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[Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

"j. alfred prufrock" wrote:
> apparently, npr fell for the bezos line this morning. their piece spoke
> favorably of the patent as necessary to protect amazon from the
> predatory barnes and noble, who had copied amazon's site byte for byte.

        Yes, absolutely.  And they even led off the piece by mentioning how
patents must be based upon newness and originality, yet failed to follow
up on that by questioning the validity of the "affiliate program"
patent.  Instead, the piece focused on the effect of Amazon's widespread
enforcement of the patent making it appear that it was entirely within
Amazon's discretion.  If I recall correctly, they stated that if Amazon
tried to enforce the patent the main effect would be e-commerce
companies having to shell out royalties.  Litigation would be the more
obvious result to me.  

        Feh!

TaB