Patently Bezos Patents6/5/2000; 7:09:18 AM March 16, 2000: "When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos laid out his proposals for reforming the patent system last week, patent experts reacted with the same lack of enthusiasm the bookseller's competitors showed when it won a patent on its customer-referral program. After all, Bezos' plan, like some of his company's e-commerce patents, did not sound all that novel to people familiar with the subject.""'This is really nothing new,' says Randy Lipsitz, partner at Kramer, Levin, Naftalis and Frankel. 'He's not the first person to have spoken out against the patent system.'"And thus goes the entire Salon article. I have two questions:

1. If the idea isn't new, why does that make it bad?
2. Where in Bezos' essay does he claim that his proposals are new? (The word "new" shows up twice, neither of them describing the proposal.)

What a waste of an article. I tend to expect better from Salon then an article falling into the "The Only Good Idea Is A New Idea" fallacy.