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Bezos Responds to Tim O'Reilly's Open Letter
Dredd13 writes, "On his site, Tim O'Reilly recounts the conversation he had with Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, in regards to the "overwhelming positive response" to Tim's open letter to the community about one-click shopping. Makes for a good read. "
Yes! Thank you.
I also don't like storing people's credit card numbers on the server
If you really want to get upset, try to get your credit card number removed from Amazon's server. They treat the info like their property, and you like a criminal for requesting it be removed.
Who is this mysterious group conducting an odd study? Why did they beat you for saying "Natalie Portman", how is the government going to ruin your life for saying "Natalie Portman". All these questions and more could be answered in an entertaining manner.
First, the government was never mentioned. Second, you're demanding that he clog up a good story with extraneous bullshit. One of the most important things for a writer to have is a good instinct about what to put in and what to leave out. I've been reading this guy's stuff for many months, and he's got that instinct in spades. It's rare, it's damned hard to learn, and you'll never do it really well if it doesn't come naturally. His prose isn't perfect by my standards (then again, I pick faults with Joyce), but he can tell a story and that's very damn important. You're clearly so far out to lunch that you can't even recognize it when somebody else does it right. Try writing yourself and find out how hopeless you are.
You appear to suffer from the delusion that if you can get a B+ regurgitating canned answers to canned questions on a high-school lit exam (e.g. "The naroter in this Peom is Sad becaus his Pupy dyed"), you know something worth knowing. You're wrong.
if you are a good writer
He's a good writer already, moron. You can't recognize that fact because your English lit. teacher didn't give you his name on a list of Great Writers of the 20th Century to memorize. You have no judgement of your own. Fuck off.
Actually, a small number of people could cut deep into Amazon's profits by regularly ordering books they had no intention of keeping. Return the suckers. That is the kind of thing that really cuts into the margins.
If shipping costs are an issue, just refuse delivery, then call and demand they reverse the charges.
This isn't about computers or technology. This is about a few people making more money that some countries. Nothing but greed here on either side. I say fuck them all.
Correct. Netscape isn't dead.
But they're damn mediocre these days, and some consider that an online fate worse than death.
And their boy prince (little Marc the wonderchild) is far less revered than he was. Which is a very, very good thing. The little creep tried to take over the 'net with closed source, and look who he delivered the net unto in the end (Microsoft).
So?
A browser should be a commodity item.
And I will start feeling sorry for Netscape when someone demonstrates they weren't trying to own the entire Internet. Microsoft didn't "rescue" us from them, but Netscape established the agenda by striving to become the closed-source access point to the WWW with their browser products. They created a situation (one big company for Microsoft to compete against) that delivered the WWW to Microsoft.
Netscape, more than any other entity I can think of, damaged the viability of a free non-proprietary WWW.
The points made by Jeff Bezos still don't justify the use of software patents as they have been used by Amazon. What if Amazon does get taken over ? The company which takes them over then owns the patents. Imagine if they are taken over by Microsoft, or AOL-Time Warner, and they enforce the patents against everyone else.
If the US isn't careful, it can say bye-bye to its lead of the software industry. The number of lawyers needed by software companies in the States (to deal with patent and licencing issues - UCITA anyone ?) will make software development significantly more expensive there than anywhere else in the world.
Don't you go sullying ESR's good name, there!
He's not rich yet, because he can't sell off the VA shares for awhile. And I know in my deepest heart that he's going to give some of the bux back to the community.
Probably in the form of little lapel badges we can all wear, which read "ESR and OpenSource(tm) are Cool!"
Nice flashy badges we can wear proudly.
He's not a sell-out until he sells out. Besides, Fetchmail is a killer utility. Right up there with the vi editor!
I stopped buying from B&N when they started selling child pornography.
That's just a mis-spelling in the text. It was supposed to read "one clique."
And, bucko, you're not in it!
Fuck that. Dave Winer is an asshole.
Is the letter patented?
Oh my goodness. I can't believe you made me look at that.
MS succeeded with the browser because they've convinced enough people about the "necessity" of the browser for the "OS", and could leverage "coincidentally" including it, and technically not selling it, with new OS purchases (or Office2000, in the case of IE5)...
At least the mechanics of NT and Win9x allow you to default another browser for the default HTML viewer, which you would think wouldn't be allowed if it was a critical, essential, piece of Win9x/NT, the way plugging in a new vmm386.vxd would impact the OS...
