May 01, 2017
Amazon, which famously made itself into one of the world’s largest retailers as a result of a massive government subsidy in the form of an exemption from the requirement to collect state sales taxes, is again looking for the government’s help. The NYT reported that Amazon has taken out a patent on custom clothing ordering over the Internet.
It’s not clear what rights Amazon intends to secure with this patent. If it means to secure the very specific process outlined in the NYT, then it probably wasted money by filing, since it would be very easy for a competitor to alter one or more of the processes detailed in the patent and therefore avoid Amazon’s claim.
On the other hand, if the Amazon is claiming the exclusive right to make clothes to order over the Internet, then this is yet another great effort by a private company to use the patent system to stifle innovation. Selling made to order clothes on the Internet is what would ordinarily be viewed as an obvious innovation that is not patentable. (It’s in the category of telling someone to turn left at the fork in the road to reach their destination. The driving directions are not patentable.)
While it might seem far-fetched to imagine that Amazon thinks that it can patent the right to sell made to order clothes on the Internet, the company did patent one-click shopping back in the 1990s. It has used this government granted monopoly to force competitors to pay it a fee for the last twenty years.
As Jeff Bezos knows well, it’s always easier to rely on the government to give you money than to earn it in the market.
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