Amazon.com is Jeff Bezos brainchild and emblematic web-commerce web enterprise. It has been popular since its initial founding both for its business model and its controversy. Originally entering business with its primary focus of gaining market and mind share, it survived the fall of most of its contemporaries around the turn of the century.
Amazon.com has been a source of several controversies, some brought on by its size--such as when it was discovered that book authors were writing anonymous comments on the Amazon web site lauding their own book--but others are brought on by the companies own actions, such as exploiting holes in the patent system of the
U.S. and other countries. The first, and most well-known case being the so-called
1-click patent, which was ruled invalid seven years later after an independent party provided the funds to re-examine the patent. Similarly, many other patents Amazon.com has filed have had well established prior art or have been minor changes to well-known systems so obvious that nobody knowledgeable in the art would have though them patent worthy.