Recently the Internet has started to seem like a lighter, happier place. Web pages have been clearer, graphics have looked snappier, Flash advertisements have seemed a tiny bit less annoying. It’s almost as if a great darkness has begun to lift.
What has been the cause of all of this good cheer? Why nothing less than the defeat of a great evil that has served as a symbol of all that is wrong with modern technologies and all the negative forces that threaten innovation today.
Yes, the notorious Amazon One-Click patent has finally been dealt a mortal blow and will hopefully soon no longer exist to threaten those who wish to innovate in the field of eCommerce.
Since it first rose from its dark pit in the late 1990’s, the Amazon One-Click patent has served as a symbol of all that was wrong with the patent system in the United States.
Even from a purely technological standpoint, the One-Click patent was pretty weak and based on obvious techniques that had been done in earlier electronic shopping models.
But what made the One-Click patent so infamous was that it was one of the first and most egregious examples of the incredibly stupid idea that is business method patents.
To pretty much everyone it sounded like the dumbest thing in the world, even in that relatively early time for the Web. People would say, “Wait a second, they patented clicking once to buy something? Isn’t that like patenting service with a smile or getting a pizza for free if it isn’t delivered in thirty minutes?”
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