>This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.
It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.
Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.
Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines
