Amazon’s One-click Patent Squashed
Apparently Amazon’s one-click patent has been struck down! I presume this to be true, only because I read it on the internet. I looked around on the uspto.gov site as it says to on that post and found something but nothing that said in bold words this was true. Anyhizzie the optimist in me believes that the one-click patent was never a reasonable one and that this is a true thing. And not long ago, the one-click patent was upheld by the USPTO. Color me confused.
This was, to my admittedly faulty memory, the first internet business process patent that was just awful. It should never have been granted. I mean if patents are designed to encourage investment in research and development of really expensive things, say… the many zillions of dollars and years necessary to invent some new pharmaceutical molecule, how much of the opposite of zillions of dollars and years of research was it for some suit in Seattle to sit down and say,”You know what? It’d be cool if we could save people’s data and just use it when they push this link. Can you guys do that?”
It’s one of the few genuinely evil (to steal Google’s parlance) things that I’ve known Amazon to do and they did it so early on. It generated them a lot of ill will, but as all things, people got over it and generally speaking forgot about it. I’m glad that this guy didn’t.
