December 20, 2005

eCash is prior art to Amazon one click?

In the retail world, Amazon's one-click patent is well known. What wasn't realised, it seems, is that DigiCash's eCash software shipped with the same functionality... Nick describes how Peter Calveley is looking to get the patent re-examined using docs from wayback machine.

Calveley is the first to point out, as far as I know, that the automated payment policy setting of ecash, combined with a single click to order an item (e.g. to download a file or to make a wager), is a very good prior art reference which anticipates the Amazon one-click patent (or at least makes it even more blindingly obvious than we software engineers already thought it was).

Nick is also callout for all old DigiCash buffs - can you help?

If you have personal information or know of further documentation about this feature, or any other product or design prior to 1997 that used one-click ordering, both myself and Peter Claveley are greatly interested in collecting this information.

Calveley is also collecting pledges to cover the fee - using PledgeBank which in itself is a newsworthy item. I should think anyone who's been terrorised by the patent would donate! I wonder what form of eCash he'll take?

Posted by iang at December 20, 2005 05:35 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Surely people remember silly html rendered 'games' like my TicTacToe where every click cost you some coin. To make the game playable, you would turn of the client-side notification, indeed turning the whole experience into a single click to 'buy' the next page that reflected your move. And in case you won, there'd be payout ;-)

Posted by: Marius at December 20, 2005 07:48 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?






Hit preview to see your comment as it would be displayed.