I pretty much agree with this post. Barnes and Noble have been putting smaller stores out of business long before Amazon was a twinkle in JB's eye. They continue to do so today. I have no problem with them using this patent as a tool to use against B&N. The argument that all you need to do is come up with better ideas to beat the competition( as stated elsewhere in the thread, not above post) is bullshit. Ask any of the small software manufacturers who went out of business while there ideas are being used by Microsoft today. In the internet economy, when new ideas can sometimes be copied by a competitor in less than 24 hours(just redesign some of the web page's functionality), the only criteria that defines who eats and who is eaten is who has more influence on the price at which goods to be sold are purchased, or who has the largest amount of purchasing power. Seems B&N is the clear winner in both these catagories. Well I've said my peace and am now going to do some shopping on Amazon.
API - Why Wait??
An Amazon API would be cool, but why wait for them to do it? Infotone (infotone.com) has already developed the capabilities to do this - for Amazon or ANY web site on the web.
Just write a few lines of code and you can abstract away all that html junk and get a clean functional interface to their encyclopedia of shopping capabilities. Then, integrate these capabilities into your own web site or develop something just for you own use (on your PC or mobile device).
Check out Infotone Developer Stuff for more details or email developers@infotone.com to get it from the horse's mouth.
What he can do is license it for cheap. But he must try to stop people (all people) from using the patent without Amazon's "express written permission."
Don't copyrighted works need to have some minimum length? I believe you can't copyright a single word, like "the" (C)2000 by Anonymous Coward, for instance.
Don't forget that Bezos himself has a David-and-Goliath standoff in mind: relatively small and very vulnerable Amazon versus giant-Walmart and giant-B&N.
And given the choice between Amazon, Walmart, and B&N, I'll pick Amazon, even with their 1-Click and affiliate program patents. All three have helped put the squeeze on independent retailers and e-tailers, all three have put companies out of business. But of the three, only Amazon has done it as a side effect, not a core element of their business philosophy.
If you're referring to the books of Jock Sturges, David Hamilton, et al., then all I can say is Honi soit qui mal y pense, or (roughly) "it takes one to know one." If you can't tell the difference between art and pornography, you're certainly not the sort of person I want deciding what books I can and can't buy.
When the first letter from O'Reilly came out you were all outraged. When the response came out, you all put your tail between your legs and cried "Jeff has to protect his business..." Baaaa, Baaaaa Get your noses out of O'Reilly's butt and think for yourselves.
Um...no. In fact, Netscape may not be dead, but their portal is pretty much like everyone else's corporate portal, which is to say it blows, and their browser SUCKS ROCKS compared to IE (this from a diehard Unix zealot of 10+ years). What's your problem with jwz, anyway? Is it that he told the truth about how Netscape's culture got destroyed?
Too bad you used the Hindu/Buddhist variety (with the arms bent anticlockwise) instead of the Nazi one (clockwise). Fix it!
So far you've failed to justify an exception to my general rule that people who use the phrase "paradigm shift" should be slapped vigorously about the face and head. Just FYI.
Well, this used to be one of the risks of going into business: If you had a good idea, and were successful at it, somebody else would come along and try the same thing. Look at Time and Newsweek, look at Ford and General Motors (and all the folks who didn't survive in the auto business, like Tucker), look at Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, look at NBC and CBS. Used to be that, for most businesses, there was no way to deal with competition except outsmart and out-execute it.
But that's not a comfortable position: It's certainly more comfortable to have a guaranteed monopoly. With a monopoly, you don't have to innovate. And you don't have to worry as much about customer satisfaction. And instead of using your resources to sharpen your operation, you can use them to pay fat salaries to executives.
This patent appears more obvious in hindsight than it was when Amazon first began the practice. Take the brick and mortar world for instance. Show me a store anywhere that lets you just walk in, pick up some merchandise, and walk out the door (legally). To accomplish this, you need a ton of background processing to reliably identify both the buyer and the goods, and charge the appropriate account. That's why all the brick and mortar stores force you to wait in line at a cash register. Anyone who designed a system that actually made this possible in the real world would definitely receive and defend a patent.
On the web, everyone at the time was modeling their stores on real-world stores and building virtual cash registers. Amazon was the first to design and implement a backend that supported 1-click purchasing. In addition to creating backend systems to identify buyers and goods (trivial with cookies), they also had to made decisions about how to efficiently aggregate multiple purchases into discrete shipments for millions of customers. There was also no guarantee that buyers would go for it; 1-click purchasing has the disadvantage that it is more difficult for the buyer to correct an error in the transaction.
I'm not defending Amazon's use of the patent as a weapon. I just think people here are too glib when they say the patent is obvious, especially if they've never read the patent.
