The Patent

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has, once again, issued a questionable patent, this time to Amazon.com. The Patent Office has granted Amazon patent #5,960,411 a "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network." What has Amazon actually patented? The ability to store some identifying little token in your browser, so that the browser will automatically send your identity to the web server when you select the "purchase" button. In short, Amazon has patented its 1-Click interface.

If that doesn't seem to you like a particularly innovative idea, one worthy of a 17-year enclusive patent, you're in good company. Blame the U.S. Patent Office for granting yet another ill-advised, inappropriate patent.

But it doesn't stop there. Having acquired the patent, Amazon proceeded to file a lawsuit against its rival, Barnes & Noble, for patent infringement. In early December, 1999, according to The New York Times, "Judge Marsha J. Pechman of Federal District Court in Seattle issued a preliminary injuction" preventing barnesandnoble.com from using the 1-click ordering system for which Amazon.COM holds a patent. Barnes and Noble has appealed the decision. It also plans to replace its 1-click ordering system with one that requires two clicks; Judge Pechman also ruled that Amazon's patent specifically incorporates methods to purchase an item over the Internet using only a single action. ¹

The Boycott

Richard Stallman of GNU fame called for a boycott of Amazon,^2, 4  to protest Amazon's tactics, and to draw attention to the sorry state of U.S. patent law, especially as it relates to software. Tim O'Reilly, of well-known technical book publisher, O'Reilly and Associates, has published a series of columns on the Amazon patent, including an open letter to Amazon.³

Amazon's patent is a bad patent that should never have been granted. I personally support a boycott of Amazon.com. To that end, I sent the this letter to Amazon, requesting that they close my account. I will not purchase anything more from Amazon, until and unless they choose not to enforce this (and other) patents. It doesn't matter that the patent lawsuit has been settled. As long as Amazon has not publicly declared that they will not enforce this patent, I plan to boycott their business. I urge you to do the same.

News

In reverse chronological order.

• 14 October, 2007: Peter Calveley announced that the USPTO has rejected the claims of the Amazon.com one-click patent following the re-examination request that he filed on 16 February 2006. Peter further states:

  My review resulted in the broadest claims of the patent being ruled invalid.
  
  In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.
  
  I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!
  
  Amazon has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office's rejection, but third party requests for reexamination, like the one I filed, result in having the subject patent either modified or completely revoked about 2/3 of the time.

  See Peter's blog entry for further details.
  
  Also picked up by BoingBoing.
• 16 May, 2006: Apparently, the U.S. Patent office has ordered a re-examination of Amazon's 1-click patent, based on a request filed by Peter Calveley that cited prior art. See Peter Caveley's blog for additional information.
• On 20 April, 2004, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Patent Busting Project, a campaign to overturn several patents that it says are having a chilling effect on public and consumer interest. According to their web site, "EFF will begin filing challenges to each in the form of a 're-examination request' to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office". Among the patents it cites is the Amazon 1-click patent.
• In March, 2002, Amazon and Barnes and Noble settled their suit. According to various articles, the terms of the settlement were not disclosed. At the time, Richard Stallman wrote a good argument for continuing the boycott of Amazon.com, despite the settlement. Basically, he argues that the boycott should continue because the terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Six months later, in September, 2002, the Free Software Foundation ended its boycott of Amazon. Their stated reason (from the top of their boycott page) seems a little lame: "We could not tell the precise result of the lawsuit against Barnes and Noble, but it did not seem to be very harmful to the defendent. And Amazon had not attacked anyone else."
• A 14 May, 2001 article by the IDG News Services stated that Japan's patent office has rejected Amazon's patent, on the grounds that prior art exists. The Japanese patent office has given Amazon two weeks to respond. (Unfortunately, the IDG article is no longer online.)
• According to an Internet News article, on 14 February, 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit "overturned a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court judge in Seattle in December 1999 prohibiting Barnes & Noble.com from using one-click shopping technology that allegedly infringed on arch-rival Amazon.com's online shopping tool." This development means that the case goes back to trial.

End Notes

¹New York Times article on Amazon.com's patent, http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/biztech/articles/03amazon.html. (Free subscription required.)

²Richard Stallman's call for an Amazon.com boycott, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html

³Tim O'Reilly's various columns:

• His 28 February, 2000, Ask Tim column, wherein he (a) quotes a letter he sent to Jeff Bezos, and (b) includes a reference to his open letter to Amazon, among other things.
• My Conversation with Jeff Bezos, detailing O'Reilly's March, 2000, phone conversation with Bezos.
• Reader's comments (and O'Reilly's reply) to his March column
• O'Reilly's column on Amazon's Patent Proposal

⁴You can find Richard Stallman's argument for continuing the Amazon boycott, despite the settlement of the patent lawsuit, at the following URL. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html#whyContinue.

Other Patent-related Resources

• United States Patent and Trademark Office
• European Patent Office
• Patents HQ, a clearing house for patent-related information.

Brian Clapper, bmc @ clapper . org
20 December, 1999
Last updated: 16 May, 2006

$Id: index.html 7066 2007-10-17 13:25:37Z bmc $