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Publisher Speaks Out Against Amazon Patents
andy@petdance.com writes, "In a
recent Ask Tim article on the O'Reilly Web site, Tim O'Reilly takes Jeff Bezos to task for his attempts at patenting 1-click and the associates program. An Open Letter to Amazon is provided for adding your voice to Jeff & co." O'Reilly has a very thoughtful letter about how Amazon's attitude would have killed the Web in its infancy. He also submitted a letter to the IP mailing list which explains his thoughts a bit more. See also NoWebPatents.Org which is running their own anti-Amazon boycott, and our previous story about RMS's call for a boycott.
I wonder if Tim O'Reilly has or is contemplating such a move. I don't expect it to happen, but it would certainly be a huge event, and not the first time that O'Reilly has done The Right Thing.
Cheers,
Jeffrey
O'Reilly puts his money where his mouth is. O'Reilly chose to chase up the issue. i.e. O'Reilly is putting his money (and influence) where his mouth is.
No, he's not putting money anywhere than in his bank account at the moment. If he were putting his money where his mouth is he would be refusing to ship through Amazon.
Please note, I am not making any statement about whether or not that is the right thing to do. Just disputing your rhetoric. At the moment all that is happening is "mouth". There is no economic incentive issuing from O'Reilly. RMS is the one advocating that we put our money somewhere else other than Amazon.
Let's not get confused about the difference between a verbal appeal and an economic boycott!
--Crush
I'm tired of signing ineffective petitions.
I'm tired of participating in ineffective boycotts.
It's time to DO SOMETHING!
Good Lord! How much longer are we going to have to put up with crap like this? The Corporate Man(tm) isn't going to do anything about this, because they either already have or are trying to aquire their very own frivolous patents. It's time for someone to stand up and start filing civil suits. I've got disposable income, I'll contribute.
I'm sorry but boycots/embargos simply don't work. (Blockades on the other hand...) They do in theory, but in reality it's pretty damn hard to reach critical mass.
This is not a case of the community simply persecuting for no reason. I have to admit to have seen that happen in the past. But such cases typically involve a small vocal minority of Slashdot trolls and other zealots. This is neither a case of corporation-bashing. I've done some large multinational conglomerate bashing myself, but only in cases where it's waranted (eg. Nike using slave labour, corporations trying to control sovereign states through the WTO, etc).
This is a case of abuse. Before the 1-click patent fiasco, geeks were some of the heaviest supporters of Amazon.com. Many of us participated in the affiliate program, as did Slashdot itself. Many of us patronized Amazon by purchasing books and other goods from them.
The fact is, Amazon's patents are clear abuses of the patent system. The entire community, RMS, and now O'Reilly have spoken out again the patent. This is different from a Slashdot troll saying "Borland is shit. If they're going release their compiler for free, they have to GPL it and do the same to their debuggers. Otherwise I'll bomb their offices. Who cares if it's their property to do with as they wish? I WANT MY GPL!"
Did anyone else catch this?
"It's a well known technology truism that all of the smart people don't work for you, and that one of the surest ways to success is to get more ideas and more work out of people outside your own fences."
Proof positive that Tim O'Reilly knows from whence he speaks. That's got to be one of the most effective and concise explanations of the philosophy behind open source development I've ever read.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The constant creation of these silly patents can only result in litigation. After all, a patent serves only two purposes; to put a process or invention in a publicly accessable database, and to give you ammo to sue your competitors.
Once this goes to court, there's very little chance it will stand up. Unfortunately, as more of these stupid patents go to court, the courts will require better evidence than they do now, until eventaully patents become worthless.
And despite the Slashdot concensus, this is NOT a good thing.
Software patents are usually bogus, however I seriously believe that there are exceptions. The problem is, it's easy to look at a solution an say how easy it must have been to find. It's much more difficult to look at a problem and come up with a decent solution.
Google is a tricky piece of work. Macromedia Flash is an amazing bit of programming. I only wish that someone had patented HTTP, GPLed it, and then refused to let Amazon play, effectively kicking them out of the sandbox.
There are deserving patents out there. Amazon however seems to be "patent squatting", i.e. sitting on obvious patents and hoping they become valuable. Meanwhile the Patent Office understands just as little about the Internet as ICANN, which is an impressively small amount.
[Any errors or stupidity in this document is the result of not sleeping. Goodnight.]
-----
No Zen is good zen
And of course, it's always best to do a search for the cheapest price at places like pricescan.com
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
how does anyone expect "boycotts" to have any effect on a company that has never made a dime, yet still sells stock at any price they want to name?
Dave Winer wrote an article on how we could escape the patent straightjacket at:s osForSenorBezos
t ented/
http://davenet.userland.com/2000/02/28/noMorePe
One of his points was that we should all put our ideas on the web and let them be linked to. To that end I'm putting my idea for a memory efficient hashtable on the web:
http://www.worldforge.org/website/servers/notpa
Ideally someone will make a searchable open idea database; but, in the meantime, the web and search engines can serve.