It hardly seems that the number of those it takes to accomplish something is truly a unique application of any sort.
As they say in computer science, 0, 1, and infinity are the only numbers that matter. Everyone was doing infinite-clicks. Amazon introduced 1-click. It would really be something if someone developed 0-clicks (autonomous agents?).
(1) Jeff Bezos is forced to play by big league hardball rules if he wants to continue in the big leagues.
(2) There ought to be different rules for little leaguers, and about pros stomping into little league ballfields.
Jeff's stated policy of not pursuing small "infringers" implicitly recognizes this. He wants to be nice, and principled, but that doesn't have the force of law, and ultimately he doesn't have much choice. Amazon depended on his hosting it during its larval stages, but now it is distributed in other acquired hosts, and can survive losing him. It may even eject him, in accordance with its survival genes.
If the board of directors decides "nice" is a PR luxury that threatens the survival of the business, they will regretfully decide to do what they must (or rarely, resign). But the business persists according to its own evolved survival mechanisms, which are adaptations to the market and legal environments.
Suggestion: Change the environment to protect fledgling little league businesses (say under 1 million USD gross income, indexed to year 2000) by legislating immunity to patent infringement suits for them.
This means little companies can use their patents to protect themselves against big companies, but not against other little companies. So peer competition will be pretty free, and even if one competitor gets instant big league status by being aquired or IPO'd, they won't be able quash their previous peers with their newfound power.
When they grow big enough, then there ought to be some reasonably predictable transition process to the big leagues. Perhaps patents should have publically stated license terms for transitioning little leaguers, so the little businesses that start to take off can plan.
Many big leaguers started out in the little leagues, so it is likely that they would support changes that would make a better game in the little leagues, without requiring unilateral philanthropy on their part. That last part is why there's need for a law.
If enough big leaguers (e.g., Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos) got together and sponsored writing draft legislation, perhaps it could be presented to appropriate Congress people to make it happen (Congresspeople have their own evolved survival rules, so they listen first to big league players who can help fund their campaigns, and second to organized voters.).
This would make small businesses able to focus on their innovations without having to worry about irrelevant stuff, like the otherwise unbalanced power of large business to harass potential competitors using litigation to drain time and money from their target, which is disproportionately effective against small businesses.
you are.
Non-free books like this are also incredibly short-sighted!
I urge O'Reilley to give up on selling non-free books.
Lets say, company A has *claimed* innovation that
they did not create. Doing so, they remove it
from the public, who are the true creators of
said innovation. This is evil. It doesn't matter
if it's Jeff Bezos, the tooth fairy or some
other nameless asshead. This company is partaking
in an evil against me and my society. I could care less if Bezos is a good father or friend when he's not working. I feel that his company has done wrong and if that's bad for him, tough shit! His company has patented "clicking" for chrissakes! They cannot do something so unfathomably moronic and then turn around excpect people to shower them with kissess and good intentions. I consider these types of patents to be an attack against society. If people want to partake in these questionable acts, to hell with them. They don't care about us and will have their way with our country and our laws, EVERYTHING! They will continue to take so long as we allow it.
Corporations have more rights than what is offered to mere human beings and thus will always have the advantage regardless of the scenerio or circumstances. To feel sympathy for such powerful entities is nothing short of foolish.
I think you are thinking of trademark laws.
Why is everyone so hostile against Microsoft for putting smaller software companies out of business?
maybe you should use your brain when coming up with a retort. Ever heard of ISV's? OEM's? VAR's? For every one MS has driven under, there have been dozens that sprang up and flourished. Idiot.
Let's say there is a company roughly equivalent to Amazon, but in a totally different market, like livestok and agricultural supplies, uses the Amazon "one-click" system. No problem now, Amazon isn't in that market. Yet.
A year later. Amazon sees the need to get into the Ag products business. Boom, that company, now that it's a competitor, gets a big nasty "cease-and-desist unless you pay us $x" letter, with a court date in it (not a threat of a court date, but a court date).
Hey dude, we've seen this many times before. Could you stop with the stupid gay ass spam please? It gets annoying, and we get the point already, the story is funny, maybe if you exercised your creative talents you could turn it into a serial. Who is this mysterious group conducting an odd study? Why did they beat you for saying "Natalie Portman", how is the government going to ruin your life for saying "Natalie Portman". All these questions and more could be answered in an entertaining manner. Publish an episode a day, post it to every story, and then if you are a good writer you might be promoted or something.
