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Personally, I think that "one-click" buying idea and implementation is a brilliant, and deserves to be patented. disc: former Amazon employee
by galkk 6y ago
Personally, I think that "one-click" buying idea and implementation is a brilliant, and deserves to be patented.
disc: former Amazon employee
- joshspankit 6y agoWhat’s unique about this vs the experience of a (hypothetically) rich person walking in to a department store where they have an account and saying “I’ll take that, that, and that.” then walking out and knowing that it will be delivered to their house simply by virtue of the fact that the management know their face and their preferences?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI can do you one better. I ate lunch at the same sidewalk restaurant in Shanghai almost every day for several months. I usually didn't order at all; instead, they recognized me, knew what I wanted, and brought it out without needing to be asked.
- joshspankit 6y agoI now have this dread that someone has already software-patented that. Something like “automatic ordering based on user recognition”
- Teletype 6y agoYes I agree. I am old enough to remember working on software before Amazon existed that had one click ordering. Never occurred to us that it was anything but bloody obvious, like 2 plus 2 is 4.... now theirs an idea.
- TheDong 6y agoLet's be clear about the point of patents first. Patents are for non-obvious inventions, and they exist to encourage sharing that invention's details with the public. The idea is that a patented invention is novel enough that it's unlikely someone else would independently invent it, so the patent encourages the inventor to share all the details of the invention (and in exchange gives them a monopoly on it). Patents are specifically _not_ for good ideas that aren't non-obvious inventions. You can't patent the idea of "1 click buying" or "a time machine", only an actual invention/implementation that does those things. I agree amazon's 1-click experience is a really good idea. It's also well designed and implemented. The question though is whether some other developer could, given the idea of "1 click buy", create this "invention". I think it's unquestionable that, given the problem statement, many other developers of the time could have created the same thing. In fact, a bunch of other developers have already created 1-click buy buttons, and I assure you the vast majority did not read amazon's patent to figure out how to write that code. The fact that people can build this invention without looking at amazon's patent, to me, proves it should not be patentable. The general public gained nothing from the patent.
- Retric 6y agoThat’s not really how patents are supposed to work. If you give someone enough constraints almost any patent will seem obvious. The point of patents is when an entire industry is solving a given problem doing X, and someone comes up with a better option then you want that industry to use the better method. To get that swap you need public disclosure in some industries, and to get public disclosure you need incentives. For widely available products that disclosure may consist of the actual object without any patents. But, for say oil refineries people don’t just get to walk around and see what’s what. Having said that the parent system could be changed in a vast number of ways with many tradeoffs. Just consider the wider implications beyond just software or mass produced items.
- newsclues 6y agoNon obvious test? If the patent was never invented and filed, would a child be able to come up with and communicate the idea patented? If one click to buy didn’t exist today, how many children would be able to simply state the obvious solution of one click purchasing?
- TheDong 6y agoThe actual non-obvious test is not a child, but "a person skilled in the art" (of software in this case). You also are talking about the idea, not the invention. The idea was not patented, the technical invention (effectively flow-charts for how to have a button click trigger an auth cookie check, have databases retrieve credit card numbers, etc), which is not obvious to a child. But, I would argue, the details of the invention would be clear enough to someone skilled in the art, another competent programmer.
- jkrems 6y ago> If give someone enough constraints almost any patent will seem obvious. That seems like a strawperson. The parent said that just given the very rough idea or (I would add) even just the term "1 click buy", somebody could have created a comparable experience without any reference to the patent. That's not "give someone enough constraints". That's "let somebody overhear a customer mention the feature in passing". Suggesting that Amazon wouldn't have invented 1-click buy without patents seems incompatible with good business practices. All my conversations with other developers mentioned a single reason for patenting "random" features at this point: As a way to defend against other people's patents. The only reason _not_ to create a novel feature was that it may be too close to something patented and a lucky lawyer may have argued that it was too close. If anything, software patents actively discourage innovation. I've never heard of anybody implementing a feature by using a patent. I've never heard of somebody developing a novel feature to get a patent. Which means as "patents", they are useless.
- Terretta 6y agoFWIW I had an e-commerce product offering one click buying from dynamic banner ads (!) before Amazon had one click buying. I think it was obvious at the time, and cannot fathom why other stores didn’t try it earlier except perhaps fraud fears. Separately, Amazon is often no longer one-click, which will bite you when you think you ordered but were instead on a supplemental question page you clicked back from without reading. Super annoying when the product doesn’t show up 2 days later.