One man’s fight kneeling Amazon down

Who said one man can’t change the world?

Today is a great day for everyone with an interest in free speech, free software, software, freedom and.. well.. for everyone:

The infamous one-click patent owned by Amazon has finally been proven invalid. This was one of the most controversial patents in the history of internet and, as Paul Graham tells us:

The problem with Amazon’s notorious one-click patent, for example, is not that it’s a software patent, but that it’s obvious. Any online store that kept people’s shipping addresses would have implemented this. The reason Amazon did it first was not that they were especially smart, but because they were one of the earliest sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they could buy something.

.

You know how on most e-commerce websites(except Amazon-approved ones) you always have to confirm your purchase? More often than not, this is not because of usability/security reasons, but because of stupid one-click-purchase patents. Innovation and usability being stopped because of stupid obvious patents, this is what software patents are all about, and Amazon’s one makes no exception.

I wrote on several occasions about my email exchange with Peter Calveley, owner of the http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/ blog. If you haven’t heard of Peter, make sure you check out my previous articles: “Amazon pisses me off“, Vigilante goes solo against Amazon and Kiwi actor v Amazon.com.

To sum it up, Peter describes on his blogspot blog all of his steps to make this happen - his efforts to seek for prior art, to fund-raise the fees required by the patent examination office, to finally file his discoveries and wait, for more than a year and a half, for the results to arrive:

In a recent office action, the USPTO has rejected the claims of the Amazon.com one-click patent following the re-examination request that I filed on 16 February 2006.
My review resulted in the claims of the patent being ruled invalid.
In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.
I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!
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.

Congrats, Peter! It was a long and difficult road, but your effort has finally paid off. Who said that one man can’t change the world? Software developers and freedom advocates around the world owe you a great deal. If only for having the guts to take this long road and show us it’s possible: one man can change the world.