{"id":27755,"date":"2017-09-12T14:33:35","date_gmt":"2017-09-12T09:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/officechai.com\/?p=27755"},"modified":"2017-09-12T14:34:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-12T09:04:44","slug":"amazons-controversial-one-click-patent-expires-today-changed-e-commerce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/officechai.com\/startups\/amazons-controversial-one-click-patent-expires-today-changed-e-commerce\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon’s Controversial One-Click Patent Expires Today: This Is How It Changed E-commerce"},"content":{"rendered":"

USPTO 5960411 might seem like an innocuous set of letters, but for twenty long years, they\u00a0held the key to one of the most powerful technologies in e-commerce.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1997, Amazon.com was still a small online retailer. These were\u00a0the early days of the internet, and Amazon had been one of the pioneers, calling itself the earth’s largest bookstore. It had then filed for an unusual patent. Amazon said it had developed a means of enabling users to buy items online with one click. Amazon already had users’ addresses and credit card information stored from their previous purchases — it said it would use this information to let users \u00a0buy items through a single click \u00a0on its website.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Amazon's
An image from Amazon’s original 1 click patent. Among the inventors is Bezos, Jeffery P.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It might not seem like much of an innovation now, but USPTO\u00a05960411<\/a><\/span> was granted to Amazon and Jeffrey P Bezos in September 1999. Through one stroke of the US Patent office,\u00a0Amazon\u00a0alone could use the technology to let users buy items with a single\u00a0click.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amazon didn’t wait long to use the patent to its advantage. Just a month after the patent was issued, Amazon sued\u00a0one of its biggest competitors, Barnes and Noble, for infringing on what was now its IP. Barnes and Noble was\u00a0one of America’s largest physical bookstores, and spurred in part by Amazon’s advances, had ventured into selling books online. Back then, it had a technology called Express Lane, which let users order items with one click. A judge ordered Barnes and Noble to stop using Express Lane until the case was settled. The lawsuit was settled in 2002, and the terms of\u00a0the settlement were never disclosed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The technology was clearly valuable to Amazon, and it was guarding it jealously. One click ordering took away much of the friction from e-commerce. Entering user details again was cumbersome, especially on the dial-up connections of the 2000s, and Amazon’s users had a cleaner, faster checkout experience. It also led to impulse purchases.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even then, there had been misgivings about the patent.\u00a0\u201cWhen 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system,\u201d wrote\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0in 2000, \u201cthey will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com.\u201d The internet back then was a fairly new technology, and patent offices didn’t\u00a0completely understand its nuances. One Click ordering was such an obvious technology that\u00a0economist Ken Wilbur said\u00a0<\/a><\/span>is \u201csomething that (Amazon) probably never should have been able to patent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bezos, too, seemed to agree. After the lawsuit, he said the patents system was broken, and suggested that patents be granted for five years, not seventeen. However, he refused to hand over the patent to the public domain. “Despite the call from many thoughtful folks for us to give up our patents unilaterally, I don\u2019t believe it would be right for us to do so,\u201d Bezos wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Amazon-CEO-Jeff-Bezos\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Some companies, though, were both quick to see the value of the patent, and had the heft to make a deal with Amazon. In 2000, Apple licensed the technology from Amazon, and used it on its iTunes Store and iPhoto. Amazon got a generous fee from these uses —\u00a0estimates<\/span> <\/a>say that the patent was\u00a0worth billions.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Amazon’s iron grip on the patent meant that companies in the US weren’t able to implement one click ordering as easily as they could have. That’s set to change — the patent expires on 12th September 2017, and tech companies are already making plans on how to cash in.\u00a0Facebook Google, Microsoft and other major players are considering\u00a0developing an internet-wide 1-click checkout, where your credit card information moves with you from site to site. This could be transformational — having credit card and billing information stored at a central place could help users skip from site to site, and\u00a0enjoy a seamless, Amazon-like checkout process each time.<\/span><\/p>\n

But while Amazon’s competitive advantage ends today, the patent only underscores how crucial the first-mover advantage can be for tech companies. Amazon had the foresight and good fortune to patent a technology when it was in its infancy — and managed to reap the rewards for twenty long years.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USPTO 5960411 might seem like an innocuous set of letters, but for twenty long years, they\u00a0held the key to one of the most…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[254,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startups","category-stories"],"yoast_head":"\nAmazon's Controversial One-Click Patent Expires Today: This Is How It Changed E-commerce<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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