One week after suffering a major blow to its infamous “1-Click” shopping patent, Amazon.com has been awarded what’s sure to be seen as its latest bit of highly obnoxious IP. The company has been awarded a patent on the practice of “including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.”
According to the text of the patent, it covers a technology serving the following circumstances: “a user wishing to search for ‘San Francisco Hotels’ may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.”
There’s smart conversation about the patent’s flaws over at Slashdot, as usual, but the problems here are probably obvious. Filed in August of 2004, the practice no doubt touches on any number of “prior arts” and it’s fairly obvious. Non-obviousness – which you can probably search for via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non_obviousness (if you’ll forgive me for saying so, Amazon) is a key criteria in the granting of patents.
Amazon may in the end be one of the leading factors in the eventual overhaul of the internet technology department at the US Patent office.
