Amazon.com has been taking a beating recently. I’m not just talking about their stock, which has had its share of difficulties. I’m talking about the company’s sudden fall from grace—from the dotcom we loved to love to the bullies we love to hate. In case you’ve missed the controversy, here’s the scoop: Amazon features a procedure called "1-Click," which allows registered users to buy a book, a video, or a Black & Decker 19-inch Cordless Mulching Mower with a single flick of the index finger—no confirmation screens, no hassles. Not exactly a revolutionary idea. 1-Click takes information already stored on the site (user name, address, credit card, and shipping information) and shuttles that data to a server for order fulfillment, bypassing any tedious "Yes, I really mean it" screens. The Amazonians garnered justifiable praise, and plenty of business, for smoothly implementing this completely obvious idea.

Then Amazon applied for a patent on 1-Click. The patent is not for the underlying technology that makes 1-Click possible, but simply for a "business method." The government Patent Office, infinitely capable of assessing the merits of mechanical devices but woefully inexperienced in the ways of software, promptly granted patent 5960411 for a "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network." Amazon immediately began enforcing their patent, forcing competitor Barnes & Noble (bn.com) to add a second click to their customers’ buying experience. This would be roughly equivalent to a supermarket getting a patent for the "Ten Items or Less" checkout line procedure, and making competitors scrap express checkouts altogether. Using the logic of the 1-Click patent, hundreds of everyday Web navigation, purchasing, and searching methods could eventually be patented, effectively stifling online development.

Web innovators, e-shoppers, in fact nearly ever everyone except members of the Amazon.com board, cried foul. After all, 1-Click is neither an invention nor unique. 1-Click is merely an elegant use of cookies--snippets of data that Web sites send to a user’s browser for storage and subsequent identification. Cookie technology allows Amazon.com, and a zillion other sites, to recognize a returning customer. Without cookies, 1-Click wouldn’t be possible. Fortunately, no one felt it necessary to patent the cookie concept.

Amazon’s click trick is emblematic of the aggressive commercialization of the once open, anarchic Web. The Internet community’s outrage has been so well articulated by others, in fact (see especially Tim O'Reilly’s outstanding commentary at www.oreillynet.com/patents) that I was going to let the issue go unremarked here. Then I read Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s response to the brouhaha (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/patents.html).

Bezos is a smart guy. He knows he’s got a public relations problem. He’s been accused of playing dirty. But he knows, as well, that this patent gives Amazon a competitive advantage, which he does not want to lose. So instead of agreeing to surrender the patent, as many critics have urged, he offered a "call for meaningful (perhaps even radical) patent reform." The specifics: "That the patent laws should recognize that business method and software patents are fundamentally different than other kinds of patents" and "That business method and software patents should have a much shorter lifespan than the current 17 years--I would propose 3 to 5 years." Bezos also noted he had "contacted the offices of several Members of Congress from the committees with primary responsibility for patents" to set up meetings on the matter.

What a brilliant PR ploy, shifting the debate from "whether" to "how long." Problem is, his tactic is a smoke screen. First off, five years on the Internet is an eternity. Five years ago, there was no CNET. Microsoft had yet to discover the Web; there were no browser wars; search engines were just cropping up. Three years ago, there was no Ebay; e-commerce was an iffy proposition, and MP3 wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye. Companies have launched and lurched (too many to mention), paradigms have come and gone (remember Push technology), business models have swum and sunk (the Web as TV). If "business method" patents for trivial procedures are allowed to stand even three years, some competitors will gain an insurmountable advantage.

Furthermore, leaving the dirty work up to the government simply guarantees years of foot-dragging and inactivity. Patent reform is too dicey, too scary for the Feds to contemplate. Consider the recent controversy sparked when President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested human genome sequencing should be available to the public sooner rather than later. Nowhere did either man dispute the once-controversial principle that chromosome sequences are patentable. Yet the mere hint that government might try to legislate the patent situation panicked investors and sent the biotech industry into a tailspin. Sudden market dives are not lost on politicians, who’d rather avoid financially ruinous legislation.

Too bad, since the biotech and the software industries illustrate perhaps the greatest failing of the current patent system. Patents were instituted to foster creativity, innovation, and experimentation. They were supposed to help the little guy, tinkering away in his lab or shop, guaranteeing his ideas wouldn’t be stolen. Nowadays, though, patents are the province of the big guys, who routinely spend fortunes registering thousands of DNA sequences. The biotech behemoths are applying a brute-force business approach: They know that almost all the sequences they’re patenting will prove worthless, but they also know that any single sequence might turn into a billion-dollar wonder drug. No lone inventor can compete again such big bucks.

Same goes for the world of software. The Amazons and their big-market-cap brethren can drop millions on lawyers and patent applications. Some of the patents won’t pay off; others will. On this score, Jeff Bezos and company has won; consumers have lost. Today we’re forced to click twice at every single e-commerce site but Amazon. Who knows how Web innovation will be stifled tomorrow.