Kiwi actor v Amazon.com – Technology – smh.com.au
> After trawling the US patent records, Calveley found another patent describing an “online secure financial transaction system” which had been lodged in 1996 – a year before Amazon’s.
> He also found references to a so-called DigiCash payment method in which a click on a website payment link would trigger a server to send a payment request to the customer. That also pre-dated Amazon patent. (Ironically, he discovered the Digicash evidence on an archival website that is partly bankrolled by an Amazon company.)
> So he fired off a letter to the US Patent Office with his findings, requesting a re-examination of the 1-Click patent on the grounds that Amazon’s process wasn’t original.
> Late last week he got the news he’d been waiting for. The US Patents Office had granted his request saying that his request had raised “substantial new question of patentability of claims”.
All this work because Amazon.com was slow with delivering a book he ordered. I’ve long meant that the US Patent system is in dire need of an overhaul, maybe this kind of thing will get even more people to demand change. Software patents are inherently a bad idea, anyways.