Running a company out of business is probably akin to fleshworld "Murder". Most companies really are in a "eat or be eaten" mode of operation, and most, if not all, companies are for sale, and the death of a company is it either getting eaten (bought) or dying (sold off, either from Chapter 11 or elimination by parent company).
Remember, companies are legal entities, not humans. If they die, the sorrow by people outside the company is generally is not for the company, but perhaps for the employees, especially if you know one or a few, or the products (or stocks...), if you're now holding hundreds or thousands of now orphaned stuff from the company, etc. But rarely, if ever, for the company itself.
Then we could have a Grecian style male orgie at the Geek Compound afterwards!!!
It's called, "Truth in Advertising".
You cannot make water, sweetened with sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup, flavored with malic acid, and caramel coloring and call it "Apple Juice", as Beechnut used to.
Dig into the subtle differences between various distinctions of orange juice product. You cannot call Tang "orange juice" (unless maybe you put it in quotes...). You cannot call directly frozen concentrate OJ "fresh(ly) squeezed" OJ, although you can make allusions that it is just as good as fresh squeezed OJ, etc...
You cannot call margarine butter, etc...
Mobil gas stations do this, almost...
Pull up to a pump, wave a little plastic wand at a spot on the pump (which I think is about as real as the fake mike hole on flip phones) under the 70MHz antenna, which is tied to your credit card, and you can pump your gas. The "annoying" task of either paying inside or sticking your credit card into the slot has been bypassed. Oh what a slick time-saving advancement that is...
Again, like was said previously, no more different than a long time ago being able to walk into a market, grab something, and say to the owner, "put it on my tab", and walk out with it.
Oh, come on. That was funny.
From the article:
./ [particulary on ./])
[bla-bla]
> When a good guy like Amazon
[bla-bla]
ROTFL. There is no such thing as good or bad guys in business. There are good/bad moves on the short or long term. But no company is intrisically good or bad. Even if slashdot try to make us beleive that valinux are 'good' guys such things don't exists. But I may admit that CmdrTaco beleive (or beleived) this.
But not O'Reilly. He knows that. Seeing him playing the candid is is irritating at least (I could quote at least half a dozen of places where he does this)
Cheers,
--fred (as anonymous. cookies suck, even on
Thank you for reassuring me that there is indeed intelligent life out there. :) I agree, corps have immense(dangerously so) power. We turn our backs on them now, we're fucked.
Who to trust? hmm? Maybe your mother, for she has more love for you than any other human on the planet. Your other family members too( to some extent), maybe a couple of your friends. But really, it's unwise to extend too much trust beyond that circle. Why? Because below the smiles and handshakes and good intentions, we are nothing more than a loose ball of primal instincts. "Not me!" you say. Bullshit. Damnit, why don't you people get a grip already. The puppet masters are real and there are many here among us who spend entire lifetimes, dancing at the end of a string....It saddens me to see aspects of this here on slashdot. Tim Oreilly seems to have some converts in his quest to purvey "understanding" on behalf of the Amazonian perspective regarding intellectual property. Thanks, Tim! *spit*
But my art is not about Hitler, or swastikas. It's about how JonKatz is a NeoNazi-assrammer.
They can. If they "belive" that it's false marketing.
If squashing competition and discouraging innovation is Bezos' plan, then he's not doing a very good job of it, is he? If he were, you'd think he'd sue someone besides BN.com.
WHY would they do that? If
they win or if B&N back down then they move on to others (if they win in court then many people at once, if B&N back down then probably continue one at a time). To attack everyone at once, especially on a patent that's unlikely to be upheld in the end (but think of the gain if it is!) would be insane.
Well, the problem with your analogy is that the kid is sneaking into the school during recess and stealing money from everyones desks to "aid the fight with the bully". But there isn't really a bully at all, the kid is just selfish and uses the money to buy stuff for himself. Bezos has *stolen* from us. He is staking a claim on whatever he can get his filthy hands on and calling it his own. Time for another law that protects the public against the corps. Ooops...corps write the laws dont they. Hehe, like the Millenium Copyright Law! Amazon is evil folks. Boycott them until they're dust and then boycott them some more.
I stopped running Linux when I discovered the kiddie-porn bitmaps in the kernel.
You don't believe me?
Grep on 'little-linus' sometime at the top of the kernel source (/usr/src/linux)
He's got a banner ad for an evil company on his site and needs to find a way to save face. No amount of negotiation will change my mind about amazon. And as long as oreily supports amazon, I won't be buying any of their titles. If they want to get dragged down with Amazon, so be it. This patent nonsense has got to stop. The sooner comapnies see it as poison the better. As far as I'm concerned anything that has anything to do with Amazon is tainted. This is a clear cut money versus morality scenario. Once again morality has lost. Save your money for that Athalon you've been wanting to get. In return, the world will become less evil and have more MIPS to boot. Boycott evil. Take no prisoners.
