Amazon One-Click Patent to be Re-Examined

timrichardson writes "A New Zealand actor, frustrated by a poor shopping experience, has successfully requested that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review the correctness of Amazon's infamous One-Click patent. An examiner for the agency ruled that the re-examination requested by Peter Calveley had raised a 'substantial new question of patentability' affecting Amazon's patent, according to a document outlining the agency's decision."

It's about time

I hope this is a precendent: maybe the patent system, broken as it is, will slowly get fixed over time by constant vigilant review of bogus patents.

Now we just need them to quit issuing the crappy ones in the first place.

Re:It's about time

If you RTFA it says that another patent for the single-click method was given 18 months earlier.

This can only mean that if Amazon has to give this up, it enable someone else to sue instead.

Re:It's about time

It does kind of prove his point though - people have to take out patents and protect them agressively because otherwise someone else can come and demand a slice of their business or threaten to take things away from them. I know this isn't the only reason why amazon has gone after this patent (no doubt getting at their competitor was a bonus) but it does show a fundamently flawed system

Re:It's about time

Re-exam is an old and well-established practice.

That may be so, but it's also a practice they haven't excercised much lately. I'd say it's an interesting precident that they're actually reexamining a high profile case.

Try learning for a change. You would be amazed at what you find out.

Try not being an ass for a change. You'd be surprised at how nice everybody else suddenly becomes.

First post

first post! (patent pending)

Re:First post

We regret to inform you that not only has the first post on this article been acheived by another user, but in fact the entire first post gimmick has significant prior art by the GNAA, to whom you may be liable for infringement.

disclaimer: this post is in no way associated with the poster(s) responsible for the typical GNAA-related post. It just seemed appropriate to mention them.

Re:First post

So, what is so unique about doing this on a computer or online?

The computer is a magical box where fairies and elves live (to most people). That is why its so unique. Those of us who know how computers work ... we understand better than the layperson.

Great, but...

OK, so maybe there was a prior patent, but why is there any patent on a "single clisk to buy it" business process? That's just stupid in the extreme.

Re:Great, but...

What's important to note is why this particular patent, even more so than other software patents, is stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't patent *how* you accomplish something, just *that* you accomplish it. It would be like patenting "computing numbers quickly" rather than patenting "a specific chip that can compute numbers quickly".

one click...

they guy is gettiong revenge because a book took too long - he doesn't even have any real interest in this "tech". Still, I really dislike the "one click" idea anyway because you cna end up buying things without realising thinking that you would actaully get to confirm and review the purchase - I think what amazon forced on it's competitor is better than what they use.
Further, this makes me wonder how on earth this actually got made into a patent anyway it is far too general and doesn't have any novelty to it; also, it's not really a "tech" is it, it's a button - and they've existed for ages

Re:one click...

From the article: Calveley wrote on his blog that his crusade is revenge for an "annoyingly slow" book delivery from Amazon. He used the blog to raise the $2,520 reexamination fee.

Ok, while I agree the Amazon patent is suspect, I think this guy is in it more for the free publicity. He's an actor! I have things I ordered from all sorts of online places get to me annoyingly slow, which for me is any time interval less than instantaneous, but I haven't gone to court to have a patent re-examined over it!

Does New Zealand have a small claims court, because that's where I would have sued them for the amount I spent on the book, plus some damages to keep them honest. Hell, it probably would have gone unopposed; you think Amazon is goijng to waste a couple thousand bucks on lawyers fees when they might settle it for a couple of hundred? No, this guy's in it to boost his profile, not because he's doing anyone a favor.

Who cares.

People seem to be spending a lot of time concentrating on this guy's motivation.

I really don't understand why. Why should I care what his motivation is? The point is that he got the USPTO to re-examine a dumb patent. If it did it for the publicity or to hawk his blog or because he thinks it'll speed up the Second Coming of Jesus, I don't really care. Hooray for him, in any case; the point is that the action he took was good, irrespective of the motive.

I'm not going to fault him because he was doing it for publicity. Maybe if a few more people did what he's doing -- for publicity or whatever reason -- we'd have a few less shitty patents floating around.

In fact, if you want to hurt a company these days, you're better spent going after their patents than trying to take them to court directly, especially small-claims. So if there's a company you don't like, and you can get the dough together to force a re-examination of their patents, by all means please do so. I won't question why you're doing it, the point is that it gets done.

Fee, schmee

From the AP story via Yahoo! [yahoo.com] :

Calveley wrote on his Web log that his crusade is revenge for an "annoyingly slow" book delivery from Amazon. He used the blog to raise the $2,520 reexamination fee.

Dang - is that all it took? I'd be willing to throw some ad-click revenue toward getting some of these other ridiculous patents "reexamined"...

(Irritating, but predictable, that someone has to pay, and the USPTO can't take the initiative to reexamine extremely controversial patents otherwise.)

<grrr />

One-Push Power Button

Can I patent the one-push power button?

If so, noone will be able to even turn their computers ON without my consent. Muahhahahahaaaa!

