> the patent will expire and the technology behind it will be free to be used by any e-commerce site
particularly specious. There is no "technology" behind it. It was a concept or busines process that the vaguaries of patent law deemed worthy of rewarding.
Not to mention that any technology ("source code") Amazon used to implement the patent will remain under copyright essentially indefinitely.
Or are you saying nobody else can implement "1 click" even after the patent expires... because of copyright?
Edit: Was an honest question, I've upvoted all the answers as I found them interesting, not understanding the barrage of downvotes shrug
The one-click patent has an implementation, but the implementation is so trivial that there are only two things you can do with it: either copy it wholesale, or write your own based on the same idea (which will have nothing in common with the original because they're both too small to "share DNA" like that.) In this case, you can't copy wholesale, because copyright. So you're stuck writing from scratch. At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.
This is a good way of describing the point of patents, thanks :-)
Many patents don't reward the first person who solves a given problem, so much as they reward the first person to encounter a given problem. That person adopts a trivial, obvious solution and the USPTO cheerfully rubber-stamps it at everyone else's expense. This was clearly one of those patents. It cost Amazon essentially nothing to research, nothing to develop, and nothing to implement, but the rewards were immense.
This depends on whether you consider X to be "converting ecommerce sales" or "ordering items with a single click". Just because the implementation is easy to reverse engineer from a one line description of the novelty doesn't diminish the resources spent by Amazon in coming up with this insight and testing how it improved their business.
I'm not strongly in favour of software patents in general, but the argument that this patent is "too easy to copy" misses the point a bit.
The same failure of understanding that caused the author of that blog post to misidentify Amazon's one click patent as being related to a "technology" rather than just an idea is also behind the patent office's troubling tendency to issue patents to other ideas. Advocates for patent reform make a convincing case that issuing patent protection to ideas like this actually harms innovation more than it fosters it.
The fact that the actual implementation (technology) of the one click shopping idea, the source code, is protected by copyright is true but isn't particularly relevant. And to answer your second question, copyright prevents anyone from using Amazon's particular one-click source code, but that's largely irrelevant, since it's an idea that can be implemented a million ways, which is a major reason that many people feel it shouldn't be eligible for patent protection.
Edit: I see that Animats has covered this much better elsewhere in the thread.
Maybe, but this is not why we have patents. Patents justification is to help innovations to spread, by making them public and, in exchange, granting a monopoly for some time as would have been the case should the innovation been kept secret.
Patents are not, in theory, a bonus for whoever implement something first.
In practice though, this seems to be largely the case, at least in software, that patents are like those mine field maps during the gold rushes, partitioning the hills and delimiting every tiny area belonging to one miner, probably to police what would otherwise be a violent, perpetual quarrel.
Yeah, and? I wasn't saying so.