Sorry.
Intellectual property laws can't be recursed to death.
And what the hell does "open sourcing" a patent imply? The whole object of the patent system is to provide a means to openly disclose IP and still gain some value for posessing it.
I would never have looked into it if you didn't warn me. That's a *funny* picture, made my day! :)))
Bravo. the patent, viewed <a href="http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05<nobr>9<wbr></wbr></nobr> 60411__&s_clms=1#clms">here</a>, is disturbing. I really cant see how you patent this, and they go into so much overkill. I have no idea of patent laws, but can you patent something you dont have or dont make or CANT make? In the patent, it says they have ownership of any system where you use a single action to buy an item, over any media, including tv, internet, using a keypad, issuing a voice command, etc etc. This is complete crap, I thought they had just patented the cookie, but its so much worse. I am disturbed greatly by this. Feh, and to think they are patenting something they had no part in making, thats sick, just plain sick.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
So what is everyone complaining about?
This is a disgusting picture that is completely degrading to the woman of whom it was taken. Things like this should be patented by amazon!
The GPL is nothing more than a well-thought response to the abuse of copyrights. It's about fighting the enemy with their own weapons. If Amazon puts the patent under the GPP (the General Public Patent) after hitting B&N first, I wouldn't have a problem with that. We can generalize from here. The enemy is using patents all the time. Therefore, the defenders of the public license must fight the enemy with their own weapons and start filing for patents too.
Besides, when was the last time you gave thousands of dollars to candidates of every party in an election to ensure that you had a hand in government and courts no matter who wins? Individuals are stupid enough to believe in things and thus only back what they believe in.
There is no excuse for evil.
In addition to all that, think back 17 years to get an idea of the ludicrousy of this.
17 years ago, I didn't even yet have my first Commodore 64! If you had a C64 and a tape drive, you were the luckiest person on your block!
About 18 years ago, TCP/IP took its final shape (I think). If it had been patented, we would only be able to freely use TCP/IP last year. Linux would never have come about.
If all this was about was stopping the bad guys from getting patents, one could simply publish "innovations" and thereby ensure they become prior art to ensure others cannot patent them.
Claiming that it is necessary to patent is disingenious at best.
Actually, it would seem to me that offline stores are quicker--you don't have to wait for the book to come in the mail; you can buy it and take it home immediately. You can also browse through a book before you buy it in a regular old store. The main advantage of online stores is that they are more likely to have a wider selection of somewhat less popular books, like technical books, and that one can order from them without leaving the house. As usual, it's a tradeoff. I don't think that brick-and-mortar bookstores are going to go away entirely; they still definately have something to offer.
"As far as I'm concerned anything that has anything to do with Amazon is tainted. This is a clear cut money versus morality scenario."
You don't know Jeff Bezos. Neither do I. It's easy for us to see him as some faceless bad guy, a Snidely Whiplash laughing maniacly about how he put one (two, now) over the U.S. Patent Office. O'Reilly, on the other hand, apparently knows Bezos, or at least knows Bezos' business, and heretofore has had a lot of respect for him. Bezos, to him, is an actual human being. It's a lot harder to have pure animosity towards someone that you actually regard as a person.
From what I've seen, Bezos is acting in desperation. Amazon is in the red, and as big as it is, it is vulnerable. Bezos sees himself as trying to protect his company from competitors pushing on him. Does this make him any less wrong? No. However, now that Bezos' motivations and fears are known, they can be more directly addressed. What O'Reilly has done is open the door to a possible reconciliation, offering a chance for Amazon to back down without losing face. While this may be less romantic and exciting than a David-and-Goliath hackers versus giant-Amazon standoff, it may be more helpful.
"It's different with copyrights, there's nothing in the law stating that a copyrighted text should not be obvious. All it needs to be is original, i.e. never having been written before. "
;) , could not be copyrighted, since many individuals could come up with it without having seen it before.
Actually that's not entirely true, a work is copyrightable when it's of such nature that it's unlikely it would be spontaneusly duplicated without knowing the original. Ergo, a very obvious text, such as "Hello World!"
Actually, I don't think so, they just have to be original enough. "Verkshöjd" it's called in swedish, have no idea what it is in english.
