A few months ago, Amazon.com went after BarnesandNoble.com with their absurd ‘1-Click Shopping’ patent.
Now Apple has legitimized the foolish patent by licensing 1-Click Shopping for the Apple Store.
If you locked a few reasonably intelligent web developers in a room for six weeks to design a user-friendly ecommerce site and they had never heard of 1-Click Shopping (capitalization used sarcastically), they would probably develop it independently.
Boo Amazon.com, boo U.S. Patent Office, and boo Apple.
I saw that you have a page that discusses patent-related resources at https://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2000/september/apple. I wanted to suggest adding http://www.freepatentsonline.com to the page. This web site has free PDF downloading (instead of having to page through TIFFs like at the US PTO). It is by far the best free patent searching site.