That's right, a method twice as efficient as the old way of shopping! I don't require one whole wasteful click to purchase a product - only the mouse_down action is captured, and immediatey selects the product of your choice to be whisked to your choice of locations!
What then to do with the remaining mouse_up operation? No need to squander - you can purchase yet ANOTHER product by hovering over another item and releasing the plastic rodent from your grasp! In the same time as it would have taken you to purchase a single item at OTHER on-line shopettes you may have heard of, you have two delightful items in the air and almost there!
I being a genererous person who cares little for material things and has a boundless fondness for all things O' Riley, hereby place this idea (even just the mouse_down portion) in the public domain to be used by all without recompense.
Now the chorded binary mouse button quantity selection technique, that's another story...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Once this goes to court, there's very little chance it will stand up. Unfortunately, as more of these stupid patents go to court, the courts will require better evidence than they do now, until eventaully patents become worthless.
Er. . . this patent has gone to court, and it has survived so far. Amazon obtained preliminary injunction, despite the arguments of a well-represented Barnes and Noble that the patent was invalid. Now, of course, this is hardly a final adjudication: all the court determined was that there was a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. More needs to be discovered, argued and presented to the Court, but this brings me to my point:
Whatever you might think of patents generally, the invalidity of this patent is not all that clear. While it is politically correct in this forum to savage the USPTO for issuing it, dropping lines like, "a trivial application of cookies," the truth appears far more interesting. It is far more difficult to make a legitimate, legal, argument as to this patent's invalidity.
Preliminary injunction in a patent (as opposed to a copyright or trademark) case, particularly when it stops a major enterprise from continuing business as usual, is quite rare. All a defendant needs to do is introduce evidence of invalidity or unenforceability that defeats plaintiff's claim there is a "substantial likelihood" of winning on the merits. This is the easiest standard B&N will ever face in this matter.
From now on in, B&N must prove invalidity to a jury by clear and convincing evidence, which is the civil law equivalent of "beyond a reasonable doubt." The jury will be told to find for the plaintiff unless they harbor an unwavering, clear and abiding conviction that the patent is invalid. Oh yeah, that will happen.
Not.
This is one of the principal reasons that plaintiffs win over 75% of patent cases that go to trial -- a jury, overwhelmed with reams of legal instructions from the judge and presented with technology it barely groks isn't going to harbor an unwavering, clear and abiding conviction of anything. Ultimately, what they will see is the pretty deed, and the judges instruction that, if they aren't sure, they should find for the plaintiff and go back to their families. But that's only the practical side of it.
It is one thing to say, without more, that the issuing of a patent is bad policy and should not have issued therefor. On that point, I might even find myself in agreement. It is another thing entirely to actually argue that the patent *IS* invalid. B&N was in a position to present their best prior art, and they didn't induce even the slightest doubt in the judge that there was less than a substantial likelihood that the patent was valid. In view of this, how, exactly, are they going to convince a jury that there isn't any doubt that the patent is invalid?
But to take this a step further, let's assume that Amazon actually deserves its large price-to-earnings ratio and combine it with something from http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/am azon_patent.html:
By scaring away other e-commerce sites, Amazon ensures that fewer people will find the Internet useful. That means fewer websites in the future, and therefore fewer people, and so on. Since Amazon depends on having a large user base in the future, why is it abusing a weak patent-checking system in an Internet-destroying way?
--
The shareholder is always right.
Good work O'Reilly. You might say that it has taken a long time from the initial outcry over Amazon's one-click shopping to O'Reilly doing anything, but it's not only great that he's responded, but that he has responded the way he has.
Everyone take note.
First of all, he noted that there was a community feeling of disgust over the software patent in question. Now, while O'Reilly makes a lot of cash from Amazon's business (a fact freely admitted to by O'Reilly), instead of refusing to "bite the hand" that at least partially feeds him and his company, O'Reilly chose to chase up the issue.
i.e. O'Reilly is putting his money (and influence) where his mouth is. It has been a long time claim that O'Reilly supports Open Source, and here is definitely doing the right thing [tm].
But not only that; how did he respond? First of all he wrote a private e-mail to Bezos, which wasn't necessarily a "you guys are evil! wtf do you think you are doing?!?!?", but a well-worded even-handed explanation of his situation. When that met with unsatisfactory results he has upped the pressure, with the petition mail, and public responses.
Sure, you might say, he's just protecting his own interests by mollifying the community and not abusing Amazon. But I would disagree with that. Not only has he made it clear on a personal level that he is not happy with Amazon's policies, but he's willing to step into the public space to state so, while not taking to anyone with a blowtorch.
And lets face it, if all Linux advocates, or any advocates whatsoever were so careful, and measured about their approach, there would be a lot fewer holy wars, and probably fewer lawsuits.
Cheers,
SuperG
Obviously, Amazon wants to set new records for losing money. Previous steady drains will be dwarfed when they finally piss off the largest chunk of their customer base. They'll set new records for hemorrhaging cash. And, if past performance is any indicator, their stock will skyrocket as a result.
Who knows, in a few months they may end up buying M$...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
See: my comments on the Amazon 1-click patent. --p