How Hard Is It To Realize That One-Click Buying Doesn't Deserve A Patent?

Posted by Tux De Luxe at 08:42 24/02/2010
How Hard Is It To Realize That One-Click Buying Doesn't Deserve A Patent?: "For many, many, many years, Amazon's clearly ridiculous one-click patent has been exhibit number one in a patent system gone mad. And yet... the USPTO and Amazon cling to it. After some earlier challenges at the beginning of the last decade went nowhere, in 2005, an actor/blogger dug up some prior art that resulted in the USPTO reconsidering, and finally, the USPTO realized that maybe a patent on single-click buying didn't make sense. But, for some reason, Amazon and Jeff Bezos (who a decade ago was a founder of a project to bust bogus patents) have aggressively fought to keep the patent alive. And so we've now entered the fifth year of the review process, which seems to involve some rather annoyed USPTO patent examiners, who are fed up with what appears to be Amazon simply dumping busywork on the examiners to avoid a final rejection of the patent. So, not only is the one-click patent a great example of how patents that never should have been granted still get granted, but it's also demonstrating the ridiculous lengths to which one must go to invalidate a bad patent.

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