Patent madness
I just read on Techdirt that not only has our USPTO approved Amazon’s 1-Click patent, it has gone so far as to broaden the scope of the patent. Now, you know I love Bezos’ boys, right? I think they’re a company that has consistently grokked the web. They’ve spent so much effort in really interesting ways in adding to the shopping experience on their site that shopping on Amazon really is a much more in depth experience than other sites - in many ways it was a Web2.0 site well in advance of the buzzword.
This patent business, though, has always been the bad guy side of Amazon. It was one of the first business process patents that the web folks started getting, that I can recall. To some degree, the fact that you can get these business process patents at all underscores the need to actually get them - defensively at least. Obviously, Amazon’s 1-Click isn’t defensive - since they don’t let anyone else do that. And for them to seek a broadening of the patent - which was thrice rejected by the USPTO (the 4th time, as ever, was the charm) - is, sorry, patently ridiculous. They now have the patent on “contacting the recipient of an order via e-mail or a phone call”, according to Techdirt.
It just happened that the guy handling this forth case was sympathetic to Amazon and approved it. Just like that. He cited an inability for anyone to show prior 1-Click art as the reason of approving it. That however isn’t the problem. Patents, for good or ill, were designed to make it feasible to make a profit off of the huge investment in R&D necessary for certain things like pharmaceuticals. The idea being, if you spent a billion dollars to invent something you need to have some advantage over someone else who can just take your invention and resell it - otherwise no will will invest the money to develop these things. Business processes on the other hand are not a big invention - they did not require significant R&D time or money. It took 1 guy about 5 minutes to sit down and say,”Hmm.. this process is too slow, we already have all their payment information, let’s just have on button to order it!”. And then it took another few days for the genius developers at Amazon to add that feature in.
That argument over this should not be about prior art for these specific cases but should be about business process patents in general. Framing the argument as though there was no difference between the 1-Click patent and the patent for a new molecule that cost a billion dollars to invent is a deceptive practice.
