[ballenf]

I found

> the patent will expire and the technology behind it will be free to be used by any e-commerce site

particularly specious. There is no "technology" behind it. It was a concept or busines process that the vaguaries of patent law deemed worthy of rewarding.

Not to mention that any technology ("source code") Amazon used to implement the patent will remain under copyright essentially indefinitely.

[nsxwolf]

Are you just quibbling about the semantics used in the article?

Or are you saying nobody else can implement "1 click" even after the patent expires... because of copyright?

Edit: Was an honest question, I've upvoted all the answers as I found them interesting, not understanding the barrage of downvotes shrug

[derefr]

They're saying that, unlike usual patents, the content of the one-click patent filing does not serve as a useful basis for anyone else's implementation of a one-click shopping cart. This is the whole point of patents: to publicize a trade-secret process in exchange for protection. If your patent can't be used by your competitors to (make it easier to) start doing the thing you're doing, then you didn't really file a patent.

The one-click patent has an implementation, but the implementation is so trivial that there are only two things you can do with it: either copy it wholesale, or write your own based on the same idea (which will have nothing in common with the original because they're both too small to "share DNA" like that.) In this case, you can't copy wholesale, because copyright. So you're stuck writing from scratch. At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.

[CamperBob2]

Exactly. If the teachings in the patent aren't necessary or even useful to future developers, then what was the point of granting a 20-year monopoly in the first place? No research expenses needed to be recouped, and there was never any danger that some arcane knowledge would be locked away forever as a trade secret.

Many patents don't reward the first person who solves a given problem, so much as they reward the first person to encounter a given problem. That person adopts a trivial, obvious solution and the USPTO cheerfully rubber-stamps it at everyone else's expense. This was clearly one of those patents. It cost Amazon essentially nothing to research, nothing to develop, and nothing to implement, but the rewards were immense.

[mcphage]

> If your patent can't be used by your competitors to (make it easier to) start doing the thing you're doing, then you didn't really file a patent.

This is a good way of describing the point of patents, thanks :-)

[hathawsh]

This is the most insightful description of patents I've ever seen. Thank you.

[dmurray]

> At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.

This depends on whether you consider X to be "converting ecommerce sales" or "ordering items with a single click". Just because the implementation is easy to reverse engineer from a one line description of the novelty doesn't diminish the resources spent by Amazon in coming up with this insight and testing how it improved their business.

I'm not strongly in favour of software patents in general, but the argument that this patent is "too easy to copy" misses the point a bit.

[DavidAdams]

I think the comment is both quibbling about semantics (the article used the term "technology" overly broadly because the value of the one-click idea isn't in the implementation but really just in the concept) but I think also voices a legitimate complaint.

The same failure of understanding that caused the author of that blog post to misidentify Amazon's one click patent as being related to a "technology" rather than just an idea is also behind the patent office's troubling tendency to issue patents to other ideas. Advocates for patent reform make a convincing case that issuing patent protection to ideas like this actually harms innovation more than it fosters it.

The fact that the actual implementation (technology) of the one click shopping idea, the source code, is protected by copyright is true but isn't particularly relevant. And to answer your second question, copyright prevents anyone from using Amazon's particular one-click source code, but that's largely irrelevant, since it's an idea that can be implemented a million ways, which is a major reason that many people feel it shouldn't be eligible for patent protection.

[wpietri]

I don't think it's a quibble. I think it's a point about what even makes sense to be patentable. The expiration of the patent frees up exactly zero technology.

[FeepingCreature]

To clarify, it's not that the special technology behind it doesn't get freed, it's that there is no special technology behind it.

[abpavel]

Business process can be considered a technology, i.e. technical procedure. Also, since they got the patent, wouldn't they have to pass tests for previous works, novelty, and obviousness? And, why shouldn't something be patentable, just because it's easy to replicate?

[pc2g4d]

Being easy to replicate often suggests that it is, in fact, _obvious_. Which is supposed to invalidate the patent.

[delazeur]

Lots of things become easy to replicate after they've been done once, despite being non-obvious before. The "no obvious inventions" part of patent law is supposed to prevent people from patenting things that are already broadly used (or small variations on things that are already broadly used). The cliched example being that you can't patent the wheel.

Edit: I see that Animats has covered this much better elsewhere in the thread.

[rixed]

> Lots of things become easy to replicate after they've been done once, despite being non-obvious before

Maybe, but this is not why we have patents. Patents justification is to help innovations to spread, by making them public and, in exchange, granting a monopoly for some time as would have been the case should the innovation been kept secret.

Patents are not, in theory, a bonus for whoever implement something first.

In practice though, this seems to be largely the case, at least in software, that patents are like those mine field maps during the gold rushes, partitioning the hills and delimiting every tiny area belonging to one miner, probably to police what would otherwise be a violent, perpetual quarrel.

[delazeur]

> Maybe, but this is not why we have patents.

Yeah, and? I wasn't saying so.

[tenkeyless]

this is nonsense

[tokenizerrr]

Explain?