Amazon Wants Patent for All-You-Can-Eat Shipping 76
theodp writes "USPTO documents released Thursday show that Amazon is seeking a patent covering subscription-based shipping, aka Amazon Prime. Among the seven listed inventors is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been singing the praises of Amazon Prime to Wall Street."
Re:I don't understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient for Amazon to establish this program as being "theirs" and make it obvious that anyone else who does it later is an imitator.
Prime will kill them eventually. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Because once upon a time, you could get free shipping and have something a few days later. Then, Super Saver started taking longer... and longer... and longer. They'd wait a week to ship an item that was 'ships within 24 hours'. I suppose this probably happened around the time that Prime was taking shape. But then, and this is the kicker, lots of items on the Amazon site started showing up as longer ship times than they'd had before. 'Ships within 3-5 days' or something like that for an item that used to be 24 hours. As someone who has a Prime membership, free or not, I found that irritating. But then the worst part:
They still often ship the items the next day. They just ship them by a method that will take longer to get there, even though you've used Prime for 'free second day shipping'. The excuse for this is that it 'still arrives within the delivery window', even though they're the ones who set the delivery window as being a week later for an in-stock product.
I'd rather they patented this, to be honest, because I don't want any other company copying it. I don't want to pay for the people who buy 'all you can ship' packages and then ship a huge piece of furniture on it, when all I'm usually shipping is small items. But I think that, patent or not, this will eventually either start costing a lot more or vanish entirely. The delays are a symptom of a system that doesn't work. They're having to cut corners now to afford Prime. They can't do that forever, because people won't pay for prime if *everything* starts taking a week to arrive with 'second day' shipping.
I don't want other companies doing this. I'm fine with paying for shipping if it's a reasonable price. Free is cool, too, because I know I'm still paying for it but it's packaged into the prices I'm paying, I don't have to add things to my cart to figure it out. I don't want to show up at other online sites where I shop to find that I suddenly have to shell out $80 to get things promptly because the 'free' shipping suddenly takes three times longer than it used to. It's not fair to the customers.
I like this idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't understand... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't understand... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a capitalist society we call this window of protection "first to market".
Seriously, there's not need to create ANOTHER class of patents when the current system is in such obvious shambles. Such a "short-term" patent would also likely be abused heavily, with the patent owner adding small tweaks just before the expiration term to magically extend it, or something similar. Obviously available expoits would depend on the rules for such a patent class, but do you really trust those to be written well given how the current system is working? Again, no need for this, if you implement it first it will likely take your competitors about 6 months to reverse engineer and adapt to offering the same thing, no special short-term protections needed in that case.