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."
Re:Firehose antics... (Score:3, Interesting)
Rationale: one is not supposed to RTFA on
That said, I personally kinda like legalese, patent-speak, and other dialects of formalese. They appear to be kinda like somewhere between natural and formal languages. The rules seem too strict for a truly natural language, yet not strict enough to be parsed with a formalized grammar. Most of the potential ambiguity is removed (or reduced), yet the expressive power doesn't seem to be artificially limited. If one could somehow take such a language just a couple of steps towards formalization to allow mechanical parsing and then replace the rather heavy-weight syntactical forms with something more digestible, maybe that would be an interesting basis for a semi-programming language for human-computer interaction. I mean, seriously.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd never thought of it that way but you're right. I already want to review everything(is the seller charging me $15 to ship an item that costs 40 cents to mail?) so why I'd want to accidentally buy something without a chance to say 'no' is beyond my reasoning powers.
Perhaps (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm of 2 minds about this patent. It's so obvious that if it remains, the patent system is irretrievably broken. But as long as it remains, nobody else can implement this horrid system.
When the Amazon MP3 thing showed up on
This patent is so obvious that every programmer goes through a stage where they learn about the confirmation dialog because they've already implemented this and need to fix it!
Re:Perhaps (Score:3, Interesting)
But yeah, it's obvious if I've ever seen it. In fact, doesn't iTunes use it? Surely a patent this stupid would apply to web apps just as much as it applies to websites.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea if the examiner was given extra time to work on this application, but this is unlikely, or, if given, would hardly be enough to cover the work required. PTO management is fanatical about meeting production goals and meeting dates to crank out responses. Assuming that the business methods get among the most time to work on an application would mean a Primary Examiner would be expected to average getting out the equivalent of one full prosecution in about 40 hours that counts everything from when the examiner first sees the application until it sent off as an abandonment, allowance, or an appeal. the applicant here filed a Request for Continued Examination, so the examiner got another "balanced disposal", meaning that he had about 80 hours to get this out. Of course, the time is accounted on each application, but extra time spent on one application must come at the expense of working on other applications.
Give the spotlight that this application has been under I bet management will come down hard on the examiner, probably charging him/her with an "Action Taking" clear error, if not others. They will scold employees for not doing a sufficieent job, but will will continue to hold them to production standards. Therein lies the main reason the quality of work from the PTO is often very poor.
-Ex Examiner