USPTO Orders Re-examination of Amazon.com 1-click patent after prior art claim

[mandy]

The US Patent and Trademark Office ordered a re-examination of Amazon.com's controversial 1-click patent on Friday following a New Zealander's discovery of what he believes to be prior art. Peter Calveley is not a aggrieved inventor; he's just having fun.

...when Calveley examined the 1-Click patent's claims at the USPTO's website he recalled a patent for Digicash filed in 1996, the year before Amazon.com's filing. The Digicash patent describes a process in which a purchaser has electronic cash in an account. The customer clicks on an item to buy using a single action; a sum is deducted from his account; and an item is sent to the user, perhaps as a download.

He saw an opportunity: some of the claims in Amazon.com's patent seemed very wide-ranging and overlapped, in his opinion, with the claims of the Digicash patent and other unpatented prior art, including a system that dials a number and delivers an item upon a single click, without user interaction...

full article: http://www.out-law.com/Default.aspx?page=6928

[mandy]

Update:

A panel of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected most of Amazon.com's 1-Click online purchasing system patent claims because of evidence that another patent predated this one.

In its decision, dated September 26, the three-judge panel reversed an earlier decision approving the patent claims and remanded it back to the patent examiner...

full article: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9799269...=nefd.only