Amazon patents system for taking out obvious patents
One almost thinks Jeff Bezos has come out with a one-click way for patenting everything on the Internet. With his beloved One-Click patent in tatters, Bezos got a consolation prize from the Patent Office. Patent No. 7,287,042 was issued today for a "Search engine system supporting inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL". In other words, Amazon just patented something Google has been doing for years. (Photo by AP/Andy Rogers)