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.

Yes there are obvious problems with the U.S. patent office and their evaluation of patent claims. Yes they are a major part of the problem and more needs to be done to fix the U.S. (and other) patent offices. However, rewarding those who take advantage of these flaws only serves to damage the software industry by encouraging more companies to obtain and enforce questionable patents.

The dumb patent was issued almost 5 years ago, and back then their "business methods" were probably groundbreaking.

The patent in question was issued on September 28th, 1999. What the patent basically says is that you fill out a form and give them some info, they send you a cookie to store some information to identify you, next time you visit their site it gets sent back to them. This is not, and was not at the time, "groundbreaking."

Sony's patent seems to be another screw up of the U.S. patent office. I hadn't heard anything about it previously, probably because they haven't tried to enforce it (please inform me if I'm incorrect). If they do try, I'm sure there will be plenty of noise.

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 think you missed the point. The only part of this that changes if the affiliate program was switched to fatbrain or somewhere else is that Amazon wouldn't make a profit off the sale and we wouldn't be supporting their enforcement of a ridiculous patent. See Boycott :).