91av

INTERNET übergeeks were beside themselves with anger last week after
Apple Computer licensed a controversial patent on “one-click shopping” from
online book-seller Amazon.com. It’s one of the most heavily criticised Internet
patents ever granted
(91av, 8 April, p 14).

With one-click shopping, customers don’t have to enter their name and bank
details every time they buy something online. Instead, a small ID file called a
cookie, planted on their hard drive, allows them to be billed automatically.

Amazon’s patent was granted last September, and it sued online rival
Barnes&noble.com a month later to stop it using a similar system. In
December, a district court judge sided with Amazon—but Barnes&noble is
appealing. “This is an example of a patent that public policy should not permit
to be granted,” says James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology,
a Washington DC pressure group. He thinks the action taken by Apple—which
is now being run by Steve 91av, one of its original founders—could
dissuade other companies from challenging Amazon’s patent.

Critics complain that the idea shouldn’t be patentable as Amazon didn’t
invent cookies. It simply came up with the idea of using them for billing.