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1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open t

1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open to patents that seem obvious. Sometimes novel and obvious ideas are there but it takes a special spark to get them defined and known. I will take 100 useless and obvious ideas, if it means we get 1 useful never seen one that helps us. By the way, "obvious" is only seen after it is presented. Think about it in these terms. There are math problems that seem impossible to solve yet once the answer is presented one wonders why they did not come up with the answer since the answer seems so obvious. Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves. The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
> 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.
chrismcb 3y ago
Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click. My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.
TylerE 3y ago
My favorite, somewhat memey but factually correct example is that we put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.
opportune 3y ago
1-click was patented in the days of forms, session tokens, ajax, etc. being relatively new. So yes someone was going to be first. Someone was absolutely going to figure out the implementation of 1-click ordering regardless of who patented it. That’s why software patents suck, they almost always take the form of “apply technology X to domain Y in a really basic way” which would be invented hundreds of times independently even with no prior art - but whoever gets that patent gets to block or tax all those other independent inventions of the same pattern for years. I can’t speak as much to other industries but I’m confident it describes many many patents outside software. It’s not obvious in hindsight dude, it’s obvious that given a website where I’m buying things, a good UX for some cases is to just let me buy the thing in one click. Hey I have a bunch of ideas for LLMs, should I get a patent for “a system for using a transformer model to find a message in a system’s logs” or “use a transformer model to identify a problem in an application” or “use a transformer model to produce output in the style of some human generated input”? Those are obvious given the invention of transformers, but software patents often take that exact structure “payment over a network” “use of a biometric signal to authenticate a banking transaction”. I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to implement what you’re patenting to get the patent, just describe it well enough and hope nobody else implemented it or filed for it first. Which just incentivizes purely unproductive behavior of patenting “ideas” you expect will be independently arrived at many times in the near future so you can tax them. Or makes a market for so-called “inventors” to engage in this inefficient behavior so they can sell their “inventions” (accepted patents) to trolls or megacorps to do that (yes, this is what the people who file patents to tax others for a living call themselves).

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago

> 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.

chrismcb 3y ago

Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click. My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.

TylerE 3y ago

My favorite, somewhat memey but factually correct example is that we put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.

opportune 3y ago

1-click was patented in the days of forms, session tokens, ajax, etc. being relatively new. So yes someone was going to be first. Someone was absolutely going to figure out the implementation of 1-click ordering regardless of who patented it. That’s why software patents suck, they almost always take the form of “apply technology X to domain Y in a really basic way” which would be invented hundreds of times independently even with no prior art - but whoever gets that patent gets to block or tax all those other independent inventions of the same pattern for years. I can’t speak as much to other industries but I’m confident it describes many many patents outside software. It’s not obvious in hindsight dude, it’s obvious that given a website where I’m buying things, a good UX for some cases is to just let me buy the thing in one click. Hey I have a bunch of ideas for LLMs, should I get a patent for “a system for using a transformer model to find a message in a system’s logs” or “use a transformer model to identify a problem in an application” or “use a transformer model to produce output in the style of some human generated input”? Those are obvious given the invention of transformers, but software patents often take that exact structure “payment over a network” “use of a biometric signal to authenticate a banking transaction”. I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to implement what you’re patenting to get the patent, just describe it well enough and hope nobody else implemented it or filed for it first. Which just incentivizes purely unproductive behavior of patenting “ideas” you expect will be independently arrived at many times in the near future so you can tax them. Or makes a market for so-called “inventors” to engage in this inefficient behavior so they can sell their “inventions” (accepted patents) to trolls or megacorps to do that (yes, this is what the people who file patents to tax others for a living call themselves).