God bless New Zealand

No, I have not suddenly become a Kiwi. I did, very briefly, become an All Blacks supporter after the Wallabies were bundled out of the Rugby World Cup, but obviously that didn’t last long. I hear the competition kept going after that, for some reason. Go figure.

I am, however, a keen fan of New Zealanders and their “don’t guv me thet crep” attitude to authority. Australians have it a little bit, but it seems to be part of the DNA on the other side of the Tasman.

I’m particularly a fan, at the moment, of a Kiwi by the name of Peter Calveley. He’s an actor who has lent his talents to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. (I used to be a huge fan of Peter Jackson … up until he did the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) In LOTR, Peter Claveley was a motion capture actor – which is to say, he had little electrodes attached to his body and he moved about being an orc or somesuch. Then he was completely replaced by a computer-generated model that replicated his movements. That model was then duplicated hundreds and hundreds of times so that Peter Calveley became an entire army of orcs or somesuch, none of whom looked remotely like him (one hopes). Ah, stardom.

He’s also a professional larrikin who really doesn’t care for bad customer service. He recently had less than perfect service from Amazon.com (they lost his book and had to send him a new one) so he decided to destroy their business model. That’ll teach them.
Specifically, he decided to look into the patents that make up Amazon’s “1-Click” technology. 1-Click is the system whereby Amazon stores your credit card details, shipping preferences and certain other information, then allows you to order items with one button, bypassing the need to go through the checkout.

It’s very lucrative for Amazon, not merely because it persuades more people to complete their transactions at Amazon (rather than surfing away halfway through the checkout when they remember they wanted some porn) but because almost every other ecommerce website licenses 1-Click from Amazon. Every purchase made at the iTunes Store uses 1-Click, so Amazon is getting a piece of every dollar Apple makes on that one. Ker-ching.
It’s the equivalent of every supermarket in the world paying Woolworths a fee for having an “Eight Items Or Less” lane. (Side note: that should be “Eight Items Or Fewer”, but no supermarket chain has yet employed a grammarian.)

Many have commented on the absurdity of Amazon’s 1-Click patent, but Peter Calveley, my new personal hero, did something about it. He dug about through patents, scraped together the filing fee, and challenged the patents in court. The US Patents Office upheld Calveley’s challenge, and threw out 21 of Amazon’s 26 patents relating to 1-Click.
There will be appeals, and it’s as yet unclear the extent to which Amazon’s patent will be affected. Certainly, though, the legal and financial implications for Amazon are far from over, and this will be expensive.

The moral: when a Kiwi orders something from you, make sure they get it quickly.
Matthew JC. Powell can be reached on mjcp@optusnet.com.au, probably eating fush and chups.

bless god new training & development zealand