“new zealand is a very boring place”

Aucklander Peter Calveley describes his motivation for having a go at Amazon’s one-click patent as basically being bored. Amazon didn’t deliver on a book order, which seems to have got his goat up - and provided him with a line of work to keep him busy. The work of proving that there was substantial prior art concerning one-click transactions on the web. Thanks to Calveley Amazon have proposed changes to the patent which will reduce its scope to one-click transactions involving a shopping cart, after the US Patent Office & Trademark Office had rejected the majority of Amazon’s claims (21 of 26).

Calveley used the technique of having the patent re-examined to be able to use prior art. Ironically he used information provided by Amazon’s Alexa via the Archive.org’s Wayback Machine as the source of information providing him with evidence that one-click transactions were in use on the web prior to Amazon and its patent.

Sydney Morning Herald and a couple of stories from Outlaw provide the background. For Peter’s take check his blog.