Amazon 1-Click Lawyers Make USPTO Work Xmas Eve 117
theodp writes "In a move that would do pre-makeover Ebenezer proud, Amazon.com's 1-Click lawyers put the USPTO to work on Christmas Eve. On Dec. 24th, the USPTO acknowledged receipt of yet another round of paperwork submitted by Amazon's high-priced legal muscle, the latest salvo in Amazon's 3-year battle to fend off a patent reexamination triggered by the do-it-yourself legal effort of actor Peter Calveley. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent is also under attack on another front — on Dec. 23rd, the USPTO received $810 from Amazon's attorneys together with a request that the agency invalidate Patent Examiner Mark A. Fadok's final rejection of 1-Click patent claims on the grounds of obviousness. On the bright side, patent clerks — unlike Bob Cratchit — get the day after Christmas off!"
What a ridiculous summary paragraph (Score:5, Informative)
It just shows how little some people know about the patent system. A request for continued examination can be filed with the electronic system on Dec 23rd, and very few humans would see it, if any, until the docket clerk looks at it. The examiner won't be looking at it for quite some time, so they aren't working overtime for Bezos. Further, they aren't asking for an invalidation of the final rejection, they are asking for reconsideration on the merits, and a withdrawal of the rejection (very different things). If you know about the system, the summary the submitter put forward was good for a laugh, but nothing else.
Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:2, Informative)
Way back in the day, nobody could even figure out how to do credit card processing, much less buy anything online. I have a vague recollection of one of the backbone providers in the Northeast or Midwest trying to prohibit commerical traffic over their network.
One-click buying was pretty radical. Even buying stuff online was pretty unbelievable. I mean, think about this: some company you never heard of would store your credit card number and other information so you could buy stuff without entering in all the supporting info. This was back in the day when the big debate was PPP vs SLIP, and you couldn't get a commercial PPP account (except via netcom, I think).
Now all this stuff is pretty obvious. Back in the day, just buying stuff online was pretty wild. One-click, from the engineering side, was really original. The fact that it sounds so quotidian shows how far things have come since then.
Re:Obvious patent? Not back then. (Score:5, Informative)
I have a vague recollection of one of the backbone providers in the Northeast or Midwest trying to prohibit commerical traffic over their network.
You're thinking of NSFNET [wikipedia.org], which was more-or-less the bridge between the original ARPANET and the commercial Internet we know today. The non-commercial limitations were inherited from ARPANET, and had to do with government funding of the backbone.
Re:This is a lousy business decision. (Score:5, Informative)
There are NO Amazon customers outside the Web world...
But, point well taken: you're quite right. This is a non-issue for nearly all Amazon customers anyway. We software patent opponents do care a lot (though not all of us would avoid using Amazon because of this silly patent), but we're an insignificant minority of their customer base.
Re:More people should work on XMAS during these ti (Score:1, Informative)
Aside from the usual mismanagement, unions are also one of the biggest reasons US car companies can not compete with foreign auto makers.
You realize how much a sack of crap that is, right? The biggest worker expenditure difference between auto workers in US auto maker plants versus foreign auto makers comes from the pension past workers have built up from... you know... manufacturing here for the better past of a decade. (Whereas foreign auto maker plants haven't been here long enough to build up a worker pension pool yet.)
...and of course, when it comes right down to it, worker salary and pension and all that rigmarole amounts to less than 10% of what the companies expend in general, so... Just MAYBE there are other places they need to tighten ship as well?
Subtract that bullshit additional claim to the "BOO HOO TEH UNIONS!!!" shouting, and what's the difference...? About $4 an hour, or under-a-10% salary delta. But that doesn't doesn't make waves and just MIIIIGHT get people saying "whatever, dudes, make better cars and better market decisions on your lineup," so therefore they had to trot out out that asinine $70+ figure.
Certainly some unions can cause problems, but is the auto worker union making the US car manufacturers fail? Not even close. Pension aside, the "total hourly compensation" comes to something like $52 versus $48, and while it's true UAW has been able to lobby for more valuable pensions as well, the difference is simply that of size and time. US auto manufacturers have a pension pool that's been built up by MANY more workers in MANY more plants that have been in operation since the dawn of the 20th century. (Or, I suppose, when and how they started providing pensions.)
The "competition gap" would certainly make a couple percent different all told in the long run, but that's in no way why they've all gone belly-up and are in need of bailing out now.