At 03:44 PM 2/27/00 -0500, John D. Mitchell wrote:
>I thought you might be interested in joining the boycott of Amazon.com.
>Amazon.com has patented one-click purchasing systems and affiliate
>programs.
These patents sound like they're too obvious or already
in existence. You can simply point and grunt to purchase
at a roadside stand; you can get store-specific credit
cards containing all your info already; you can put
a sign in your place suggesting a visit to a store,
including tokens which identify the referrer to the referree.
But the patent office is well known for rubberstamping
anything these days.
>We feel that having a patent on these two technologies amounts to
>owning e-Commerce.
If they came up with something new, they could patent it,
and your "need" doesn't entail "obligation" from them.
Your gripe is with the doofuses in the USPO, not Amazon.
