Amazon Goes Web 2.0 Wild to Defend 1-Click Patent

theodp writes "Six years ago, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly urged the masses to give-patent-reform-a-chance as Richard Stallman called for an Amazon boycott. On Monday, the pair will reunite to kick off O'Reilly's new Amazon-sponsored Web 2.0 Expo with A Conversation with Jeff Bezos. Be interesting if the conversation turned to Amazon's ongoing battle against an actor's effort to topple Bezos' 1-Click patent, which The Register notes included dumping 58 lbs. of paperwork on the patent examiner, including dozens of articles from the oh-so-Web-2.0 Wikipedia, which the USPTO had already deemed an un acceptable source of information ('From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian)."

Caution on /.'s part

I got "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."

I guess /. is disabling their one-click "Read More" links.

A quote for the ages

'From a legal^W any point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,'

Re:A quote for the ages

It is indeed.

There's disagreeable things in this article - Amazon's ludicrous patent, the whole concept of Web 2.0, and The Register in general. So, it's nice to come away with something that's patently ('scuse the pun) obviously true. Wiki citations are most surely toilet paper, and not just from a legal POV.

Re:A quote for the ages

Actually, in debate, I am often very pleased when my opponent relies heavily on wikipedia, it's like shooting fish in the frozen food section.

Re:A quote for the ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate#Online_debatin g [wikipedia.org]

Oh, the irony, I'm replying with a link to wikipedia (grins wolfishly).

Wikipedia vs. other sites

I don't think it's a good assumption that website citations are generally to be trusted for academic purposes. Wikipedia has requirements that citations from more trusted sources are included in articles - the lawyers in this case really should have known enough to go to those original sources and cite from there instead. You would think they would teach this sort of stuff in law school.

If the articles in question DIDN'T contain citations from other sources, then how could any of the information be trusted at all, given that it was written by one or many basically anonymous users?

Personally, I find Wikipedia to be really useful, but the problem with it from an academic standpoint is that any conclusions arrived at in its articles without citation tend to arise out of the consensus of the user community, and there is really no reason to trust information simply because the majority agrees it is the truth, especially in matters like this one.

Re:A quote for the ages

Surely the main position on Wiki and patents is disclosure. If the idea has been disclosed publicly prior to one year (? - INAL) then it can't be patented. So if some one has placed it in a public Wiki it surely must be considered publicly disclosed? The follow up may be a law suit against who ever made it public (not necessarily in the Wiki) if a breach of confidentiality was involved.

Re:A quote for the ages

Anyone who reviews my post history or goosles me, and digs a little will find that I'm not exactly a proponent of wikipedia.

But there is no black or white here. Wikipedia is not apropriate for serious use, where it's important to be correct. But it's a massive quick and dirty database. If I want to know what X is and I've never heard of it, I can go to wikipedia and get an overview. If the authors did their due dilligence, I can find a decent collection of links off site that will tell me a bit abotu the subject matter.

Wikipedia can be a useful tool. Just not for most important applications.

Let's use a programming analogy. The "right" way to deploy a new application cross platform would be to code it in C or Java, or some other language apropriate to the task, and fine tune each version for each platform, and hunt for bugs on each platform. Annother, quick, relativly painless way, if it were an unimportant, trivial task, would be to just put together a web based Java applett, or perhaps even a flash object if it's simple enough. Hell, millions do this with YouTube, every day because it's "good enough". Even though an MPEG, MOV, AVI, or other video file played in a stand alone player would be "better".

Re:A quote for the ages

Anyone who reviews my post history or goosles me, and digs a little will find that I'm not exactly a proponent of wikipedia.

Dude, I have no intention of goosling you. The only person I goosle is my wife.

What

What is toilet paper?

Re:What

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper [wikipedia.org]

From a legal point of view

From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper

does that make the one click patent the excrement in this little analogy then?

I don't quite get it...

The headline directly says that Amazon plans to use the Web 2.0 Expo to defend the one-click patent.
The summary speculates that Bezos might get called out over the one-click patent.
The article says... wait... this isn't summarizing any article.

So what's happened? Nothing new. What's going to happen? Very possibly nothing new.

RTFM, John Doll

"The problem with Wikipedia is that it's constantly changing,"

Just click on "Permanent link" and you will have a version that won't change. Or click on Cite this article.

Huh?

The news news is that Jeff Bezos is giving a speech at an O'Reilly-sponsored conference about something having nothing to do with patents, and everything else in the blurb, from the title on down, is randomly thrown in by the submitter, correct?

