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.
"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.
Previous
