Ten years to test one click
Who sez the US Patent and Trademark Office is a mess?
Many readers may be too young to remember when Amazon.com took out a patent on the notion of one-click checkout. It was that long ago. Granted, such a concept is, of course, entirely non-obvious, took billions of dollars and millions of man-years in research and development, and you can’t blame them for thinking nobody had ever done anything similar before. I mean, clicks? On webpages? That’s innovation for you!
Now El Reg reports that due to the efforts of a New Zealander, most of the patent’s major claims have been struck down.
Don’t get me wrong. I like patents. In principle. But unlike our own patent office in South Africa, which is merely a registrar, the US PTO is actually supposed to investigate patent claims. That it so often fails in this mission is possibly one of the biggest problems with the patent system as it stands. It taints the entire principle of patents, making the defensible look ludicrously indefensible at times. Such as when it takes ten years and one month for the US PTO to laugh Jeff Bezos’s absurd claim out of their office.
(Hat tip: youngBLOOD.)
