Patent delight for lawyers
The kindest thing you can say about the American patent system is that it is broken. The latest patent filing from Amazon only reinforces that opinion.
The 27 page long document comprising patent number US008615473 granted to Amazon is entitled "Method and System for Anticipatory Package Shipping". Whilst the origins of the word "patent" means clear and open, the language of this patent couldn't be more tortuous and opaque. This is just one short snippet copied verbatim from the patent, and its not even the whole sentence:
"A method comprising: performing by one of more computing devices: determining a status of one or more packages currently in transit to respective destination geographical areas wherein said destination geographical areas include multiple delivery addresses to which said package is deliverable, wherein at least one of the one or more shipped packages comprises one or more items which have been shipped before an order has occurred for the one or more items in the at least one shipped package, and wherein the one or more shipped packages were shipped to a respective destination geographical area without completely specifying the delivery address at time of shipment, such that at the time of shipment, each shipped package is deliverable to said respective destination geographical area but it not deliverable to any delivery address;"
If you can manage to wade through all 27 pages of legal verbiage, the "invention" seems to boil down to this: an online retailer could use past delivery information to work out that there seems to be a predictable demand for widgets in, say, Manchester. In that case it will pre-ship widgets to a distribution centre near Manchester in anticipation of orders. That's our invention and we claim rights to it.
So yes, it sounds like Amazon has been awarded a patent for inventing the warehouse.
28th January 2014