I wrote before about Peter, a guy who went on an individual battle against the US patent system and specifically against Amazon’s notorious “one-click” patent (for the guys not in the know, it says that only an licensed websites can ever sell stuff using just one click.
Even though they didn’t actually innovate anything, since the process of selling online stuff can be easily optimized to work in one-steps processes without any prior info on Amazon’s algorithm, this is the most notorious example of big companies owning common-sense patents that restrict development and innovation in a broad field.
Well, Peter, after digging through archives of failed computer companies, has managed to discover some revealing prior art; from public donations and Pay-pal (which took quite a bit longer than one would expect, given the general public interest on evil patents), he eventually succeeded in obtaining a reexamination of Amazon’s one-click patent. From now on, the USPO is on its own; we can just hope that they won’t keep being stupid over and over again.
In the meantime, we should give big cheers to Peter, a modern David against a society of Goliaths….
orice altceva! Este gratis! :)
