From: "Dave Ings" 

(Before you ask I don't know much more than I read in the press.) The press
reports that Amazon has been sued because unlike many others they have
refused to licence the patents in question. They also report that some of
these patents date from the days of the IBM / Prodigy / Sears joint venture
... i.e. before the Web.

FWIW I will point out that IBM recently took a public stand (including
congressional testimony by John Kelly) *against* business method patents,
so it is very unlikely these are business method versus technology patents.
(I will leave for another thread the ongoing debate about whether software
should be patentable.)

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http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20F13FD34550C758EDDA00
894DE404482#
Hoping to Be a Model, I.B.M. Will Put Its Patent Filings Online By STEVE LOHR
I.B.M., the nation's largest patent holder, will publish its patent filings
on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes
will be a model for others.

If widely adopted, the policy could help to curb the rising wave of patent
disputes and patent litigation.

The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly
identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak
authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also
asserts that so-called business methods alone -- broad descriptions of
ideas, without technical specifics -- should not be patentable.

The move by I.B.M. does carry business risks. Patents typically take three
or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies
often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to
try to hide their technical intentions from rivals.

''Competitors will know years ahead in some cases what fields we're working
on,'' said John Kelly, senior vice president for technology and
intellectual property at I.B.M. ''We've decided we'll take that risk and
seek our competitive advantage elsewhere.''

The more open approach, I.B.M. says, is intended as a step toward improving
the quality of patents issued in general because the process of public
review should weed out me-too claims that are not genuine innovations.

''The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial
capital in a global knowledge economy,'' said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s
chief executive. ''If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want
to do something, it's going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that
intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future.''


--
Regards,
Dave Ings,
Toronto, Canada

"Mike N."  wrote in message
news:1m4qj2hh996bnnq85ehi2elck8sr3rfbb6{at}4ax.com...
>
>  I haven't read these, but how is Amazon being singled out?  Other than
> basic HTML and the world wide web, I fail to see how these are patentable.
> I'll have to check them out later for dates and content.

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