One-Click Reprise

The One-Click Saga has been going on for a while now. BountyQuest has now thrown in the towel on finding a definitive usage of one-click web shopping that predates Amazon's patent. Tim O'Reilly wrote a response to the finding, where he accepts Amazon's patent as valid - with nary a mention of the fact that most of the world doesn't permit software patents at all. Finally, Internetnews.com looks at the future of one-click and notes that despite any smoking gun, this might help Barnes and Noble fight their lawsuit against Amazon.

Re:Let me get this straight...

Bingo. And to quote O'Reilly: On close examination, I also discovered that the One-Click patent is far narrower than people assume it is. The innovation it claims is based on some very specific software-driven steps in the Web shopping process that were designed to make it simpler and more automatic for consumers to complete e-commerce transactions. The specific steps of the claims were what had to be non-obvious and novel, and O'Reilly points out those claims are narrow indeed.

Re:Let me get this straight...

Geeks tend to constantly overestimate their own ability in what amounts to severe egotism. They assume that if someone else could create something, then surely it wouldn't been no trouble to them.

The XOR patent for cursor display was the favourite whipping boy of the anti-software patent movement (you can still find the odd reference here and there). XOR-ing cursors was according to the anti-software patent folks the "obvious" and "natural way" to do it.

Then at some point a researcher took the care of examining how exactly cursor display was done in all other graphic systems in 1978 when the XOR patent application was filed (there weren't that many) and all those he could find used a copy buffer and not the "obvious" XOR idea.

IIRC, the XOR idea was so quickly adopted that by 1981 it was prevalent and even tought in school. But no documented use before 1980 or so could be found.

In 1989 corporations with deep pockets challenged the XOR patent. It was duly reexamined and held valid by the PTO.

MiniVend - Submission 16 to Bounty Quest

I find the entry number 16 of the submission to the one-click BountyQuest very interesting. See here [bountyquest.com]

Tim O'Reilly says the following (quote):
"16. Online Minivend Reference Guide "MiniVend -multi-catalog shopping cart and mall," March 14, 1997. Mike Heins, the creator of the MiniVend system (now owned by Red Hat under the name "Interchange") provided some great art. He showed us how to very easily configure his open-source system to perform single-click buying. In writing the system, he put considerable effort into saving customer session information, so that buyers would not have to reenter their information to make purchases.

However, the submission is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone made those simple changes and implemented 1-Click shopping in the proper fashion before our Prior To date." (end of quote)

The last sentence is, IMHO, really MORE THAN ANNOYING ! Not that I blame Tim O'Reilly for it, but I simply don't believe it.

I have been reading the minivend mailing list since it started out beginning of 1997. Mike Heins posted to his minivend mailing list as a response to someone who asked exactly for something that represents the implementation of the one-click ordering feature, that this feature CAN be implemented AND THAT IT HAS BEEN DONE. This was on May 13th, 1997 and clearly before the cut-off date of Sept. 27th, 1997.

Please read the short thread of the post on "Retaining user information" here [akopia.com]

I am aware of the fact, that Mike Heins might have been under restrictions to release any more information of who had done it at that time, but obviously he knew so much, that he confidently could mention on the mailing list, that it "has been done". I can say, that what later became known as the "famous" one-click feature, was something that was an option to be implemented easily for a programmer who could understand the software, i.e. a person skilled in the trade, and users of MiniVend were aware of it. I am sure several people have thought and played with setting it up, but might not have gone through with it, because many customer didn't like it at that time. It was considered just too mysterious and considered not "slow and clear" enough.

But quite frankly I could very well imagine that in certain industries that feature might have been welcome and that it was implemented. I simply think that the ones, who did it, don't want to come forward for whatever reasons.

Now, may be it is really impossible to find the person or site, who implemented it and prove that it was done, but this is an appeal for whoever it was to COME FORWARD.

So, even if Tim O'Reilly throws the towel, that doesn't mean that the battle is lost.

Would be interesting to know if the site could be found and retrieved in the Alexa archive, which of course now is conveniently owned by Amazon.com itself. What a coincidence. For more on Alexa archives look here [alexa.com] and here [alexa.com]. The archives have now 16 terabytes of text, audio and graphical files, accumulated from April 1996 on.

Who will end up owning this patent?

I am one of the folks who thinks that Amazon's destined to go belly-up, that the reason they haven't yet is because they were the giant, and it's harder to get the big tree falling -- of course, once it starts it's impossible to stop.

So assuming that I'm right (and please save your joke about "assume", those of us out of elementary school have heard it already), Amazon's going to be having a great big "We've lost our lease, everything must go, we're holding nothing back!" sale. And then what will they have to offer? Limited inventory, a huge database of customers cross-correlated and analyzed out the wazoo...and, of course, a patent portfolio. One which if rigorously enforced pretty much gives the online store to whomever ends up owning the patent.