What other useless patents can we come up with?

Dogbert's solution

I hope you all remember Dogbert's no-click patent...

"You'd better click something soon, or I'm going to have to ship you some books."

Good

It's about time that someone take the inititive to get patents on obvious technology examined. May this be precented for many other patents as well.

Once again, an actor comes to the rescue.

Shades of "Team America: World Police" aside, remind me to buy a ticket to whatever this guy [imdb.com] is in next.

Bad Acting

I'm going to sue the New Zealand government to force them to re-examine the citizenship of Peter Calveley after his poor acting performance when he approached me posing as a woman outside of a bar in Auckland.

Recent events are leading me in one intellectual

, highly educated and humanist perception on the patent matter, out of angst and frusturation at the behest of the greed going on around the sector :

Fuck patents

Not saying I like the patent

But the reason why it was granted and why they want to defend it to the end is because it buffers against buyer's regret. How many times have you added a book to your shopping cart, only to think about it, and then remove it. With One-Click, the item is already purchased at the first click, and it would take much more effort to go and cancel the order once thought about. Ingenious idea, and probably defendable under current patent law, unless of course the entire concept of patenting buisness models is done away with.

huh

"We look forward to working with the examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and we welcome the opportunity to revalidate what we believe is an important innovation in e-commerce."

important innovation as long as you are amazon.

Nice to see...

In the related stories field, the original 1-click story from 1999 [slashdot.org]. It makes you feel it was just yesterday.

Blogs can be useful

This is Peter's more frequently updated blog [blogspot.com] than the one linked in the article. It has an update on the reexamination request. According to Peter, "The reexamination takes aims at claim 11 and some dependent claims, which in my opinion are the broadest and most restrictive claims in the patent. If Amazon can be made to narrow them, it could allow others to implement innovative and interesting ways of shopping with "one-click" (This isn't legal or professional advice- see the disclaimer below)."

As the article points out, Peter raised the money necessary to pay the reexamination fee through donations. I don't know what his chances are of being successful, but it certainly shows that blogs can be useful in allowing more people to participate in processes that were previously mainly used by businesses. Maybe they'll raise the reexamination fee to keep up with technical progress. ;-)

It's a stupid patent, but...

From TFA:
Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith issued the following response Thursday: "Amazon.com remains confident in the validity of its 1-Click patent, which enables customers to shop conveniently without having to enter their shipping and billing information each time they purchase. We look forward to working with the examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and we welcome the opportunity to revalidate what we believe is an important innovation in e-commerce."

Who couldn't think of this stuff? There is no innovation in it all. While the current patent foolishness is problematic I think it will sort itself out in the end, because there are competitive business interests (read money) fighting over various positions on patents. Copyrights seem to be a far more dangerous issue to liberty focused individuals (read geeks) because all the cards seem stacked into the hands of the major copyright holders. The people never seem to get a fair shake anymore unless their interests coincide with that of a large corporate block.

all clicks

This was definitely one of the more stupid patents, how on earth does it make sense that you can patent an amount of clicks? So, can I go patent two-click purchases? And three-click purchases? Right on up to 1,000,000-click purchases? So that nobody can buy anything without my piece of the pie coming my way? Freakin' ridiculous.

Hmm, let's see...

Click in browser address bar | "www.amazon.com" | Enter Key - 1 click Click in User Name box | "loginame" | Tab | "Password" | Click Login button | - 2 clicks Click in search box | "Author Name" | Click search button - 2 clicks Click on search result | Click on "1-Click Purchase" button - 2 clicks Total number of clicks requrie to use Amazon.com's 1-Click system : 7 Time to bring a false advertising suit.

What will be the effects on licensees?

If this patent is wiped out, will Amazon have to reimburse companies like Apple who have licensed the "technology"?

Can this be expanded to *all* "Biz Method" patents

Seems to me that this is the poster child for abolishing the whole category of Business Method patents. How can it be generalized to the whole category? Can it at all?

New Zealand

What's really sad is it took someone from New Zealand to be frustrated enough to do something about it. You'd hope with 365+ million people someone from the US would have gotten it re-examined.

Not that I'm any better. I didn't do anything about it.

One-click patent and prior art...

In the early-to-mid 90's I attended an "Institute of Technology" where, among other things, I took the level 1 databases course. In that course we had various projects to do, one of which was to implement an "online shopping site".

At that time, our design presumed that you'd set up your account with the retailer over the phone (mostly because we didn't want to get bogged down with the form handling, but also because the UI design was a minor part of this one assignment).

So, we did what was obvious (and what several other people came up with) -- have someone login (no cookies back then) and use the HTTP basic authentication link the session to the customer record in the database. Next to each item, there was a button that said "put it on my tab" and did just that, stuck an entry in the database saying you wanted it. There was a script that could run on a periodic basis and rolled up a list of what was on who's tab and built an order from it.

It seems to me that if a biology student taking a database class thought it was obvious then (to be fair, I had a partner who was an engineer), then it was obvious to anyone that did that sort of thing for a living. Do I have a record of the assignment? No. It never occurred to me to hold onto my old homework for more than a decade.

