While I agree that the patent is ridiculous, I don't believe that amazon should be totally to blame. The U.S. government granted it, after all. The dumb patent was issued almost 5 years ago, and back then their "business methods" were probably groundbreaking.

It's the USPTO that needs revamping, not the people who submit patent requests. Yep, software patents are BAD, so perhaps we should collectively let the USPTO know that they should get more technologically savvy before issuing patents they don't seem to understand the rippling effects of. And if patents are to be enforced by the patent-holder, they need to have a statute of limitations in which to do so. They shouldn't be allowed to wait until the patent is widely used and pop up with ludicrous licensing fees (Unisys, anyone?).

Sony has a patent for "a method for interactive network session tracking from inbound source to net sale includes storing a unique session ID (identifier) in an entry in a session database, and associating the session ID with an inbound source (origin) of the user of an interactive network site", but no one's complaining about them (and who hasn't done something like this?).

IMHO, amazon is only being pointed at because they chose to try to enforce their patent with one of their (big) competitors.

If I didn't already have the promoted DBI book, I'd have clicked dbi.perl.org's link, not for political reasons, but for supportive ones. The link is an affiliate link, and the way I see it, if I bought the dbi book from an affiliate link, Tim Bunce gets a royalty, O'Reilly gets another book sold, amazon shareholders may actually get a dividend and dbi.perl.org gets a few bucks in commission.

I expect there to be a few dissentions to this ideaology, but this is just my opinion -- I don't expect anyone else to share it :)