Filed under: Patents
Patently-O and TechFlash have reported that Amazon.com’s highly-debated “one-click” patent, U.S. Patent 5,960,411, is about to survive reexamination by the USPTO with its claims largely unchanged. The “one-click” patent covers a system for ordering products online with only a single ordering action required by the customer. The patent is often cited as a key impetus for recent efforts to reform the U.S. Patent Act, limit patentability of business methods, and improve patent quality at the USPTO.
After the public criticism, in 2006 the USPTO ordered a reexamination of the one-click patent. In 2007, during the reexamination, the USPTO upheld claims 6-10. Claim 6 is directed to a client system for ordering an item comprising, among other things, (i) a “single-action ordering component” that sends a requests to a server to order an identified item in response to a single action by a user, and (ii) a “shopping cart ordering component” that, in response to an add-to-shopping cart action, sents a request to a server to add the identified item to a shopping cart.
In a recently-issued Notice of Intent to Issue Reexamination Certificate, the USPTO indicated that it would allow the remaining claims after Amazon.com amended the other claims to include similar features directed to a shopping cart.
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