up the significance of Amazon and the one click. However, the one click is for other things than just purchasing from a site.
Try dinking with the USPS with one click for wicked power.
... if the USPTO had a '1-click' accept/reject option for their patent/trademark approval systems. Unfortunately either Jeff Bezos or Peter Calveley beat them to it.
The safest thing for any bureaucracy to do is nothing at all. You can't get blamed for making a bad decision, and you get to claim that you don't have enough resources to do the job, thus vying for an increased budget next year.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
USPTO is waiting on Bilski. It will come soon and state whether a business method (and not software as is commonly said) is valid. USPTO doesn't want to have to re-decide this afterward, and only if business method patents are approved of will it get approved.
Congress should pass a law requiring patent submitters to pay the USPTO to review their applications, billable by the hour, for however long that takes.
This arrangement would scale to cover companies that submit patents by the truckloads (IBM, Microsoft, Google) as well as start-ups that have a small number of key patents protecting their core IP. It would allow the government to hire more patent examiners, while protecting the taxpayers (though not necessarily industries) against abuse from troll outfits.
The sucker will expire on Sept 12, 2017.
That as I remember, the original proposal by Amazon from 2000 included limiting software patent duration to something like five years. Had that been done, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place since the patent would have been expired by then.
will patent anything as long as the paperwork is in order. They don't want to be in the business of deciding patentability--that is too much work. Their view is that once they grant the patent it is the job of opposing parties to fight the patent in court (read, lawyers doing all the work on behalf of clients) and having a judge decide. In theory, if the office did decide on patentability then you could sue them and drag them to court--and they don't want that. They probably have legal immunity though.
Perhaps a company can force the USPTO to make a decision (to revoke 1-click or not) by challenging Amazon in court. Basically, a company could implement 1-click then force Amazon to sue (for patent infringement). Once in court, it could be noted that the current patent has been challenged with prior art and has been under review by USPTO for years.
tucker max fail.
It probably wouldn't speed up the process. First, just because some company implemented 1-click, does not force Amazon to sue. Unlike trademarks, where the mark has to be enforced to prevent delusion, patent infringement can be ignored. RedHat has even gone so far as to publicly state they won't enforce their patents in certain situations. Second, even if it was brought to court, the judge could decide to stay the case pending the decision from the USPTO. This sometimes happens because the judge doesn't want to waste their time or effort when the USPTO is already looking at the case.
1. Register your source of funds with the candy machine. The candy machine becomes aware that there is an account that purchases can be charged to.
2. Press a single button to make a purchase.
3. The candy machine accesses the registered source of funds and attempts to deduct the purchase price.
4. This can be repeated for a number of transactions, and each time the candy machine will access the source of funds to attempt to deduct the purchase price.
For a closer approximation, see: parking ticket machines where you insert a credit card and buy at the push of a button.
Seriously, this is obvious in every way and Amazon is retarded for acting that way. When it comes to validating business methods patent, a _minimum_ should be that offline methods are always prior arts for any obvious internet implementation. And hopefully it is, given Amazon's repeated failures.
As one of the classic cases, I've been gathering some info already about this:
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