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)."

RTFM, John Doll

[saibot834]

"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.

What was the result..

[jshriverWVU]

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.

The One-Click Patent in Not a Bad Patent

[Anonymous Coward]

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.