Lawyers don't tend to study the actual subjects they write about. That is how many patent attorneys can argue in good faith that this is a technology rather than a mere “bell and whistle.” If Amazon's back end is anywhere near as well designed as we can assume it is, the difficulty in creating a shortcut to create a basket, put one item in it and send it immediately to check out would be so trivial that no other industry would seriously try to claim that as a real invention. It's damn near like a company trying to claim a patent on adding a new gear to a manual transmission car.

When we describe “inventions” or “technologies” as things that can be owned as property, that carries the implication that inadvertently writing software that’s similar to another company’s software is in the same moral category as stealing a car.

He should look a the similarities between Flex and Silverlight if he believes this to be the case. They use different underlying technologies to address the same space, and end up doing it in a similar fashion. They are different to a software engineer with their different languages and libraries, but they seek the same fundamental goal and end solution which would put them in the category you described.

Lawyers don't tend to study the actual subjects they write about. That is how many patent attorneys can argue in good faith that this is a technology rather than a mere “bell and whistle.” If Amazon's back end is anywhere near as well designed as we can assume it is, the difficulty in creating a shortcut to create a basket, put one item in it and send it immediately to check out would be so trivial that no other industry would seriously try to claim that as a real invention. It's damn near like a company trying to claim a patent on adding a new gear to a manual transmission car.

When we describe “inventions” or “technologies” as things that can be owned as property, that carries the implication that inadvertently writing software that’s similar to another company’s software is in the same moral category as stealing a car.

He should look a the similarities between Flex and Silverlight if he believes this to be the case. They use different underlying technologies to address the same space, and end up doing it in a similar fashion. They are different to a software engineer with their different languages and libraries, but they seek the same fundamental goal and end solution which would put them in the category you described.

Lawyers don't tend to study the actual subjects they write about. That is how many patent attorneys can argue in good faith that this is a technology rather than a mere “bell and whistle.” If Amazon's back end is anywhere near as well designed as we can assume it is, the difficulty in creating a shortcut to create a basket, put one item in it and send it immediately to check out would be so trivial that no other industry would seriously try to claim that as a real invention. It's damn near like a company trying to claim a patent on adding a new gear to a manual transmission car.