Amazon One-Click Patent Shot Down By US Patent Office
One of the dumbest patents granted in recent history has got to be Amazon’s “One Click” ordering patent. Clicking on a buy button and, you know, buying something — it seems rather obvious. Now it looks like parts of the patent have been struck down. Unfortunately, not because it’s a stupid and obvious idea, but because it’s a stupid and obvious idea someone else had already patented:
But when Calveley examined the 1-Click patent’s claims at the USPTO’s website, he recalled a patent for Digicash filed in 1996, the year before Amazon.com’s filing. The Digicash patent describes a process in which a purchaser has electronic cash in an account. The customer clicks on an item to buy using a single action; a sum is deducted from his account; and an item is sent to the user, perhaps as a download.
He saw an opportunity: some of the claims in Amazon.com’s patent seemed very wide-ranging and overlapped, in his opinion, with the claims of the Digicash patent and other unpatented prior art, including a system that dials a number and delivers an item upon a single click, without user interaction.
Read the relevant blog post by the instigator of the patent review here.
