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

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).