New Amazon Patent Cites Bezos Patent Reform

theodp writes "In seeking yet another patent related to 'single-action ordering of items,' Amazon asked the USPTO to consider a number of documents, including Doonesbury cartoons, which Amazon earlier claimed vindicated its 1-Click patent. Ironically, much of this material was collected and edited by BountyQuest, which reportedly received $1+ million from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the name of patent reform. A USPTO examiner dutifully considered the material, and on Tuesday U.S. Patent No. 6,907,315 was issued to Amazon."

Filed May 22, 2003, covers all eCommerce

[Anonymous Coward]

Its worded vaguely enough to cover all eCommerce.

Isn't there some sort of lawsuit you can bring against the patent office to force them to do their job?

Also is there anyway to check on the sharedealings of patent reviewers? Forgive my suspiciousness but when patent reviewers are so determined to do their job badly, I wonder if they have an underlying motive.

Obviousness

[NoOneInParticular]

Just a thought I had the other day for patent reform and to get rid of the horrors of 'one click shopping' patents. For every patent, there needs to be a clear statement of the problem that is solved. Although in invention one of the hardest parts is to identify the problem, the problem (i.e., problem area) is in itself not patentable. At least not officially.

Then, the examiner invites 5 people skilled in the art that are unaffiliated to the patent seeker. They are confronted with the problem description and come up with a solution to tackle that particular problem. If some of the five come up with something substantially similar to the invention that the patent is sought for, the patent doesn't get granted due to obviousness. Even if the engineers don't come up with the actual answer but with alternative solutions there will be a win, as a legal circumvention of the patent will be on record.

Such a system would have killed Bezos' original patent right of. Problem: "I want to be able to allow my customers to buy things with a single click". The patented solution would have been proposed by 5 out of 5 people skilled in the art. Similar questions as "I want to be able to stream live video to a computer", "I want to show a picture of the product I'm selling " will be shot down.

One of the big dangers of software patents currently is locking out entire problem domains, by patenting the questions, not the answers. If the question contains the answer, it should not be patentable.

Note that with this scheme the question "How does one exercise a cat" would most likely allow for this patent [freepatentsonline.com].

Re:Filed May 22, 2003, covers all eCommerce

[mavenguy]

Actually, this application is continuation (i. e. based strictly on the disclosure) of a previous application which issued as Patent No. 6,615,226 which was filed on 9/12/1997, wich in turn was filed as a Continuation in part of a third application which matured as Patent No. 5,715,399, filed 5/30/1995, which, yet in turn, was based on a fourth application, issued as 5,727,163, filed on 3/30/1995. A "continuation in part" is an application which adds additional disclosure to a previous application; any claim which relies on the newly added material will only get the benefit of the actual filing date of the CIP, but claims supported by the "parent" application get the benefit of the parent application's filing date.

Those wishing to look into the prosecution history for issued patents can get online information via the PAIR [uspto.gov] portal. The information includes a "Transaction History" from which one may surmise an outline of what happened (rejections, responses, interviews, etc.) More recent applications also provide images of the application contents, so you can actually read the examiner's action and the applicant's responses, including arguments and how the claims were amended.

This application had one rejection, an amendment, and then was allowed. I tried to view the rejection (via the "Image File Wrapper" tab) but got very sporadic results for the built in pdf viewer; maybe it would work better for someone else.

The parent application seems to deal with a totally different invention involving the display of a form document in sections, each section showing some description with a clickable element to then expand to input data fields, which, can, in turn, be collapsed back to the description (seems like the current patent should have been a division rather than a continuation, but what do I know; wouldn't make a difference in the analysis). This parent application was finally rejected to which Amazon appealed to the Board of Appeals (part of the PTO) which reversed the examiner. It doesn't seem to me to be relevant to this patent since the claims are directed to such disparate subject matter. Unfortunately, the parent patent file date is not available online, so one would have to order a copy of the application ($$$ + time) or go to the PTO (or whereever the case is stored these days) to look at it.

The CIP applications seem to deal with using truncated credit card numbers as a security measure, and probably don't have supporting disclosure for this patent, but I didn't check this, so, maybe they do.

As to the merits of this patent, seems like a bunch of crap to me. I'd be curious to see the full rejection by the examiner and applicant's amendment to the claims and arguments to pursuade the examiner to allow the application.

Sessions.

[eluusive]

While I only read the abstract, this seemed to me to be a patent that does nothing but use cookie sessions in a "new" way. (I know other people already do this with cookies.) I could be wrong, but I thought that patents had to be a new invetion, or be a combination of multiple patentented invetions?

This patent could be likened to patenting the use of a car to transport jellybeans instead of people.

Re:Business value?

[ManxStef]

What made me laugh out loud was the fact that the US Patent Office itself has an online ordering cart that seems (at least, from quickly reading the abstract) to fit the criteria of the patent they just granted to Amazon, and it's displayed on the very same page as the patent [uspto.gov]! (Indeed, you can use it to buy a paper copy of the patent.) So they may well owe Amazon some royalties. Oh, the irony! :)

patents have a purpose

[Heisenbug]

Remember that a patent is not just a free reward for being so clever. It's a social contract: a voluntary limitation on all of our rights (e.g. my freedom to create a one-click checkout process) in exchange for a social benefit (e.g. the public revelation of a system for creating a one-click checkout process). If Jeff Bezos had been unable to prevent everyone else from creating one-click checkout processes, would it have made it economically impossible for him to implement them, or encouraged him to keep them a secret, and therefore deprived our society of anything?

Please. Of course not. In this particular social contract, we got ripped off. It's time to renegotiate.

Re:Technical Inovation Indeed

[kiatoa]

From paper bags to bottle caps to different types of paper cups. It's silly.

I would argue that a lot of those "silly" patents did some societal good. Why spend money on turning a good idea into a product when you know that someone with deeper pockets (probably a corporation) can turn around and copy your design and then undercut you. Without patents there are probably lots of ideas that would either be long delayed in being developed into a product or perhaps never see the light of day at all. The problem (IMHO) is that the current patent system no longer does what it was originally intended to do. My solution: make the patent office buy back patents that lose in court and adjust the definition of what can be patented to include the concept of "impediment to implementation". If an idea is at risk of being kept secret and unpublished then a patent is in societies best interest. Otherwise why prevent others from implementing the idea? One click is a good example. The development cost of implementing the idea is very small. The likelyhood of someone else coming up with the idea is, uh, like about 100%. There doesn't appear to be anything gained by allowing the idea to be monopolized. Does knowing that the one click idea was patentable give you an incentive to sit down and think up other good ideas? I doubt it.

Re:patents have a purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to operate a shop should not need to be dependent on the ordering system. It should be based on being able to make potential customers aware of the products on offer and then delivering them at a good price, in a timely manner, and with suitable support if there is a problem. Plenty of other places use open source or generic web shop systems and do very well, and Amazon would do fine had it not patented the shopping system as the success was not predicated on the shopping system but on the products available (and now it is predicated on the brand recognition).

In other words patents were originally designed to protect the invention of a product, not the means of distributing the product. The one-click system is not the product that Amazon sells - books and DVDs are.