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Comment by akeefer | Hacker News Reader

Software patents effectively cover features rather than implementations, so a patent troll (or a judge or jury) doesn't need to look at your source code to determine if you violated their patent: they really just need to be able to use the application enough to determine what it does.

Of course, the issue of if you violated the patent or not, or if you removed any offending source code, is pretty much immaterial to the patent lawsuit issue; they can sue you either way, and if they want to take it to court, you'll have to pay a truckload of money to defend yourself, unless you want a summary judgment issued against you.

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Software patents effectively cover features rather than implementations

No, software patents cover ways to implement features. Amazon does not have a patent on "buying something with one click"; the patent deals with one specific way to let people buy something with one click (I'm guessing cookies and stored shipping preferences? I've never read the patent in question).

if they want to take it to court, you'll have to pay a truckload of money to defend yourself

Sure, but this is independent of the subject matter of the claim. In the US you can sue anyone for anything and it will cost a lot of money for them to defend themselves; witness the "90 year old without a computer illegally downloaded porn movies" copyright suits, for instance.

Ideally yes, but I believe (and note that I am not a patent lawyer), that you can also have patents for 'methods of doing business'.

Methods of doing business are closer to 'buying something with one click,' as they aren't tied to a physical machine or a specific implementation of a process as in code, they are patenting the process of purchasing with one click through a web form itself.

The 'invention' is the supposedly 'innovative' way of allowing customers to purchase something using a single button.

Note that I said they "effectively" cover features rather than implementations. Technically they should cover implementations, but the reality is that they actually cover features, because the patents are so broad that they effectively cover solving a given problem using a computer. That wasn't the intention of the patent system, but that's the effect.

Also, I believe you're incorrect about Amazon's patent: it basically does cover any method whereby the user only has to use one click to buy something, regardless of the implementation. It was challenged and then amended to narrow it down to requiring a shopping cart, it appears, but the patent has nothing to do with cookies or databases or anything like that: anyone who implements the same feature in their application could run afoul of the patent, regardless of how they implement it under the hood.

Now you've made me curious. Claim 1 of the one-click patent:

    A method of placing an order for an item comprising:

    under control of a client system,
        displaying information identifying the item; and
        in response to only a single action being
        performed, sending a request to order the item
        along with an identifier of a purchaser of the
        item to a server system;

    under control of a single-action ordering component
    of the server system,
        receiving the request;
        retrieving additional information previously
        stored for the purchaser identified by the
        identifier in the received request; and

    generating an order to purchase the requested
    item for the purchaser identified by the
    identifier in the received request using the
    retrieved additional information; and

    fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase
    of the item

    whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping
    cart ordering model.

IANA Patent Lawyer, but one obvious way to provide "one-click" functionality while evading this patent would be to have all the information required to generate an order POSTed in response to the mouse-click instead of storing customer data on the server.

I suspect that sending a login session cookie instead of a user-id cookie would also be ruled to be non-infringing -- after all, the patent specifies "an identifier of a purchaser", not "an identifier which can in combination with previously stored information be used to identify a purchaser".

If I wanted to think about this for more than five minutes I could come up with other solutions, but I'm not a patent lawyer and don't want to spend too much time twisting my brain around patent law.

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