Op de pagina's van de Linux Documentation Project vond ik een protest tegen Amazon.com, dat blijkbaar in een wanhopige poging om winst te maken het gebruik van cookies heeft gepatenteerd. En ze zijn van plan om daar geld uit te slaan, want ze zijn al begonnen processen te voeren tegen andere bedrijven in de US.
Een hapje uit het originele bericht:
Amazon has obtained a US patent (5,960,411) on an important and obvious idea for E-commerce: the idea that your command in a web browser to buy a certain item can carry along information about your identity. (This works by sending back a "cookie", a kind of ID code that your browser received previously from the same server.) Amazon has sued to block the use of this simple idea, showing that they truly intend to monopolize it. This is an attack against the World Wide Web and against E-commerce in general. The idea in question is that a company can give you something which you can subsequently show them to identify yourself for credit. This is nothing new: a physical credit card does the same job, after all. But the US Patent Office issues patents on obvious and well-known ideas every day. Sometimes the result is a disaster