Sure, a corporation has a split responsibility between shareholders, customers, employees and society. This is a dynamic & often unequal releationship... but in the end the true resonsibility is responsibility TO ITSELF. It must remain competitive while staying in the spirit of the law.
And despite the rhetoric to the contrary, I don't think it's so easy to call out the 1-click patent as a blatant violation of the system. The most important and effective innovations are those that are NATURALLY OBVIOUS but no one else DID IT BEFORE. If prior art can be found, then Amazon has no case. Otherwise, I really do think this fits into the spirit of patent law: protect a process innovation from competitors to bolster investment.
Copyrights and patents in many ways can HELP competition by forcing companies to look at NEW things to innovate on, instead of copying the old things.
Over-broad patents are a danger, especially in software infrastructure.. I definitely do think they should be shortened to something like 5 years over the current 20-some years. But, patents are needed to encourage investment into innovation...
-Stu
Actually, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
It's the holder of a trademark or servicemark who actually is obliged to defend it actively, lest it (they) fall into everyday parlance. If I'm not mistaken, that's how the word 'aspirin' became generic in the US. It's still a Bayer trademark in many other parts of the world.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Yes, patenting something that has already been implemented is not unknown. Prior art searches are not perfect. However, this clearly doesn't apply here because the originator is not "small and fairly local." Amazon is a big company with billions in market capitalization clearly capable of hiring it's own lawyers.
I repeat myself from a previous reply, but hey... If you implement something, someone else cannot come by later and patent the same idea. B&N could not patent 1-click shopping once Amazon already has implemented it.
Yes, as long as you have some proof that you did it before they file.
This strikes me as a bad idea, unless what Amazon wanted was to prove they're every bit as evil as B&N and that I should reconsider my decision to buy from them rather than B&N (which, incidently, is exactly what I've done -- I used to buy from Amazon exclusively, but now than Amazon has proven to me that they're no better and no longer hold the moral high ground, B&N is getting my business again -- what B&N did was obviously wrong, but I was gravely mistaken to think Amazon was any better).
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Why? It's not relevant to anything being discussed here.
If Red Hat pulled this kind of shit on Microsoft, only Microsoft, and no one else, I have a feeling that there would be fewer complaints than there are. Haha! Either you haven't been on /. long or you're pretty clueless...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I get tired of seeing this point. It's probably in the best interest of my company to murder my competitors. That doesn't mean I should. The fact that it increases share value does not justify any action, not even for a business. This is most definately not "what companies are meant to do". Unfair and wrong business practices do not become alright because our profit margin is increased. What companies are meant to do is compete for consumers' business. They are not meant to do anything at all that increases profit.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I specifically disagree with your claim that the patent system was created to prevent secrets from dying with their inventors. The Constitution says the patent system was created to promote progress in science and arts. While one part of promoting progress may involve preventing secrets from dying with their inventors, that is certainly not the main purpose of patent law but only a side issue that may or may not be consistent with the overall goal of promoting progress.
Lastly, a couple of completely unrelated side notes:
You say a copyrighted work needs to be original, i.e., never written before. That's not true. A copyrighted work needs to be original in that you didn't copy it from any other copyrighted work. This meaning of "original" is different from your meaning. For example, if I have been living on a desert island for the past 50 years, and I write a novel entirely on my own that just happens to match a Stephen King novel word for word, I can assert copyright on my novel and the copyright would be entirely valid. In order to be copyrightable, a work needs to be original in the sense that you created it on your own without copying from copyrighted sources. It does not need to be original in the sense that nobody has ever created it before.
Also note that one is allowed to copy from public domain sources and copyright the resulting work. This scenario demonstrates very clearly that a work can be copyrighted even if it isn't an entirely new creation.
You say the courts are the appropriate forum to dispute patents. The reason many Slashdot readers disagree with this view is that in their mind the USPTO has been granting illegitimate patents at such a fast rate that there is no hope of ever challenging all of them in our already overburdened court system. Court cases are so expensive in terms of both time and money that there is no hope of reining in an abusive USPTO through the courts: the USPTO can grant patents much more easily than opponents can overturn them. Especially galling is the fact that patent applications are kept secret until the patents are actually granted, and that there is no way to overturn a patent once it has been granted except to go to court.
Shut up and die like an aviator, apparently.
When all your local shops are dead and everyone is using eBay then your Steve Vai's out-of-print original pressing of 'Flex-able' will be $50 (or more) again. That's the market. Your friend will be out of business and you'll still be paying the same. Or more.
With Amazon & co. we're saving at the moment through the competition between them. When the competition is over then we'll be paying. And how.
