1-Click Rejection Rejected 201
theodp writes "On Wednesday, a three-judge USPTO panel convened at Amazon's request rejected a USPTO Examiner's rejection of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's 1-Click patent, ruling that it wasn't obvious to them what the Examiner found obvious. The application has been remanded to the Examiner with instructions to make the obviousness more obvious."
Firehose antics... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe this was a bad call coming straight from the firehose?
Catch-22 (Score:4, Insightful)
It's incredibly easy, if not trivial, to design a site so that someone can save a set of data (name, address, CC info) and resubmit it along with another set of data (the order) in one click. There are first and second-year CS and CIS projects that are more complicated than that. Securing the site wouldn't be nearly as simple, but that's not the part that's covered by the patent.
Obviousness. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
And as far as I've heard it's a crap 'invention' anyway, one wrong click and you just spent money on something you didn't really want. I'd rather review my account data and address every time.
Gah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents were never intended to protect ideas but rather an idea + method of accomplishing it. The purpose being that it wouldn't stifle innovation because other people could come up with other - perhaps improved - methods to accomplish the same thing. Thus innovation continues forward, but the particular device that the original designer came up with is protected, not the goal he set out to accomplish. It's akin to patenting an octagonal wheel. Someone else is free to come along and patent a circle based wheel. But with software patents, even if you do it better, you can be sued for it. Thus obvious stifling of innovation. Sure you could do it on your own time, but you have to wait, what, 50 years before you can make money from it?
Re:Half-click shopping ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oblig.... (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem with "Obvious" (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a number of things that are perfectly obvious to me that may not be obvious to someone else. One of the things I think is lacking is the notion, actually used in patent law, "obvious to someone skilled in the art." But what "art?" Software engineering is not one art. Like it or not, it is splitting into a number of (sometimes and sometimes not) overlapping fields.
Web, GUI, networking, search, OS, embedded, etc. these are all specializations and what is obvious to an OS guy may be completely incomprehensible to a web guy. An OS guy who only sees mouse clicks as merely system interrupts may not think 1-click is obvious, hell he probably doesn't even like mice.
The 1-click patent is totally obvious and trivial to anyone doing any sort of GUI and/or web programming.
Not treated on the merits (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, but... It's so OBVIOUS!
The problem with the whole area of tech patents evaluated by non-techie people is the classic teacher's dilemma: for those who understand, no explanation is necessary, while for those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Almost by definition, something is obvious if it is apparent without further explanation. However, like the many tests of "reasonableness" in law, obviousness is in the eye of the beholder and depends on context. Defining an accurate, repeatable, qualitative test that determines whether something is or is not obvious in general is impossible.
However, one realistic and credible test is whether other people in the field in question could sensibly be expected to "invent" the same thing in the same circumstances without much thought. I would argue that claiming a typical web developer wouldn't think of the idea to have a single click in a specific place perform an action is pretty insulting to the intelligence of web developers, not least because hyperlinks have been following this principle since before Amazon was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos's eye. Similarly, the idea of remembering user data to minimise repetitive data entry has been around in database world since many years before the web existed. This is drifting into prior art rather than obviousness, perhaps, but I suspect that's the best way to attack this particular lunacy. After all, you can't credibly argue that other people wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstances if many of them already did.
Re:But... (Score:2, Insightful)
We'll keep your credit card on file.
This is the essence of 1-click. Now, I'm not saying that just saying it makes it possible, but, come-on, if you said this to any web-designer from 1988 on, they could have implemented it (perhaps not securely, but, whatever.)
Re:Obvious to WHOM? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get this argument. If it looks obvious in retrospect, it's still obvious. Patents exist because it's good for society to have a system where individuals or companies that choose to spend money on expensive research, have a way of profiting from it. If your research wasn't expensive, and your "invention" was the result of a single aha-moment, then society does not benefit from you getting a patent.
And that's the way obviousness should be interpreted. There's no way someone else wouldn't have "invented" ("discovered" is perhaps a better word) one-click shopping, if Amazon didn't. Perhaps Amazon was first, but it's still obvious.
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a fan of legal abuses or lawyers who try to weedle a situation trying to get the bad guy off on some technicality of how something was worded, but let's face it, sometimes that's exactly what's needed. Sometimes it's the bad guys who are getting hung by the same technicalities of language. Consider the RIAA's attempts to prosecute people for "offering up" songs for download, which technically isn't doing anything wrong. Without being specific about what "offering up" means, we'd have no real way to defend against the RIAA, right?
Everything can be used for "good" or "bad" deeds, but what is "good" and what is "bad" are strictly a matter of perspective.