How can this even be subject of a patent?

Come on.
A signle-click purchase is not a matter of intelectual property.
It is just the most logical way to sell any item over the internet, provided the user is logged in.

I mean, why would anyone NOT deploy a single-click system???
In other words... how can THERE BE a patent like that?
Can it even be enforced?

So,m what happens if I register for a patent for 2-clicks, 3-clicks and 4-clicks.
Then, the next guy who deploys an online bookstore is going to have to use 5 clicks?

That just doesn't make any sense.

I hope Amazon did not spend a nickel to fill that patente, because NOBODY should even pay attention to it.

This is just too scary when you start thinking about it.

Rui

There need to be penalties...

There needs to be some risk for a company in getting a patent. Especially over-simplified ones like this. For instance, if it is later found out that a company received a patent on an obvious technology, business method, etc., then that company needs to pay a fine! It is obvious that they knew what they were doing.

Likewise, and especially, extortionist who obtain patents on obvious tech solely for the purpose of suing others need to pay fines, even bigger ones. Then they need to pay damages to any of the companies on which they committed this extortion on successfully.

Let's face it, fines and penalties are the only things that *might* scare large companies like this into thinking twice about getting that obvious patent, regardless of prior art or simplicity.

Destroying Innovation

I know this has been discussed several times before, but let me repeat, we need this system to go soon, else countless people will have been harmed.

I work for a small startup company, we've been in existence 1 year and have only 15 people. Inspite of us working overtime everyday, we spend hours with our patent attorneys, filing patents for every small thing we do.

Reason: we might find ourselves suddenly sued by someone over infringement

We need to clean out this whole system, else all people will do is file patents and file lawsuits. Lets hope the Amazon re-examination is a precursor to bigger things.

Time for a career change.

With the endless lawsuits flying around for patent infringement, challenges to existing patents, breach of contact and other "IP theft", it seems to me I'm in the wrong line of work.

Instead of writing code (the pay and benefits for which I can't complain), maybe I should probably add a law degree, sell my soul and get into the tech litigation biz. I can make tons upon tons of cash - far, far more than I am making now - and don't have to write anything (except the occasional briefs and motions). But I guess I better claim patent on the process of doing this, or I'LL get sued.

A result of

This Patent review is a result of Forbes [forbes.com] news article about eBay's "Buy it Now" patent and the Supreme Court judgement [slashdot.org].

Software and Business Method patents need to go and be banned.

I already made my position clear about these types of bogus patents. If you don't, read my comment over here [slashdot.org].

Considering the nature of innovation...

I really think it shouldn't be patentable for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that despite the clear innovative nature of the process, it cannot be restricted like other patentable materials such as chemicals, devices, and processes to produce either chemicals or devices. The second reason is that it could be argued that Amazon's One-Click idea is not really innovative, thus just on that front, it could have been easily thrown out of the patent office.

All in all, I'm all for innovators to benefit from their work, but there comes some things the government ought not to protect, and considering how copyright has been mutated beyond the original intended use makes one wonder how long before individual words in the lexicon become controlled to a point where one must pay or ask permission to use them as well...

-- Bridget

I'm not sure who really gain for the patent system

My opinion is that patent shouldn't exist at all. The base was to protect the small from the big but with all the cost that it's implies (including lawyers...) it's mostly a war for big company. I would drop the entire system and let the company fight for quality, price and services.

News flash: Patents are for novel expressions

not for describing how to do something that everyone is already doing.

In related news, the Vatican announces Earth is not flat.

The reason why...

The reason the US gives out so many ridiculous patents is because they want to stay competitive in international technology rankings.

How sad.

What next?

If a company can get a patent to buy stuff with one click, making it a violation for other companies to allow people to buy with one click, what next, a patent issued making it illegal to breed? Wait, already happened....

Everything is Patentable at Some Point

The subject matter of the one-click patent at the very least was innovative at one point in time. At some point the subject matter of that patent was new, useful, and non-obvious. Anything that is useful is patentable at some point in time because it had to be new and non-obvious at some point, right?

2-click patent

In 1999, Amazon obtained an injunction that forced rival bookseller barnesandnoble.com to go to two clicks

And in most recent news, barnesandnoble.com patented the two click method for purchases, forcing all other online stores to the three click method.

Analysts forecast that by 2010, new online stores will be forcing consumers to use 20 clicks or more for purchases.

Re:Patent on Pointer

I've got a finger for you...

Re:Recouping extortion/licensing fees

Unfortunately, yes.

Think about it this way -- do the police and prosecutors get sent to PMITA prison if they put away an innocent man?

Re:Way to go ...

breething

Breeding would be even better.

Re:So all you need to fight patent trolls...

Just heard in the RIM boardroom: OK - let's get rid of all the fscking money-sucking lawyers and hire that actor!

Re:Way to go ...

Go ahead and do that. In the mean time I'll try to patent breathing. One of us may make boatloads of money :-)