But if Amazon recieves a patent for "one click shopping"... how are we supposed to get around that and create competing systems? Basically, in the software world, there are only a few ways to do any given operation, and even fewer of those are reasonable. After all, when it comes down to it, all computers work off of three basic operations: Read, Write, Move Pointer (Turing Machines if you're into that sort of thing). With software patents, there can often be no competing design, as the only workable design is patented. That's not reasonable.