Amazon's audacity goes far beyond laying legal claim to the "single-click" purchase.

Here is a quote from the patent that was granted on September 28, 1999: "Also, various different single actions can be used to effect the placement of an order.

For example, a voice command may be spoken by the purchaser, a key may be depressed by the purchaser, a button on a television remote control device may be depressed by the purchaser, or selection using any pointing device may be effected by the purchaser.

Although a single action may be preceded by multiple physical movements of the purchaser (e.g., moving a mouse so that a mouse pointer is over a button), the single action generally refers to a single event received by a client system that indicates to place the order."

"We examine patents against the prior art that is available to us," said U.S. Patent and Trademark Office commissioner and assistant secretary of commerce Q. Todd Dickinson in an Internet chat with the public earlier this month.

Dickinson--a former patent attorney himself at Sun Company, Inc., Chevron Corporation, Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc., and the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania law firm of Blenko, Buell, Ziesenheim and Beck--has overseen the fast-tracking of a number of high-profile e-commerce patents.

"We have cut our cycle time last year from 16 to 12.9 months," he said in the chat. "We have done this by hiring additional examiners, 1500 in the last two years."

But it's a stressful process for patent examiners, Dickenson admitted.

"This is a big concern of mine personally," he said,in the chat exchange. "We are working constantly, especially with our unions to make improvements ... work schedule flexibility, comp time, health and fitness facilities, and expanded educational opportunities."

The real question is whether the patent office's staff is up to the task of evaluating eBusiness applications. A staff that can't be reached by e-mail.

A patent office that is just now "experimenting" with semantic technology--for example, CoBrain.com--that would allow them to comprehend the context for each new "process" application. "We are aware of semantic searching generally," said Dickenson, "and are researching it now."

Since the approval process is entirely confidential--not allowing for opposition challenges--the only recourse for companies like Barnes and Noble is to make the argument for reexamination of questionable patents.

These reexaminations, once rare, may soon be commonplace. "In the past, reexaminations have been initiated where significant concern about the patentability of the claimed subject matter has been expressed by a substantial segment of the industry," explained a December 21, 1999 press release by the patent office.

That press release announced that Commissioner Dickenson has reopened patent 5,806,063 awarded in 1998 to McDonnell Douglas Corporation employee Bruce Dickens, for a Y2K solution called "Data formatting and sorting for dates spanning the turn of the century."

The Dickens patent resembles Amazon's in that it applies to database manipulation--his "invention" was to add more numerical entries to the way dates are collected in a database for any 10-decade continuum straddling the year 2000.

The patent office is taking another look because of his idea's utter simplicity.

If the first digit of a two-digit decade/year is less than the first digit of the decade/year that marks the starting point of the 10-decade span, then the corresponding two-digit century number will be "20"--if the first digit of that two-digit decade/year, however, is more than the first digit of the decade/year starting point, the century number will be "19."

According to the Patent and Trademark Office press release, examiners "will reconsider the claims in the patent to determine whether the invention is new and non-obvious [key criteria for awarding patents]."

The entire eBusiness community will be holding its collective breath to see whether our patent office has the understanding and guts to cancel the Y2K patent, and then move forward and rescind similarly ridiculous patents like Amazon's single click and LinkShare's reinvention of "affiliate-marketing."

AskJeeves would also be relieved to learn that the patent examiners have come to their senses and denied a new application by two MIT professors who claim they "invented" the search engine.

In a recent Clickz.com story, "End the Patent Wars," Dana Blankenhorn points out that, "a patent on a mousetrap doesn't stop another inventor from building an even better mousetrap."

He goes on to nail the problem with all the "State Street" patents on business processes like reverse auctions, affiliate-marketing and single-click purchases. "The patent in this case doesn't just protect the way you did something," writes Blankenhorn. "It protects all ways of doing that thing ... rather than supporting innovation, business process patents stop it in its tracks."

A short year ago, Vice-President Al Gore said, "We must redouble our efforts to remove barriers that can stifle the growth of the Internet an htd of electronic commerce," in unveiling the First Annual Report of his working group on electronic commerce. Now might be a good time for Gore to have a heart-to-heart with his patent commissioner. Otherwise, it could be an ice-cold millennium for America's small-business economy.