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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Randy Ellingson who wrote (85983)	12/2/1999 5:51:00 PM
From: Eric Wells	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>>I also think it's entirely possible they thought of it... Randy - I don't know what industry you are in - but I've been working in the software industry since the mid-80's. And the "idea" that you can "click-once" using a mouse to initiate a process for which information has been previously gathered - well, there's nothing innovative about it at all. Amazon may or may not have been the first company to apply the concept to an e-commerce transaction - but even if they were the first, I don't believe they deserve a patent. Imagine a scenario where the first company to use streaming video on a web site is awarded a patent for "using video on a web site" - so that anyone that uses video on a web site without a license is in violation of the patent. The scenario is analogous to what we are seeing today with Amazon. Amazon may have some claim to a trademark on the term "one-click" to describe and market the process. But as for the one-click process being innovative - it's not. It will be a travesty of justice, and an affront to any software developer who has ever written a line of code if Amazon is allowed to retain this patent. -Eric