There are 26 claims in Amazon.com's patent for Method
and system for placing a purchase order via a communications
network, better known as its 1-Click patent. Only five of
the claims – numbered 6 to 10 – have been deemed "patentable and/or
confirmed." Twenty-one others were rejected.
Peter Calveley from Auckland has previously told OUT-LAW that he has no business
interest in revoking Amazon's most famous asset of intellectual
property.
He worked as a motion capture performer and appeared as part of
the evil armies in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy before
he began his Amazon.com campaign over 18 months ago. He said
at the time that it was a simply a hobby borne of an interest in
patents and a frustration with an order for a book from Amazon that
took too long to arrive.
Amazon applied for its famous patent in September 1997, naming
founder and CEO Jeff Bezos as one of three inventors.
Only new inventions can be patented. An invention is not
eligible for a patent if it has been described in prior art. Prior
art includes any information that has been made available to the
public in any form before the patent application is filed. Calveley
submitted a 22-page list of evidence that he considered prior
art.
Among Calveley's evidence was a patent filed in April 1994
that described a one-button
ordering process for interactive TV. "When a viewer wishes to
order an item, a button is pressed on the TV remote control. This
button signals the client computer ... to solicit the information
necessary to place the order," says the patent.
The USPTO noted that process
and also that another part of that patent described
generating an order to purchase a requested item for the purchaser
using an identifier. "The client computer would not know which
information to retrieve from the permanent memory or who to charge
or send the item to unless an identifier was transmitted when the
order was placed from the user's interactive TV," it said.
Another patent, filed more than one year before Amazon's,
describes an On-line
secured financial transaction system through electronic
media. The USPTO noted that it "shows method for
ordering an item using a client system … comprising: displaying
information identifying the item and displaying an indication of a
single action that is to be performed to order the identified item
… The product may be purchased by clicking on a single action
button 'BUY'"
Eight claims fell because of an article that appeared in
Newsweek in 1995, The End of Money?, by Senior Editor
Steven Levy. Levy's Newsweek article included this explanation:
“You’re cruising the net,
hopping from link to link with your favorite browser. In a small
window in the corner of your screen sits a ledger. ‘$100.00' it
reads. As you land on a favorite web site, something strikes your
fancy – an annotated bibliography of every article ever written
about Sandra Bullock! Only five bucks. You click on a button, and
the file is downloaded to your computer. That tiny ledger on your
screen now reads '$95.00.'”
The USPTO noted: "Levy shows method for ordering an item using a
client system (a computer and a Web site, … the method comprising:
displaying information identifying the item (for example, an
article on Sandra Bullock) and displaying an indication of a single
action that is to be performed to order the identified item by
clicking on a button."
Another of Amazon's patents, Secure
method and system for communicating a list of credit card
numbers, filed in 1995 and naming Bezos as inventor,
undermined three other claims of the 1-Click patent.
Five claims in the 1-Click patent were upheld because the prior
art did not cover a single-action ordering system that includes a
shopping cart ordering component. The patents cited by Calveley
related to a system called DigiCash, where a user has access to
electronic cash to purchase items electronically.
"None of these DigiCash or electronic cash systems or the prior
art contemplates or suggests a single action ordering system or
component that includes a shopping cart ordering component."
The patent office concludes that two claims in Amazon's patent
could become patentable if they were amended to refer to a shopping
cart model.
In a blog posting
last night, Calveley wrote: "Amazon has the opportunity to respond
to the Patent Office's rejection, but third party requests for
reexamination, like the one I filed, result in having the subject
patent either modified or completely revoked about 2/3 of the
time."
Amazon.com's 1-Click patent became famous when it sued rival
bookseller Barnes & Noble.com in 1999. It alleged infringement
for allowing B&N customers to make repeat purchases just by
clicking on a product. B&N argued that the patent should be
declared invalid but a court imposed an injunction, requiring it to
change its shopping process. The companies later agreed
settlement terms. Amazon.com has since licensed the patent to other
retailers, including Apple.
