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But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea.

Unfortunately, while that's how it was supposed to work, that's not how it does work.

Amazon's "one-click" patent is an obvious case in point: they own the idea of executing an Internet shopping transaction with a single mouse click. No matter how divergent your implementation is from theirs (and to be fair to Amazon, Barnes & Nobles' implementation wasn't very divergent) they effectively own the core idea and, by extension, any work you put into it.

It's utterly impossible to argue that this state of affairs encourages progress in the useful arts and sciences, or otherwise benefits society in any way.




Amazon didn't just patent an idea. They patented an extremely effective embodiment of that idea. One-click wasn't a pint-glass-and-bar-napkin patent.


I have an extremely effective embodiment of brushing my teeth, but you don't see me running off to the patent office to keep other people from brushing my teeth that way.

Of course, if I could brush my teeth on the Internet, I can see how that might be different.


It sounds like you're trying to argue that one-click was as obvious as brushing your teeth. Amazon was far from the first company to take payments over the net --- I remember buying an RSA shirt by keying the ABA and account numbers off a check. But Amazon appears to have been the first company to actually publish an embodiment of one-click shopping. Why's that?


Honestly, I don't know. It could be that smaller online retailers were afraid of the inevitable rise in returns, chargebacks, and other customer-service hassles that would accompany any measures that encourage impulse buying. I know I would be.

While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders.

The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection.

Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.




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