Amazon patent insanity isn't over

No sooner had a judge carved huge holes in the famous one-click-checkout patent that Amazon.com swindled out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, than the very same idiots at the very same mental institution awards it a patent on another amazing new thing: putting search terms into a URL.

The novelty, it appears, is that the entire contents of the section that follows the first single slash is a search term, instead of referring first to a file, and then placing the search term after a question-mark character. The application was made in March 2004, so it took the patent researchers more than three years even to comprehend the enormity of this invention.

True, it is mind-blowing. Imagine, being able to interpret the path specified in a URL actually to pass data to a web application? Imagine if it didn’t just have to indicate a file name, but could reference an object? The implications are staggering. The innovation is profound, the ambition soaring.

The time and investment that Amazon.com put into this must have been immense. Mean time, people in Amazon.real are starving. Someone should just give them some Amazon.com shares. Imagine being able to sue, by proxy, most of the people who have ever written anything for the web! Surely, anyone who admits knowledge of REST, or has ever hacked a 404 page to parse and act on the given URL, would be guilty as sin? The Amazonians (real and imaginary) would be rich!

I’m thinking maybe I’ll license this brilliant idea. I don’t want to give too much away here, but just think what you could do on the command line, for example, if the string following a command could actually contain data, such as options and parameters, to be parsed by the command you’re running? Or better yet, if the very same script could be called using two different names, and do different things, depending? Think about it. It would revolutionise computing! History books would talk about the mainframe era, the client-server era, the internet era and the Amazon.ivo era. That would rock. (Anyone who wants to invest, please leave your name, number and proposed capital commitment as a comment. My people may call you, pending pre-qualification screening.)

There is legitimate debate among free-market supporters about whether a patent is a justifiable application of property and contract rights, under which the owner of a trade secret agrees to disclose it in return for the temporary protection of that intellectual property (in which case the patent should, in fairness, last in perpetuity), or whether it is an artificial monopoly bestowed by government that has no place in a free market.

The latter is perhaps theoretically sounder, but it also makes unlikely allies of private-property-rights libertarians and information-wants-to-be-free socialists. I tend to agree with the concept of patent protection, because if it is not granted the information won’t be free, but will remain secret. I think it’s worth rewarding people for disclosing trade secrets, so they become publicly available for innovators to build upon, without expropriating the rights of the original inventors to the fruits of their labour.

However, that does assume a working patent-registration system, which makes sure trivial patents on non-secrets aren’t awarded to every Jack and his lawyer who bothers to turn up to the USPTO in Virginia. The one-click-checkout patent, obvious though it was, survived 10 years of lawyering and judging and reviewing before it finally took a serious knock. Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours were wasted on lawyers, judges and reviewers because of that single daft patent. And now they’ve got another one to play with. Someone should check this scheme for kickbacks and corruption, but even if it’s clean as a whistle, it’s evidence of a government’s awesome skill at burning cash.

Patent reform is sorely needed. It must be comprehensive, including but not limited to properly researching the prior art and non-obviousness criteria on an application, limiting the practice of patent ring-fencing, declining to issue patents on inventions that have long been in commercial use, or preventing patents on mere concepts that have not actually been developed and cannot be demonstrated. A good approximation to some of this is to abolish software patents altogether. It’s so broken, it may not be fixable.

And patent reform is needed before international patent harmonisation at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, I might add. Harmonising so everyone has the same broken system is hardly progress.

So someone please shut down the laughing stock that is the USPTO. Impeach it. Vote it out. Do whatever it is Americans do with tax-funded boondoggles. (Oh wait, scratch that. Do whatever Americans usually fail to do with tax-funded boondoggles.)

The bureaucratic clowns over in Virginia make anyone who supports patents in principle look like an idiot.

(This was first published on my personal blog.)