Today's innovative web-pioneers are tomorrow's profiteering monopolists.
Regards, Ralph.
Amazon's assertion that they're under attack from "ruthless competitors" is completely valid. That means they've got a good thing that others want to capitalize on. The only way they can stay ahead of that crushing wave of johnnie-come-latelys is to continue to innovate. As Tim said, it is when companies turn to lawsuits, corporate maneuvering and anti-competitive practices that indicates they've given up and can no longer stay in front by virtue of ingenuity. They have decided to stagnate and needless to say, this is destructive for the entire industry. If Amazon provides services above and beyond those of their competitors and stands up to their reputation for service, customers will continue to come.
-bjl
Excuse me?
NETSCAPE IS NOT DEAD! You sound like a ZDnet writer! Netscape is no longer an industry leader (thanks to their getting trampled on by the Beast of Redmond) but they're certainly NOT dead. They're still around, pouring immense resources into Mozilla, running a great portal, and will eventually become AOL's business brand. Whether you like them that way or not is irrelevant; they're still ALIVE either way.
Perhaps we should instead talk about Jamie Zawinski, and how the world would be better off if he were dead.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Yes it is. What do you think a business is there for? The greater good of mankind? No, they're there to turn a profit, and pay their employees.
What?! And what if murdering your competitors did not come with the repercussions that you mentioned? What if it DID raise shareholder value? Would it be alright then? Of course not. So his statement is correct as we have already outlined *AT LEAST* one action that is not justified by increased profit. I'll bet there are more.
--- "The problem is not that the world is full of fools, it's that lightning isn't being distributed correctly." -- Mar
"We both agreed that the roadblocks placed in the way of B&N by Amazon's patents are small. After all, what did it take B&N to work around the 1-click patent? They had to add a second click for the user to confirm the order." :)
I thought Microsoft had the patent on the second click.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
- Amazon.co m, Barnes & Noble settle lawsuit
- Barnes & Noble Fights for Best-Seller' List
- Advertising Battle Of The On-line Bookstores (Adlaw)
- Tons of related links on C|Net
I always viewed B&N as a nice bookstore with coffee, who just happened to hire some horrible web designers (just look at their page with anything besides IE5 or NN4). It's a good thing this article happened to come around and change my mind.Another thing that struck me while thinking about this whole thing. Remember what Ford did? He patented ideas so that others couldn't patent them and abuse the patents. He then allowed everyone to use his ideas for free. Perhaps that's what Jeff is doing here. I have no proof, but I'm hoping it's that way.
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A patent is not a shield for protection, but a weapon to attack with.
I sat in a four hour meeting with a patent lawyer just yesterday. A patent gives you no other explicit protection from infringment other than the right to STOP someone from using the patented item.
In his EXACT words "I am an arms dealer, and patents are land-mines you want to litter in your competitiion's path".
This is how the law is written, how it is used, and how it will stay until a complete overhaul of the system is done.
Regardless of what we think about it (I despise software patents, but that's osmething else) this is HOW IT WORKS.
I don't mean to step on anyone's toes, but there seems to be a serious misconception here about how patents are "supposed" to be used. I can tell you it's not as a shield.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
Everybody knows you need Pikemen to kill an elephant.
Boycott.
The fact that Bezos has ignored thousands of interested parites but deigns to speak to the publisher of very hot selling titles is quite revealing.
The fact that he'd use O'Reilly as a mouthpiece instead of agreeing to issue his own response tells me he is using O'Reilly, not learning from him.
This wasn't a dialogue--it was damage control.
Amazon isn't netscape.
They're a dime-a-dozen online store that happened to get in early and drive their stock price to ridiculous levels.
They want to be the Microsoft of online retailing and they're using Microsoft tactics.
What you are saying, then, is that it's okay for Amazon to use the patent as a bluff, but not to actively defend itself in court. A good offense is part of any viable defense.
Yes, but instead of coming up with something better than one click shopping, they instead tried a lame workaround that still violated Amazon's patent, and now they're in court for it.
If B&N wants to come out on top, why don't they just come up with something better than one-click? Could the solution be just as obvious in retrospect?
If they wouldn't have tried to get those patents then someone else (mabye B&N) would have done.
Here's my point. If someone else had done it, I would be boycotting and complaining about that company. If it is wrong for Barnes and Noble to (hypothetically) obtain a patent and then use it as the basis of legal action against Amazon, it is wrong for Amazon to do the same. Mr. Bezos' promises are nice, but they don't convince me.
