Kiwi tackles Internet giant

GEOFF DALE

PETER CALVELEY: Declared war on global giant Amazon.com. 'They needed a kicking.'

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A plucky Kiwi who took on a NZ$13 billion American Internet giant and won - potentially slaying one of the world's most lucrative patents - says the company "needed a kicking".

Aucklander Peter Calveley saw red when he discovered that a "one click" online shopping system - patented by global Internet retailer Amazon.com in 1997 - had already been invented.

The 37-year-old fight sequence choreographer and actor, who worked on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, appeared in the movies as part of the evil orc armies. He has studied commercial law and lists United States patents as a hobby.

Frustrated in 2005 when a book he ordered from Amazon took too long to arrive, he used his blog to declare war on the Internet retailer - which had sales of more than NZ$13 billion last year and profits of NZ$253 million.

Mr Calveley started researching the patent - which lets shoppers make easy one-click Internet purchases with their mouse and was used by Amazon to sue rival bookseller Barnes & Noble.com in 1999 - and discovered that a similar "DigiCash" payment system had been used in the early 1990s by another Internet company.

The one-click technology allows an Internet customer to enter a credit card number and address just once, meaning for subsequent purchases they need to click only once to buy an item. The technology - which Amazon has licensed to other companies including computer giant Apple - makes it harder for customers to change their mind.

Mr Calveley filed papers with the US Patents and Trademarks Office in 2005 asking it to investigate Amazon's patent claims, scraping together the necessary $4000 fee from donations over the Internet.

"I just thought it was very,very cheeky," he told The Dominion Post yesterday. "I don't have anything against them really. But if I see someone doing something stupid like that they need a slapping round." In May last year the office began re-examining the Amazon patent and it announced this week that it had rejected all but five of the company's 26 patent claims after a 17-month investigation.

It opens the way for other companies to use the easy one-click online shopping system without paying licensing fees to Amazon, which could end the company's stranglehold on its most famous intellectual property asset.

Amazon has two months to lodge an appeal. A company spokesman said it expected to file a response before the December 9 deadline.

Mr Calveley spent "a couple of hundred bucks" on printing and postage costs in his successful battle against Amazon's army of high-powered lawyers, but only became aware of the decision on Wednesday night when he noticed a surge in his "blog traffic".

He admitted the company was probably angry with him and said the case was a bit like David versus Goliath. "Neither I nor the contributors were like the opposition that have their own space programme, so it was a bit harder for us than it was for them."

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