1-Click Ordering
Peter Hartman, Jeff Bezos and others, Amazon, USA, patent 5,960,411 of 1999. Buying with a single click.
Overview
Amazon patented a method for placing an online order with a single click, using stored payment and shipping details. It quickly won a preliminary injunction against Barnes & Noble's Express Lane checkout in 1999, and critics made it a symbol of overly broad software patents. Apple licensed the patent in 2000 for its online store. The European Patent Office rejected a parallel application as obvious. The US patent expired in 2017, after which one-click buying spread across online retail.
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