There’s major progress to report this morning on the patent front. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, is posting an open letter on his company’s Web site, responding to the widespread outrage in the Internet community about Amazon’s recently awarded patents on so-called “1-click” shopping and Web-affiliate programs.
“I now believe it’s possible that the current rules governing business method and software patents could end up harming all of us – including Amazon.com and its many shareholders, the folks to whom I have a strongresponsibility, not only ethical, but legal and fiduciary as well,” he writes.
Bezos’s letter is a reply to customer e-mail, three conversations and an open letter from Tim O’Reilly, who runs O’Reilly & Associates, the excellent technology-oriented book publisher. O’Reilly’s letter prompted literally hundreds of responses and thousands of petition signatures demanding that Amazon change its tactics.
Bezos’ letter is extremely thoughtful, and important. Here’s why:
He recognizes that the patent laws need to be changed.
In particular, he would shorten the time a business process or software patent would be valid, from the current 17 years to three to five years, and says the lifespan should be made retroactive to current patents.
He’s willing to be a leader in approaching Congress on this issue, and has already spoken with several lawmakers’ staff members.
He endorses a system whereby proposed patents would not be granted until after a public comment period during which “prior art” — evidence that an idea isn’t new — could be brought to the attention of the agency that grants patents, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO).
“Bottom line,” he says: ” fewer patents, of higher average quality, with shorter lifetimes. Fewer, better, shorter. A short name might be ‘fast patents.'”
But Bezos’ letter raises many questions, too. Among them:
He appears to believe there’s justification for patenting Internet business processes and software, a highly dubious proposition in the first place.
He defends his company’s use of the patent system, naturally, saying he has to defend himself against bigger predators. But he evades the question of how and whether he’ll enforce new patents. We’ve already seen Amazon take Barnes & Noble’s Web operation to court over the 1-click method.
And he defends the PTO, saying it’s doing the best it can given the law and its resources. The PTO examiners are plainly overworked, but the lousy quality of what they’re doing is simply indefensible.
O’Reilly has pointed out on several occasions, and I want to echo him, that Amazon’s patents are only the best-known of a horrible bunch that should have been thrown out in the application stage. They are far from the worst. The other Internet poster child for bad patents is Priceline.com, which persuaded the PTO to give exclusivity for online reverse auctions. Priceline is known as a patent mill, churning out applications, but so are corporate giants like IBM and Microsoft, which may be the worst abusers of a broken system.
A remarkable aspect of the Amazon episode is how the Internet, once again, has forced an issue. This isn’t at all to negate O’Reilly’s superb contribution to the debate — his postings and conversations with Bezos clearly made a huge impact, as Bezos himself says. But the way the Net responded, with boycott-Amazon sites and other activism, was plainly a motivating force.
I’m torn over whether I should end my own call for an Amazon boycott. I want to do that, because Bezos’ willingness to spearhead a movement to fix the system is praiseworthy. He listened, and he’s moving in the right direction.
But Amazon is still enforcing its 1-click patent, which Bezos defends as genuinely innovative despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. And it’s probably a matter of time before it goes after someone for affiliate marketing, a concept Amazon apparently didn’t invent in the first place.
Bezos deserves a lot of credit for coming this far on such an important issue. I believe he needs to go a bit further.
What do you think?