1-Click Rejection Rejected

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...

[mystran]

And now somebody probably should say: You must be new here.

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:But...

[ehrichweiss]

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.

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

[Poromenos1]

Maybe it's useless for this particular implementation, but what if someone creates a site that allows you to buy items/services (such as songs) for a fixed fee (say $1) with one click while you're browsing? That'll be useful, but in comes this patent and that site can't use their system any more.

Re:But...

[Aladrin]

Far from elegant, '1 click' is dangerous and insane. As a developer, I would -never- consider implementing such a crazy thing. The 'are you sure' dialog is more of an invention than '1 click'. '1 click' is the opposite of invention, it's lack of one. It's leaving out a step. You know, the secure one that prevents the customer from accidentally ordering the $1000 fuzzybear their daughter was looking at by accidentally clicking on the button, then clicking elsewhere and loading the second page so they don't even know they've ordered it.

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 /. yesterday, buying MP3s defaulted to 1-click. I bought one about 3 steps earlier than I expected. (Luckily, I had intended to follow through with it.) Less than an hour later, they had added a 'check here to always confirm before purchase' checkbox. They had obviously snagged quite a few 'accidental' sales that people didn't expect to make, and got tons of complaints.

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

[Firehed]

Well I have to say that it pairs quite nicely with Amazon's new MP3 store. Or if you have Amazon Prime (since 2-day shipping is free on Prime items). At least with the MP3s, you can have it show a confirmation after the one-click purchase making it two-click - I'd assume it's the same for tangible goods as well.

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...

[mavenguy]

This very probably the case, as reading the board's full decision shows. However, after browsing over the long and contorted prosecution of this application, and considering the huge number of claims to consider it's clear that there was not enough time to do a proper job to meet the level of discussion and discourse required by the Board.

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