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Ask HN: How do I license Amazon's 1-click tech?

34 points by peteforde ↗ HN
Amazon licensed it to Apple in 2000, but according to my research they remain the only licensee and details about the transaction are private.

Bluntly: what's Amazon's deal, here? They've completely changed how the web works with AWS, yet they haven't gotten around to set up a reasonable licensing system for 1-click? I want to pay them money!

It just seems silly for such an innovative company to lock up the most obvious shopping metaphor in patent bureaucracy when they could be taking 2% of my sales instead.

Jeff! Werner! It's been 10 years. This isn't about protecting your innovation against Barnes and Noble anymore. Now it just kind of... sucks.

25 comments

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aces
yeah, it would seem to me that with amazons patent reservoir and others reservoirs that creating a marketplace and a way to pull in that ability legally into your app would be a natural.
pinksoda
I didn't realize they had a patent for this until now. Does this mean that no shopping cart can let you check out in under 2 clicks?
peteforde
You can implement it, but you're inviting patent litigation.
kingofspain
I spent a few days earlier this week adding hoops to a checkout process to avoid infringing on this. Previous devs had naively implemented something they thought made sense & made things easier for the customer. Foolish fools!

Still makes me angry that they got away with this.

auxbuss
I used it for years. I had a "shop" page where each button went directly to the payment provider (with the appropriate details). This was the most basic way to make purchases years ago. The payment providers used this method in its examples. You still come across sites doing it this way, here and there.

The patent is beyond ridiculous. I doubt it would hold outside the US. (I'm not in the US, but I use some US-based service providers.) But I guess someone, sometime will have to go through the process of knocking this patent down, such is the madness that the patent process has become.

simonk
The patent was upheld in Canada.
rhizome
Barnes & Noble tested this 10 years ago and their solution was to add a second "confirmation" click. That would seem to be about the minimum necessary to avoid infringement.
TomOfTTB
I don't think you're seeing the longer game Amazon is playing here. Yes they could make a small amount of money licensing 1-click to you so you could use such a system with your user info.

But if they only offer the service through the Amazon Payment program than they get your users to use their identity system, they get a much bigger cut of each payment and they get to add info of the sale to their already massive database of user preferences.

Which is probably why they offer 1-click via Amazon Payments and no where else. (I'm not saying it's honest or that I agree but it does make sense from a profit point of view)

peteforde
If I could use Amazon as a low-level payment processor and in do so this gave me license to use a 1-click implementation (my code, not some generic JS hack) in my marketplace, I would happily be the first customer.

Unfortunately, Amazon Payments - as offered today - is simply not a fit for my platform. If they rolled out a 100% API driven payment gateway that didn't require any Amazon credentials... again, I would happily be the first customer.

maze
This patent is stupid, as they didn't invent this technology... I can't believe how it was granted...

Sorry if this is off-topic..

peteforde
Your anger is well-placed. As far as I've ever understood it, the patent was used to ensure a competitive advantage against its competitors during the era when Amazon was promoting itself as the world's biggest bookstore.

11 years out, Amazon is the world's biggest a-lot-of-things. IANAL but at some point this is just stifling innovation, pure and simple. 1-click was licensed to Apple 10 years ago, and this arrangement doesn't seem to have threatened Amazon's market situation.

The real goal of my post is the hope that the right people will see is, so that we can start a process of change in terms of how (and why) they lock this IP down.

flipbrad
I wonder whether this particular patent (and its licensing unavailability) is what is holding back micropayments?
Tichy
I am pretty sure that is not the problem.
cabalamat
As far as I can tell, the main problem with micropayments is to do them, a company has to be licensed as a bank. In the UK, the regulatory requirements for banking are such that it takes £100 million to set up a new one; other jurisdictions are similar I imagine.
mattdonahoe
I assume that the patent is generic enough that I couldn't have a "slide to buy" mechanism?
netcan
Interesting question. It seems pretty broad.

The meat (claim 1):

..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 .. ..fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.

snippets from claims 2 - 26

2 The method of claim 1 wherein the displaying of information includes displaying information indicating the single action.

3-4 The method of claim 1 wherein the single action is clicking a button / is speaking of a sound

17-22 . The method of claim 11 wherein the single action is:

- clicking a mouse button when a cursor is positioned over a predefined area of the displayed information

- a sound generated by a user

- selection using a television remote control.

- is depressing of a key on a key pad.

- selecting using a pointing device.

- selection of a displayed indication

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazonpatent.html

I'm not a lawyer and don't know anything about patents. What I thought I knew seems to be proven wrong by the existence of this patent. But, it looks like "slide to buy" is covered in the last one.

If someone wants a topic to research and blog about, how about a round up of one-click patent workarounds that have been implemented. Especially if these have been reviewed by lawyers or implemented in response to litigation threats.

Uhhrrr
Hm, in the GUI world, a mouse press and mouse release are generally considered distinct actions...
peteforde
Can you imagine if the legal world regularly consulted Tufte for clarification and inspiration?
Uhhrrr
That would be a freaking awesome project. Have there been attempts to do visualizations of all the ins and outs of, say, allowing evidence from a traffic stop, or jurisdictional disputes?
bound008
Many of the claims of the patent have been overturned. The interesting part is the legal way that this was accomplished. Instead of using lawyers, the person responsible here (who was mad at amazon for slow deliveries of a book) paid for the USPTO to reexamine the patent with new evidence of prior art submitted. Here is the post of the person claiming victory over amazon:

http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2007/10/amazon-one-click-patent-...

cduan
If you look at the Patent Office record, you will find that the patent was ultimately upheld, with a few wording changes. The blog post refers to the Patent Office's initial opinion (called a "non-final Office Action"), not the final decision.

Here's a post from the same person, discussing the final result:

http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2010/03/one-click-patent-reexami...

dmarti
Relevant article: http://openp2p.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10... Tim O'Reilly: "some months after we'd awarded the bounty, splitting it three ways for prior art that wasn't completely on the money, someone sent in a killer piece of prior art. I still have it on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click."
quanticle
The point wasn't ever to protect their innovation (if it can be called that) against others. The point is to ensure that only Amazon has the ability to do one-click checkouts in the way that is described in the patent. Licensing that technology to you would dilute that monopoly and defeat the purpose of gaining it.