Thursday, March 11, 2010

One Click Patent Reexamination over - with claims amended and other Amazon applications rejected in light of my prior art

The USPTO has recently issued a ""notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate" for the Amazon.com one-click patent, which was subject to a reexamination request that I filed in light of some prior art that I found. The Amazon.com claims were amended to remove their broad monopoly on "One click shopping", confining it to situations in which there is a shopping cart involved.

Despite the Amazon corporate spin permeating the web, the amendment of the claims was significant and opens the way to the use of one-click shopping in a wide range of settings, and would be very useful, for example in mobile devices where people do not want to wade through a shopping cart.

Conduct of the reexamination

The claim amendments were forced as I found prior art that clearly anticipated the claims. However the USPTO made no more than a cosmetic attempt to reexamine the claims from an obviousness perspective, despite the radically new prior art that was found.
The fact that "one click shopping" is obvious from a common-sense viewpoint was what caused the public outcry in the first place, so one would think the USPTO would want to conduct a serious examination of this aspect rather than essentially ignoring it as they did.

Therefore I am very glad that I had prior art that clearly anticipated their claims, rather than having to rely on obviousness.

The USPTO blatantly ignored their own rules about the conduct of reexamination.
They disregarded the time limits in the MPEP about the time Amazon was allowed to respond to each office action,
Amazon was essentially given unlimited time to file as many kg (I have lost track by now but I think almost 100 kg) of pointless submissions as they wanted, when in most cases, they should only have had a few weeks to respond to each office action. Therefore this dragged on for far longer than it should have.

Effect on other Amazon patent applications

The prior art I found, such as the Levy article, has now also been used in the rejection of another Amazon patent application 09/318,447 and the final rejection of yet another Amazon application 11/618,452 (Both also, like the original "one-click" patent, titled "METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PLACING A PURCHASE ORDER VIA A COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK ".
Yay!

I would like to thank everyone who helped out, especially those who helped pay for the reexamination request in the first place.
Look me up anytime.

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