USPTO's 1-Click Indecisiveness Enters 5th Year 36
theodp writes "When it comes to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent, the USPTO is an agency that just can't say no. Or yes. It's now been 4+ years since actor Peter Calveley submitted prior art that triggered a USPTO reexamination of the 1-Click patent. Still no 'final answer' from the USPTO, although an Examiner recently issued yet another Final Rejection of 1-Click related claims (pdf), admonishing Amazon for making him 'sift through hundreds of submitted references to identify what applicant allegedly has already submitted,' which he complained is 'adding an undue burden' to his workload. Looks like Bezos' 2000 pledge of 'less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office' isn't working out so well in practice. Not too surprising — after all, Amazon did inform Congress that it 'has modified its specific [patent] reform proposals from the year 2000.'"
Waiting on Bilksi (Score:5, Interesting)
applicants should pay the USPTO for expenses (Score:1, Interesting)
Congress should pass a law requiring patent submitters to pay the USPTO to review their applications, billable by the hour, for however long that takes.
This arrangement would scale to cover companies that submit patents by the truckloads (IBM, Microsoft, Google) as well as start-ups that have a small number of key patents protecting their core IP. It would allow the government to hire more patent examiners, while protecting the taxpayers (though not necessarily industries) against abuse from troll outfits.
Re:Bureaucracies... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would say this is in direct disagreement with your previous statement.
Congress typically passes vague laws so that the responsibility of the effect of the law is lessened or more easily deflected.
It is up to the courts to reject laws as too vague and require them to have more specificity.
Laws would be much less absurd if they left no room for interpretation. #1 this would lead to a fear in passing laws and #2 this would reduce their breadth
Candy machines are prior art (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Register your source of funds with the candy machine. The candy machine becomes aware that there is an account that purchases can be charged to.
2. Press a single button to make a purchase.
3. The candy machine accesses the registered source of funds and attempts to deduct the purchase price.
4. This can be repeated for a number of transactions, and each time the candy machine will access the source of funds to attempt to deduct the purchase price.
For a closer approximation, see: parking ticket machines where you insert a credit card and buy at the push of a button.
Seriously, this is obvious in every way and Amazon is retarded for acting that way. When it comes to validating business methods patent, a _minimum_ should be that offline methods are always prior arts for any obvious internet implementation. And hopefully it is, given Amazon's repeated failures.