1-Click, also called one-click or one-click buying, is the technique of allowing customers to make purchases with the payment information needed to complete the purchase having been entered by the user previously. [1] More particularly, it allows an online shopper using an Internet marketplace to purchase an item without having to use shopping cart software. Instead of manually inputting billing and shipping information for a purchase, a user can use one-click buying to use a predefined address and credit card number to purchase one or more items. Since the expiration of Amazon's patent, there has been an advent of checkout experience platforms, such as ShopPay, Simpler, PeachPay, Zplit, and Bolt which offer similar one-click checkout flows. [2]
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a patent [3] for this technique to Amazon.com in September 1999. Amazon.com also owns the "1-Click" trademark. [4]
On May 12, 2006, the USPTO ordered a reexamination [5] of the "One-Click" patent, based on a request filed by Peter Calveley. [6] Calveley cited as prior art an earlier e-commerce patent and the Digicash electronic cash system.
On October 9, 2007, the USPTO issued an office action in the reexamination which confirmed the patentability of claims 6 to 10 of the patent. [7] The patent examiner, however, rejected claims 1 to 5 and 11 to 26. In November 2007, Amazon responded by amending the broadest claims (1 and 11) to restrict them to a shopping cart model of commerce. They have also submitted several hundred references for the examiner to consider. [8] In March 2010, the reexamined and amended patent was allowed. [9] [10]
Amazon's U.S. patent expired on September 11, 2017. [11]
In Europe, a patent application [12] on 1-Click ordering was filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) but was rejected by the EPO in 2007 due to obviousness; the decision was upheld in 2011. [13]
A related gift-ordering patent was granted in 2003, but revoked in 2007 following an opposition. [14]
In Canada, the Federal Court of Canada held that the One click patent could not be rejected as a pure business method since it had a physical effect. The Court remanded the application to the Canadian patent office for a reexamination. [15]
Amazon.com in 2000 licensed 1-Click ordering to Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) for use on its online store. [16] [17] Apple subsequently added 1-Click ordering to the iTunes Store [18] and iPhoto. [19] Apple paid $1 million to license the patent.
Amazon filed a patent infringement lawsuit in October 1999 in response to Barnes & Noble's offering a 1-Click ordering option called "Express Lane". After reviewing the evidence, a judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering Barnes & Noble to stop offering Express Lane until the case was settled. [20] Barnes & Noble had developed a way to design around the patent by requiring shoppers to make a second click to confirm their purchase. [21] [22] The lawsuit was settled in 2002. The terms of the settlement, including whether or not Barnes & Noble took a license to the patent or paid any money to Amazon, were not disclosed. [23]
In response to the lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation urged a boycott of Amazon.com. [24] The boycott was lifted by GNU in September 2002. [25] [26]
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, the company originally started as an online marketplace for books but gradually expanded its offerings to include a wide range of product categories, referred to as "The Everything Store". Today, Amazon is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies, the other four being Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. The company operates approximately 600 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexandria, Virginia, after a 2005 move from the Crystal City area of neighboring Arlington, Virginia.
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The involvement of the public in patent examination is used in some forms to help identifying relevant prior art and, more generally, to help assessing whether patent applications and inventions meet the requirements of patent law, such as novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness, and sufficiency of disclosure.
MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U.S. 118 (2007), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving patent law. It arose from a lawsuit filed by MedImmune which challenged one of the Cabilly patents issued to Genentech. One of the central issues was whether a licensee retained the right to challenge a licensed patent, or whether this right was forfeited upon signing of the license agreement. The case related indirectly to past debate over whether the US should change to a first to file patent system - in 2011, President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, which shifted the United States to a first-inventor-to-file patent system.
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Shel Kaphan is an American computer programmer who was the first employee of technology company Amazon. Working there from 1994 to 1999, he co-wrote the first Amazon website, wrote the product review system, and contributed to 1-Click. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described Kaphan as "the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com," and Brad Stone wrote in his book about Amazon, The Everything Store, that "Kaphan was an introverted hacker with an idealistic streak and little intuitive leadership ability."