Nope. The patent should be granted only if it is "not obvious to a skilled practitioner skilled in the art", not just if nobody published the same exact thing before. 1-click WAS obvious in 1998 to any skilled practitioner who knew about cookies.
The only difference is that they evidently found a good formula to do it with repeated successes by focusing on early localization on European (and especially German) market, and so became famous.
By the way, I'm in favor of patents in general, but with very stringent non-obviousness requirements. IIRC the USPTO changed its attitude not so many years ago here, going from a "reject as much as possible" one to a "accept as much as possible" one.
If US entrepreneurs suck at serving a global market (and they do - failing even with covering Canada and Mexico for years, their direct neighbors), someone else is bound to fill the niche.
Instead of whining about the Samwers, how about expanding as soon as possible? Either there's money to be had abroad (then go and get it) or there's not (then why aren't Samwers bankrupt by now, at least thrice?).
I'm not "whining" about the Samwers - I am bringing them into the larger context of this debate. That is - with patent protection - their outright clones would not exist. You draw a completely different imputation by comparing it to business strategy of expanding faster and cloning a product. I am not against, in any sense, taking an idea (groupon) and making it work in a different part of the world - as long as it adds something to it - a different UI and so on.
The Samwers don't add that and that's what is detestable. If your startup worked hard, built a product with a great UI that is commented upon and then a competitor clones it outright in a different market - are you suggesting you wouldn't be pissed ? Because that's exactly what the Samwers do. And sometimes it's not so easy to just "expand as soon as possible" - payments is a whole massive legal headache (in the case of stripe). Verification systems, financial approval and so on and so on per country and many others. Plus, expanding quickly involves local offices, larger teams, greater strategic planning, more investment capital which then dilutes existing people more and so on and so on. So it's not a simple matter of "expand as quickly as possible" but sometimes that's just not feasible.
They probably "should" do that by offering this as a service to promising US startups. But who would pay for that an even remotely comparable amount of $$$ than what they get now?
Thanks for the pointer, I'd never heard of these guys. Pretty amazing...