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."

Fee, schmee

[Grrr]

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 />

Re:It's about time

[astralbat]

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:one click...

[Billosaur]

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.

Not saying I like the patent

[Macblaster]

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.

all clicks

[_Shorty-dammit]

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.

What will be the effects on licensees?

[XxtraLarGe]

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

Re:Great, but...

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

What's more, even after the insane patent was granted, this still should have had a stake put in it seven years ago. If an infringing system can be made non-infringing simply by adding superfluous complexity to the infringing apparatus, then the patent (whether Amazon's or some predecessor's) is devoid of any recognizable intellectual property:

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

So there you have it. Unless the USPTO vacates this patent, according to the logic in the injunction Amazon obtained, we'd have to let Barnes & Noble register ownership of "two click ordering" if they so desired. Then online bookstores & other retailers could logically follow suit, until Newegg was 84th in line & I had to write client-side auto-follow scripts to speed through the checkout process.

I have a virtual donut for anyone with a screenshot of what when Barnes & Noble's second click looked like when they first implemented it to comply with the injunction. I'd have done something like "Your order is almost complete. Please click here [bn.com] for no reason whatsoever except that a pissy competitor of ours fought in court to create this hassle for you. (More info [freesoftwaremagazine.com])"

"[...] several other online businesses claimed [the patent] was overly broad and that the technology wasn't very original."

Well duh. For all the ink that's been spilt on this issue, I'm amazed that all it took was a dude from New Zealand willing to throw a few grand at the problem to get it reviewed. Krikey!

"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."

Uhhh... wait a minute. Was Amazon saying they own the idea of not having to re-enter one's shipping & billing information with each purchase? Really?

EFF's Patent Busters project...

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Seems to be gaining momentum on the "vigilant review" front - two re-exams granted just recently:

Test.com: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_05.php#00468 2 [eff.org]
Clear Channel: http://www.eff.org/patent/wanted/patent.php?p=clea rchannel [eff.org]

God, I'm glad these guys do what they do.

http://www.eff.org/patent/ [eff.org]

Re:all clicks

[MindStalker]

No.. One click is just the nickname for the patent. That patent covers storage of users Credit and Address info so you can order and have something delievered by a simple single click of an Order button.
(Not that this is a bad patent, but the number of clicks is more of a side effect of the system and not the system itself)

Re:Not saying I like the patent

[Macblaster]

Ingenious to patent. Amazon saw their sales shoot up dramatically when they implemented the feature. Barnes and Noble, wanting to see the same result, now has to pay Amazon in order to do so, making having the buisness model and patenting the buisness model a twofold win for Amazon. Yes it's a simple matter of acting on user input, but most buisness model patents are mind numbingly simple and general, which is why I dont like the idea of them at all. Personally, I hope they're all thrown out, but because these types of patents are accepted as legal, to patent one-click was a very smart (and ingenious) move on Amazon's part.

Re:Not saying I like the patent

[Jimb0v]

Are you against all method patents? Why should a business method be treated any different than that method for some innovative method of molding plastic? There are a lot of business methods that exist that I would have considered patentable at the time. Frequent flyer miles? Drive up banking? These ideas when they first came on the scene were completely foreign and I don't see how you can say they are any different intuitively than a method for using a widget.