My day.

1. I got up, once.

2. I opened my door by pulling the handle once. Opening the door once. Then going out of the bedroom once.

3. I brushed my teeth once with one toothbrush.

4. I drank 1 cup of coffee, went outside once and into 1 shop where I bought a danish pastry by pointing to it once.

5. I caught one bus, stamped my ticket once and sat on one seat to go to one job.

If someone patents one pull door opening, or one stamp ticket marking or one toothbrush teeth cleaning, or one seat sitting down, I would be totally scr*w*d.

Besides Micronet was a shopping system on Prestel and you would buy it by pressing ONE button which would bill to your phone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronet800

Screen shows you press '5' to have a go at the game.

So this isn't a test of whether 1 click shopping patent is permissible, it's a test of whether the patent office is a joke or not.

1. I got out of bed twice.

2. I opened the bedroom door by pulling the handle down twice.

3. When I ordered my danish pastry I had to point to it, then point to it again.

4. At the bus ticket machine, I had to push the 'give me a ticket' button twice as usual.

5. At the stop I want to get off at, I pushed the stop button twice and hopped off and on and back off the bus again.

My life is so hard, but there is no obvious way to make it easier! Perhaps if two people could invent solutions to my problems!

Oh well, I'll just click 'Post comment' twice to submit my post.

It honestly does beggar belief how some patents are awarded!

As an IP holder, I can tell you that the USPTO can make life easy or hard. If you're a big corporation with lots of resources, it's easy. If you're an individual, it can be a royal PITA. Amazon probably used the "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" approach. Which is what it appears happened in this case.

It's really frustrating that people focus in on the "we will automatically charge your credit card with no further input" aspect and ignore that most of the claims in the patent are with respect to the sliding window for deciding when an order is ready to ship in order to reduce shipping costs and so on. NONE of the "prior art" people mention in any of these discussions ever looks at that.

When you do three one-click purchases in a sitting, they all become part of one order. THAT is what the one-click patent is about. Which is also, conveniently, what everyone seems to ignore in these stories.

So what you appear to be saying is that this is a new innovation and that prior to 97 everytime I visited the supermarket I would put one item in my trolley, get it scanned, pay for it and load it into the car and then go back and repeat the exercise.

I must be so used to this innovative one click stuff now that I had forgotten those days completely.

How did we survive before the Internet and the US Patent Office?

Strange though as I seem to recollect picking up a hand scanner and scanning my own items as I put them in the trolley. Replacing the scanner printed out a receipt which was put in a till and my money went off the card. I used to think to myself - "If only shopping was this easy on the Internet". Mind you at that time no one was using the internet for shopping, it was for sharing information.