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Out-Law News 2 min. read

Amazon.com gets cookies patent, incites boycott


A free-software activist yesterday threatened to repeat an earlier campaign for a boycott of Amazon.com if the company tries to enforce a recently granted cookies patent, according to news site ZDNet UK.

In 1984, Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project that developed a free UNIX-like operating system called GNU. His site explains that GNU, pronounced "guh-noo," is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."

He adds that variants of the GNU operating system, which use the Linux kernel, are now widely used; and though these systems are often referred to as "Linux", he says they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.

Stallman first organised a boycott of Amazon.com in 2000 when it asserted its rights in its controversial "one-click" business method patent by suing rival book retailer Barnes & Noble. The action settled, but not before Barnes & Noble had altered its on-line purchasing system to require two clicks rather than one.

This week, Stallman told ZDNet in an e-mail that he will re-launch the boycott if Amazon.com attacks anyone over a patent granted this week for "Use of browser cookies to store structured data".

Cookies are small text files sent from a web server to a web site visitor's computer and are stored on the hard drive, so that when the user visits the web site again or visits another page of the site, the site will remember him.

Without cookies, it is often said that the internet would have no memory. They are used by most commercial web sites and serve a valuable purpose.

The cookie patent now granted to Amazon.com, according to the patent filing, applies to "web site customisation using cookies, and more particularly, to a method of extending the functionality of cookies to increase web site performance." The patent focuses on solving the problem of multiple accesses to the back end database.

According to ZDNet, Stallman's first boycott had little effect on Amazon.com, but succeeded in raising the profile of software and business method patents. The controversy over these patents continues and there is growing pressure on the US Patent and Trademark Office to rethink its approach.

According to John MacKenzie, intellectual property specialist at Masons, the international law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM:

"This is a good example of the distinct difference between the US Patent office and the approach taken by the European Patent Office. In the States both business method and software patents are allowed. In the EU they are not.

"The dilemma for those operating on-line is that the internet is global, and the creation of sophisticated cookies might infringe the Amazon.com patent. Instead of the US Patent office checking the patent, for example for prior art, it is left to the companies targeted by Amazon.com to argue that the patent is not valid.

"This is obviously an unsatisfactory situation that has many calling upon the US Congress to rectify."

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