Microsoft Corp., (MSFT) Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and L.L. Bean Inc. are just some of the companies that have flooded the Supreme Court with advice as it prepares for Monday’s arguments over one of the biggest questions involving intellectual property: When can a business method be patented?

There has been a surge in companies receiving patents for ways of doing business, from Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) one-click checkout to Priceline.com Inc.’s (PCLN) reverse auctions, since a 1998 court decision expanded the scope of processes that could be patented.

The Supreme Court must now determine whether such swaths of modern business activity deserve patent protections, thereby opening the door to infringement lawsuits, or belong in the public domain, depriving their inventors of monopoly profits.

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We already have a ton of passwords to remember. Now Amazon.com (AMZN) wants us to remember something new–PayPhrase–which has already sparked an online pile on.

The program, which Amazon announced Wednesday, is supposed to replace ordinary login and password combinations with a phrase and PIN combination that are linked to a specific account and shipping address. The distinction is subtle: You have one Amazon login and password (which aren’t going away), but you can have multiple PayPhrases that are linked to specific aspects of your account, like different shipping addresses or credit cards.

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Cult musician Mojo Nixon hasn’t had a hit in years, but he’s moved over a million songs at Amazon.com (AMZN) so far this month.

The artist, who calls his revved-up rockabilly sound “psychobilly,” earlier this year cooked up a scheme to put almost his entire catalog up on Amazon.com, for free. “I’m losing a little bit of money in the short run,” Mr. Nixon says. But “in the long run, there is going to be much bigger Mojo awareness.” He and his online distributor, The Orchard, hope the move will lead to bigger sales and other opportunities, such as licensing more of his songs to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Mr. Nixon, who was hoping to get just 10,000 or so downloads out of the scheme, says he is very happy with the outcome so far.

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A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com (AMZN) than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

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When Amazon.com (AMZN) agreed to buy Zappos last week for $847 million in cash and stock, most reports said that the online shoe and clothing store had over $1 billion in sales last year.

But when Amazon filed its official paperwork about the deal with the SEC today, the company reported 2008 net revenues of just $635 million.

Why the more than $300 million discrepancy?

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Netflix (NFLX) shares are getting a boost today from vague takeover rumors.

TheFlyOnTheWall.com notes that the move in the stock today appears due to “renewed takeover speculation.”

About two years ago, there were a round of rumors that the company was going to be acquired by Amazon.com (AMZN), and there is some bulletin board chatter this morning spouting the same theory.

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If you value your spare time, don’t start posting comments and reviews on Amazon (AMZN), Mark Espinosa suggests. It can be a hard habit to break.

Given his rank as the online retailer’s No. 1 reviewer, he would certainly know.

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Figuring out when Web sites have been blocked by governments is an imprecise science.
Take, for example, Wednesday, when some Chinese Internet users began reporting an inability to access Amazon.com (AMZN), the U.S. Web site for the online retail giant. Yet Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said that “nothing happened.”

To back up the claim in blog posts and Twitter discussions, Chinese Internet users and watchers pointed to Herdict Web, a four-month-old system run by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which aggregates reports of Web site accessibility into one database. On Wednesday, 12 reports on Herdict claimed Amazon.com was inaccessible in China, and as of the time of this posting three claim it is back up. The reports came from users all over the country, including people whose Internet service providers are in Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Ningbo and Tianjin.

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In the future, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices.

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Amazon.com (AMZN) is absolutely on fire. The company posted Q1 results that blew away estimates, with EPS of 41 cents a dime ahead of the Street, as both gross margins and operating margin expanded in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Not only are consumers continuing to migrate shopping to online from offline, but Amazon continues to gobble up share: Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker notes that Amazon’s U.S. business has grown at least 18 percentage points faster than overall e-commerce for eight consecutive quarters. Throw in better-than-expected demand for the Kindle–annoyingly, the company won’t give any specific data on sales of the device–and you have a recipe for an investor lovefest.

And when I say the stock is on fire, I don’t just mean today. AMZN is up about 67 percent year to date, and a whopping 145 percent since the stock’s November low.

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Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) shut like a book.

Domino’s Pizza Inc. (DPZ) was late but eventually delivered.

And CNN focused on the good news.

When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages–and reputations–in a fast-twitch online world.

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Shopping on cellphones–long a dream among e-commerce companies–is not yet a mass-market phenomenon. But some new tools could help change that picture.

Amazon.com (AMZN) Thursday unveiled free software for BlackBerry handsets (trackball models only, please), that allow users to browse for products, read reviews, and buy on the go–just like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone that came out in December.

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Jokes dreamed up by tech companies for April Fool’s Day may not be spectacularly funny. But one can’t help but notice the level of effort put in, which sometimes seems to rival the intensity of their product-development efforts.

Qualcomm (QCOM), for example, has a very slick video on YouTube that initially seems to be a typical piece of corporate B-roll hyping the latest development out of their labs. Then it turns out they are discussing putting cellular base stations on pigeons to form a flying wireless network, which prompts the need to develop a beast called the wolf-pigeon to defend the network, which inspires the creation of a shark-falcon to control the wolf-pigeons, and so on.

Amazon.com (AMZN), reacting to the gaseous conversations about a trend known as cloud computing, contends in a Web posting that it has a new high-level offering in the field–on a blimp. It’s called “the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE for short. Using the latest in airship technology, we’ve created a cloud that can come to you,” the company writes.

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GameStop (GME) shares are getting clobbered today on news that Amazon.com (AMZN) is getting into the business of buying and selling used video games–and so is Toys ’R Us.

Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter explained in a research note today that one reason he has maintained an Outperform rating on GME shares is that the company has dominated the used videogame business; he notes that used games generate 44 percent of the retailer’s gross profits, nearly twice the segment’s sales contribution to the company. Over the last several days, he reports, there have been two attacks on the company’s near monopoly in used games.

On Tuesday, Forbes reported that Toys ’R Us has a pilot program to test the sale of used games in some of its U.S. stores; Forbes noted that the program was first reported in the user forums of a Web site called cheapassgamer.com. Other retailers, including Best Buy (BBY) and Blockbuster (BBI), have previously experimented in the segment, but haven’t made much of a dent.

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Slowly but surely, Legg Mason has been easing out of its once gigantic stake in Amazon.com (AMZN), formerly a favorite stock of Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller.

In a filing with the SEC yesterday, Legg disclosed that it now holds 9,592,126 Amazon shares, down from 24,280,422 shares in its previous filing in October. The latest sales reduce Legg Mason’s stake to 2.24 percent of Amazon’s outstanding shares.

The investment firm has been gradually paring back its shares over the last two years.

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