It must be a strange week to be an intellectual property lawyer for Amazon. Days after the US Patent Office threw out a patent for "one-click" checkout button, the USPTO has granted Amazon a patent for something that seems at least as obvious: placing a "search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting."

Wait, that can't possibly mean what we think it means. They have a patent on URLS like "www.a9.com/San Francisco Hotels"? Yup, that's exactly what it means. Amazon claims that what differentiates these URLs from others is the lack of special formatting language like "search?q=."

Now, there are at least two basic problems with this as far as we can tell:

1. Generally you're only supposed to be able to get a patent for things that aren't obvious.
2. We're pretty sure there will be a lot of companies who can show "prior art," meaning they had URLs following this format long before Amazon filed for the patent in 2004.

Anyone want to predict how long it will take Amazon to try patenting a system for ordering products online using a keyboard and mouse?
[via Slashdot]