Amazon's One-click

Reading about Amazon's patent on One-click and found this open letter on O'Reilly from Tim O'Reilly to Jeff Bezos. Good read. Soon after O'Reilly published the open letter 10,000 signatures were collected in no time!

Open letter excerpt:

We are writing to request that Amazon stop all attempts to enforce the patent that it has been granted on "one click ordering" (Patent number 5,960,411). It is our belief that this patent was granted without adequate review of prior art, and further, that even were it ultimately found valid, such broad patents serve only to hold back further innovation.

One-Click ordering is a clever marketing slogan. However, your patent fails to meet even the most rudimentary tests for novelty and non-obviousness to an expert in the field. The fundamental technology on which Amazon's one-click implementation is based is the use of "cookies", a small amount of data placed on client computers to add state and session management capabilities to the World Wide Web, which was introduced in 1994 into Netscape Navigator by Lou Montulli, Marc Andreesen, and others, at the urging of none other than Vint Cerf. The technique had been deployed on thousands of sites well in advance of your 1997 patent application.
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