So what happens then? I'd especially like to hear from real live professionals, who might know what happens when the legal entity holding intellectual "property" dissolves.

Re:Question to all

Patents are NOT a competitive advantage. There is no competition in a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to make something then market forces can't select the best product.

Patents IMHO last longer than they should. The purpose of a patent shouldn't be to ensure a monopoly, it's to let you get to market first. This is accomplished with a limited term monopoly sure, but the monopoly should be the means, not the end.

With a mechanical process you need to tool up, a process that isn't even taking as long these days, and then ship a new physical product. With software you can ship a product in six months (I know of which I speak, my company is releasing products we were having first design meetings about in September 2000.) so a nearly twenty year monopoly is insane.

So, that's a problem with the implementation of patents in general. If it takes a company two years to bring hardware to market the patent should be for three years or so, not seventeen (last I heard). Protection should be removed when the company brings a product to market, or when they stop production. This would stop companies from laying a mine-field in an undeveloped industry.

Then, onto the specifics of software patents... Most software patents seem to either cover a basic universal property just used in a new medium. Discoveries supposedly can't be patented. If you discover a formula for pi you can't patent pi, or the formula. But that's the sort of thing I feel you see in software patents. What should be patentable is a specific chip that is designed to calculate pi more quickly than a general CPU.

To use the favorite example, using XOR to draw a cursor.

This was patented in the late 70s, before the PC revolution. Nobody was really working on GUIs and the ones who were weren't doing it for production systems. To implement ASM-level optimization in drawing routines on a concept system would have made it harder to design for and wasted developer time on speed tweaks. (Tweaks for speed come before release, when the number of users is such to justify their savings vs the outlay of the programmer's time.)

So this patent was basically granted to the first company to get around to optimizing a GUI to the point where they did the obvious thing for drawing a cursor.

For a cursor you want speed much more than looks. It doesn't matter if the cursor changes color as it moves, in fact, it's easier to see if it's always in reverse-video relative to the background. So the tradeoffs involved in display quality are irrelevant with the usefulness of being able to draw and erase the cursor with the same routine, and with not having to have a buffer to store the part of the screen being overwritten.

But there's no reason this would have been developed early. A generic drawing routine would have been of use for anything you wanted to draw. It would have been slower and taken more memory, but a single test system can afford to be faster and have more memory than the eventual target system. Thus slower, more general routines are obviously what should have been used.

So why does a company deserve a patent on someone that any competent programmer (of the era, back when people learned ASM) could have done, had they had the need?

Patents are supposed to reward innovation, not simply the first person into an area.

Similarly, almost all software patents I've heard about have been trivially obvious. Sure, the patenter was the first, but that's not a high enough standard for non-software patents. We also require that an average professional in the industry wouldn't think of the same thing in the same circumstance.

But was any programmer of the era asked to optimize a cursor drawing routine in ASM, to see how they'd go about it?

I never liked the Bounty Quest approach anyway

From my point of view, all business-model and software patents are bad mojo on the face of it, and finding prior art for them is wrongheaded and simply plays into the "software patents are acceptable" mindset. Proving Amazons 1-Click Shopping is invalid due to prior art is only a way of saying that that prior art should have gotten the patent in the first place, which is just as bad.

All this benefits are lawyers

They are trying to limit and mutate the definition of prior art. Once they have something defined as a test case that will create precedent for the rest of the industry, lawyers pour lots of money into it.

Consider the future this will have judicially. All this does is raise the amount of capital you have to get togethr to start an e-business of this type- by increasing the level of liability you have to insure against. That hurts the dot economy, all those "entrepreneurs" you are always talking about, guys.

Ironically, the lawyers glom onto the juiciest cows, the ideas most likely to revolutionize some aspect of our computing experience and thus to justly make money. Thus they retard progress.

Just another note from the Ban the Lawyers foundation.. ;)

New definition of "throwing in the towel"

From BountyQuest:

In particular, it's highly unlikely that Amazon will be able to assert single-action claims in interactive TV, for example, even though the current patent covers that area. Even on the Web it's doubtful that Amazon can continue to enforce the 1-Click patent, except where alleged infringers utilize the precise sequence of software steps detailed in the patent. Simply put, the threat to e-commerce posed by the 1-Click patent is now severely diminished.

So they've found enough prior art to invalidate any use of the patent except in the most precise form. Unless you do implement exact same system as Amazon you are safe. BountyQuest haven't "thrown in the towel". They've won.

This is exhausting

When I encounter discussion of things like the one-click patent, it instantly wears me out. It's exhausting trying to think of ways to argue with people who see all ideas as salable "intellectual property". I don't think science would have made any progress if people in former times had been accustomed to thinking this way. Think if the telescope had been enforcibly patented, or the microscope.

What can you say to someone who thinks this is a good idea? I'm not anti-business. But is there nothing that isn't owned, that isn't property.

I predict that we will soon start patenting philosophies or religions.


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