By Rachel Chalmers
Amazon.com Inc has filed a lawsuit against rival barnesandnoble.com, claiming barnesandnoble.com has illegally copied Amazon’s 1-Click technology. The suit was filed on Thursday October 21 1999 in the US District Court in Seattle. Amazon’s lawyers accuse barnesandnoble.com of patent infringement. They seek a court-ordered halt to the allegedly copied feature, and demand an unspecified amount in damages. Executives at Amazon say the company introduced its 1-Click feature in September 1997. We spent thousands of hours to develop our 1-Click process, claimed CEO Jeff Bezos, and the reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers.
Barnesandnoble.com has been quick to strike back. The lawsuit brought against us by one of our e-commerce competitors is a desperate attempt to retaliate for our growing market share, the company said in a statement. We believe the allegations to be completely without merit and we will vigorously defend our position. However, we are please to notice that they spelled our name correctly in a press release announcing the lawsuit. In fact, traffic to our web site was up substantially today because of the publicity. We thank our competitor for the incremental sales.
The snaky comment about spelling has its roots in the last exchange of press releases between the two rivals. In 1998, Barnesandnoble.com’s announced its intention to acquire Ingram Book Group Inc, a major supplier to Amazon. Amazon was a swift and bitter critic of the proposed merger, saying that it would: undoubtedly raise industry-wide concern and noting that Goliath is always in range of a good slingshot. Barnesandnoble.com shot out a retort, correcting Amazon’s spelling and snapping: With a market capitalization of some $6bn and more than four million customers, we suppose you know a Goliath when you see one. Amazon’s press mavens had the last word, however. They issued a press release which read: Oh. As a matter of fact, Amazon won the argument. In June 1999, under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, Barnesandnoble.com backed out of the acquisition.
Ironically, as recently as April 1999, Amazon had to settle a similar lawsuit brought against it by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Amazon had hired Richard Dalzell, formerly of Wal-Mart IT, as its chief information officer. Wal-Mart’s lawyers insisted that Dalzell had misappropriated confidential documents which described Wal-Mart’s data warehousing technology. They claimed Amazon hired Dalzell to copy Wal-Mart’s trade secrets for use in its joint venture with Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers, Drugstore.com. Eventually Amazon agreed to reassign nine former Wal-Mart IS personnel, to stop recruiting Wal-Mart employees and to return the papers. Maybe the company can take the lessons it learned from the Wal- Mart case to force Barnesandnoble.com into a similar settlement.
