Matt Loney's Blog
What it says on the box
Wednesday 1 November 2006, 12:32 PM
1-Click at 6
In my inbox this morning from Theodp and reproduced here verbatim:
"Six years ago, the NY Times hyped the launch of now-defunct BountyQuest, the patent reform lovechild of Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly. Last June, Amazon lobbyist Paul Misener invoked the ghost of BountyQuest, asking Congress to believe that the Bezos-funded company's failure to declare an 'official' winner in an O'Reilly-underwritten contest to debunk Amazon's 1-Click patent proved that 1-Click was novel. Misener made the mistake of going on to boast that no 1-Click prior art had ever surfaced, prompting Rep. Howard Berman to call BS and point out that the USPTO had ordered a reexamination of the patent in May. So we should expect self-proclaimed patent protester O'Reilly to cry foul over Amazon's subversion of BountyQuest and suggestion that Tim himself proved 1-Click was patent-worthy, right? Maybe not. After all, Tim's counting on 1-Click inventor Bezos, lobbyist Misener and other patent-packing Amazonians to entertain the high-rollers next week at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference."
Now I have come to love 1-Click, especially when used with something like Google's book search. Find a book, click through to Amazon. Click on the 1-Click button, and that's it. A horribly easy way to spend money, and a great lesson for e-commerce operations everywhere. But I still don't think it should be patenable. I also love the fact that my newsagent recognises me by name when I walk to buy a newspaper; but it should hardly be patentable. It is simply not a novel idea.
Of course I'm ignoring here the whole issue of whether software should be patentable. But we've just launched this redesign and I have a lot of testnig to do on what we think is a pretty novel site with some pretty novel features peppered around it, and which quite frankly we'd be flattered if our competitors tried to copy.
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