Dear All

I have just been reading the letter sent to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, This was sent
by Tim O'Reilly on January 5 on behalf of O'Reilly & Associates.

http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/amazon_patent.html

Jeff Bezos reply can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/patents.html/104-6716058-5492438

This letter was regarding the recent patent awarded to Amazon for the 1-click
ordering. I have been following this issue since news broke on the various
newsgroups.

I am currently a customer of Amazon and find my self disgusted by this patent
and Amazons actions. Tim O'Reily has rightly pointed out that Amazon has made a
huge name for itself and profits using this technology that was developed by
various individuals, and freely given to the internet community as open source.
This action of patenting a simple idea such as using cookies to ease the
ordering process is a complete farce. This will stiffle future development and
close doors for other users. Does Amazon really made to protect such a basic
concept in this way? This to me is the perfect example of a company going
completely money crazy. Maybe it is time for me to review who I purchase my
books from in future. I would hope that Amazon could review its position and
maybe drop its patent.

What will be the next patent, database access, sever-side scripting, using my
computer, maybe I should apply for a patent to stop people inserting 3 1/2 disks
into their computer. This patent will start the ball rolling in the wrong
direction.

I am quite sure that Amazon uses open source products within their business and
web sites. Maybe it could be possible for the creator's of Apache, PHP3, Perl
and various others to include clauses against Amazon using these freely
available utils.

If Amazon wish to fence themselves in, maybe they should only play on their own.

Thanks for reading this

Ray Statham