What was the result..

of the lawsuit? I thought the One-click was a good example of silly patents. Having it overturned is important now just so other people can "use similiar concepts" but in software in general. If to many of these silly patents get pushed through it will be impossible for any non-big-firm programmer to develop anything, else they'll be infringing on the "while() {}" patent.

When did Tim O'Reilly become such a scumbag?

O'Reilly's behavior is truly despicable. Here's a guy who got rich promoting open source and intellectual property freedom. But as soon as he gets the chance to cuddle up to the IP holders, he sells out his principles.

From the FTA:

Millionaire tech publisher Tim O'Reilly once vowed to torpedo Amazon.com's 1-Click patent. Against a backdrop of widespread outrage over Amazon's aggressive use of the patent, O'Reilly created a contest to find prior art to undermine the IP claim, and thus invalidate the patent. However, O'Reilly quietly dropped the campaign; saying he would never disclose it because he trusted Amazon.com CEO Bezos not to use it.

Following that cockle-warming tribute to his integrity, Bezos became a regular star turn at O'Reilly's web evangelism conferences. These days, O'Reilly's VC fund AlphaTech Ventures is supported by Bezos, and represented by the same firm of attorneys, Fenwick & West, which is defending Amazon.com against Peter Calveley.

Never accuse these dot.com moguls of permitting ethics to stand in the way of getting rich.

O'Reilly has the money and the influence to help strike out this dumb patent, but he chooses not to do so. It would be a nice irony if the USPTO threw it out because Tim's chum Jeff used Wikipedia. I'd laugh my fricking ass off.

From a legal point of view

A wiki page is great if it is timestamped. A wiki page is a publication and can be used to establish prior art.

The "patent expert" might as well have said The journal of machine intelligence and pattern recognition is toilet paper because the pages change from issue to issue.

If archive.org could take an examiner, or anyone else, to a wiki version dated before the filing date of a patent, then I think it can be used to establish prior art.

Even if the USPTO says it won't accept the wiki, a court could over rule them.

Beautiful symmetry in patent law vs. Wiki

From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian.

And from any sane person's point of view, 99% of comments from patent experts are toilet paper, which is why we're in such a mess today.

So, it's beautifully symmetric. Patent lawyers and Wikipedia were made for each other. :-)

Although in Wikipedia's defence, it gets it right ***far*** more often. :-)

In any case, Wikipedia can always be corrected, and very easily, that's the power of it. Whereas the only way of correcting a patent lawyer is with a lobotomy.

Commodore killed by patents?

I was just reading the book "On the Edge", which is about Commodore's rise and fall. The silly "Xor cursor" patent lawsuit may be what finished them off. Commodore survived a slump in 1986 and may have also survived its 1993 slump if not for the Xor patent suit. Although the issues were complicated, the Xor lawsuit may have been what put it over the edge. If Commodore survived a few years longer to about 1996, then the shere money wave of the web boom may have kept them alive to try again with more products and an updated Amiga that was on the drawing boards.

Proud Amazon Boycotter.

I am happy to say I have never once bought a single thing from Amazon.com. Their patent bullshittery is the reason. Fine, eBay/Half.com isn't necessarily run by angels, but they aren't going ape-shit on patents either. I do reference Amazon quite a bit, if I could find a better place that has tech specs and info on nearly any product I would use it, but epinions doesn't quite reach that level, at least I don't send them money.

The One-Click Patent in Not a Bad Patent

The Amazon one-click patent is not a bad patent for the the following reasons:

1. It was filed in 1997, and its subject matter may have been invented even a while before then. When you look at whether at patent is obvious or not, you have to look at it at the time of invention. Of course it's obvious, after it's been used for a decade. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 1997? Was it obvious in 1997? Probably not.

2. It does not claim every single kind of e-commerce involving single-clicking. Here's what it actually claims:

"under control of a client system,

displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;

under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and

generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model."

It is *not* a patent on "Anytime somebody clicks the mouse in e-commerce." It actually is a pretty specific invention. Other methods of e-commerce would have to do *all* of those steps do be infringing. If they left any one of them out, or if there were any other material differences than what's claimed, they'd not be infringing. For example, the sentence "whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model" means that any other one-click system that use a shopping cart model is NOT infringing.

Moo

One things i really, really, really like about Amazon are the comments. For the most part, good and bad are there. Censoring is left to inappropiate or off-topic remarks. B&N, however, remove all negative remarks.

If Amazon messes up here and there, i don't care much. They offer an excellent service.