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

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (110554)	10/15/2000 11:43:00 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Victor: I always keep some gold in my long-term holdings -- just sits there looking stupid, but there it will stay. I don't have the strength for a complete explanation -- just think of gold as the flip side of the US stock market. If the US market does well, I am ok. If the US stock market goes where Ike has suggested, gold will rocket and I will be ok. The US now "believes" in the stock market -- it is hard to find anything else that Americans believe in the way they do the stock market. Gold cannot go up and the stock market cannot go down-- your sentiment is pretty representative I think. Long live the stock market bull. DOW 500,000 and an Italian sports car in every driveway.

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (110554)	10/16/2000 9:27:08 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 164684

eCommerce Amazon Tastes Its Own Patent-Pending Medicine Penelope Patsuris, Forbes.com, 10.13.00, 12:01 AM ET NEW YORK - Live by the sword, die by the sword. That's the lesson Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN) may learn the hard way, thanks to OpenTV (nasdaq: OPTV), a company that makes software and infrastructure for interactive TV (iTV) set-top boxes. OpenTV is the latest to file for patent rights to the "one-click" shopping tool that Amazon has fought so bitterly over with Barnesandnoble.com (nasdaq: BNBN). This dispute between the Web's two biggest booksellers is still in litigation. Barnesandnoble.com has been barred from using the technology since a U.S. District Court issued an injunction against the company in December 1999. In late September OpenTV applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to broaden the scope of a patent originally awarded to the company in 1998 so it includes "one-click" shopping. This tool lets repeat customers make purchases without having to re-enter address and credit card information each time. Amazon first made one-click shopping available on its site in September 1997 and was awarded the patent for it in September 1999. Should the Patent Office decide in OpenTV's favor, Amazon could be forced to either pay licensing fees for one-click shopping or abandon it altogether. Ironically, that's the same position Amazon has been trying to put Barnesandnoble.com into for the past year. OpenTV wants to put one-click shopping to use on interactive TV. The industry hopes that shopping applications will be as big a part of iTV as entertainment, with viewers able to easily buy CDs, for example, while watching a Madonna video. OpenTV was formed in 1994 by a partnership between Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW) and Thomson Multimedia. The company's customers include EchoStar's (nasdaq: DISH) Dish Network and BskyB in the U.K., and it claims to have its technology in 10 million homes. Its $25 million in 1999 revenue may be dwarfed by Amazon's 1999 sales of $1.6 billion, but with backing from heavyweights like America Online) and Time Warner (nyse: TWX), OpenTV should have no problem finding the resources to fund a legal battle. Although the company has its eye on the iTV market, executives claim that its patent applies to electronic commerce of any kind. "We have claims on one-click shopping in any client-server environment," says OpenTV Chief Intellectual Property Officer Craig Opperman. Opperman says that OpenTV originally applied for this patent, covering the area of "interactive content signal delivery," in 1994. When the executive joined the company four months ago, his first order of business was to examine its existing intellectual property. "That's when I saw that this patent discloses very valuable technology about storing personal data within a set-top box, which OpenTV did not specifically claim originally," says Opperman. By law, patent holders have the right to apply to make additional claims within two years of the date the original patent was issued, and OpenTV made it just under the wire, since that two-year period expired Oct. 6, 2000. The Patent Office may or may not approve OpenTV's additional claim, depending on the evidence submitted. "We don't expect to hear anything for three to five months," says Opperman. If OpenTV wins its claim, it won't just be Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com that would have to pay up. OpenTV competitors like Liberate and Canal+, which are also interested in enabling iTV shopping, would have to as well. Opperman says he has yet to research whether any other set-top box software currently has one-click shopping capabilities. OpenTV would not be able to demand any retroactive payments from sites that used one-click shopping prior to the new ruling. The licensing would only begin as of the day the new claim was approved. As to whether he intends to make other companies pay up, Opperman is coy, saying only: "The more people that buy our software, the better. We're certainly not interested in getting into online retail ourselves." The legal patent issues could take years to iron out. "There's a lot of confusion here," says Brian Hopkins, a New York City-based intellectual property attorney. "Amazon could do anything from trying to narrow its own claim so it doesn't overlap with OpenTV to producing evidence that it invented one-click shopping before OpenTV even applied for its first patent." Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, thinks the whole notion of patenting a particular means of doing business is just a passing fancy. The concept was largely unheard of until the onset of the Internet. Since then, companies such as Priceline.com (nasdaq: PCLN), Pitney Bowes (nyse: PBI) and CarOrder.com have filed for these business method patents. "This whole is just a barely modulated form of insanity," he says. "Business method patents are generally a joke. I think it's only a matter of time before we see legislation barring any further business method patents and possibly casting doubt upon the ones that already exist." By then, the new media lawyers will probably have dreamed up another way to milk the e-commerce cash cow.