If your business is so fragile that you have to bully your competitors just to keep the doors open, you're probably not going to last very long anyway.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
*************
ELECTRONIC PEASANTS
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE: [Amazon's]founder Jeff Bezos owns over $4 billion. The work of Amazon employees is less lucrative and a great deal less creative. Several hundred, many young, unmarried and well educated, work at the Seattle premises in gigantic landscaped offices split into tiny, shared cubicles. With their head-sets plugged in and their eyes glued to the screen they handle millions of e-mail orders a year.
Some managers at Amazon refer to them as "electronic peasants", for when they are on-line with a customer they are not supposed to show off their literary skills. The focus in these modern times is on output: 12 e-mails an hour and the sack for anyone who drops below seven and a half. On the phone any conversation exceeding four minutes, in a voice that according to a former employee "is supposed to be loud enough for the customer to hear and quiet enough to keep from distracting cubical mates," earns the guilty party a warning.
"It's like Communist China under Mao," explains one of the new economy's production-line workers, "you're constantly being pushed to help the collective. If you fail to do this, you're going against your family. But if this is a family, it belongs on the Jerry Springer show." Such ingratitude in a company that is constantly organizing events for its workers - or devotees. Last September, for instance, there was a "Midnight madness" keyboard marathon, humorously announced by an e-mail entitled "You can sleep when you're dead". This irresistible game involved coming to work at night to cope with as many outstanding cyber-orders as possible. The winner received a princely $100 prize.
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
**********
I don't buy from Amazon. Tim O'Reilly means well, but there's nothing in his conversation that makes me believe that Bezos is a man with whom I wish to do business. He's just another sweatshop owner. He's made a pile of dough and he means to share as little of it as possible with him employees. In the "brick and mortar" world, he'd be an eligible target for the protests currently being staged on campuses around the country.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
Here's what I told O'Reilly this morning. I'm reposting it here with minor corrections:
I read all these comments saying, "Way to go Tim!" and "Amazon isn't so bad after all." And, I'm disgusted.
Bezos and his crew appear to be nothing but a greedy bunch of boomers out to screw everybody they can out of all the money they can. I'm sorry, but they come off that way to me. It's great they haven't made a profit, yet, so maybe they'll put themselves out of business soon, just like Netscape did. Hiding behind "unfair competition" and patents is a copout. Netscape lost because they got big [in their own minds] and arrogant. I see Amazon going the same way.
O'Reilly appears to [be] Amazon and Bezos' apologist. He sees the writing on the wall: O'Reilly books are consistently on the Amazon bestseller list and they are consistently bought by the very tech-oriented people who are shouting "Boycott!" Tim's afraid of losing all those sales through Amazon and those sales not materializing elsewhere in the market. Face it, he stands to lose money, too.
I'm adding O'Reilly to my list of companies to boycott, at least until they stop doing business with Amazon. Amazon, I won't be doing business with you ever, unless you're going under and you want to sell me the amazon.com address.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Maybe so, but someone found it amusing enough to moderate it up one. Which is more than can be said for you. :)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Amazon sells books, just like many other companies. Regardless of whether they were the first ones online, many companies will be selling exactly the same books at (almost) exactly the same prices. The key in a situation like this is product differentiation. All toothpaste and diapers are the same so companies add special features like stripes or wings or pictures of Barney. Amazon need to keep people coming back because they are PERCEIVED as different/better. So, as Tim suggested, providing more "communitity" type services like review, discussion groups, collabrative projects, etc. will reinforce peoples view of Amazon as _the_ place to go online for books.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
>For instance, if Amazon was really concerned with the competition from B&N they could have been honest and explained their situation to all of us. This would have generated far more support than obtaining patents.
Buried in your post is this point that I consider of utmost importance. I think this is something that many corporations need to learn. The single most important thing in business today (IMO) is COMMUNICATION! Most corporations *SUCK* at communicating with their customers. I work at an ISP and we use Cisco, 3Com, and Sun hardware for the bulk of our service. All three of those companies have *pathetic* communication with their customers. You can see the damage of that in 3Com and Sun...and I truly believe that Cisco may end up feeling some pain if they don't start figuring out ways to communicate with customers better. I don't know that I've *ever* seen a company that really communicates well with their customers.
Jeff
Then why is he being a jerk about it? If he really just wanted to avoid abuse, he'd have gotten it and ignored it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Well, hardly, unforntunately. They're pretty good at annihilating the competition. Just a few years ago we had many, local, independent bookstores that were thriving. Then _two_ B&N's dropped out of hyperspace within three miles of each other, and my town smack dead between the two. All but one local bookstore has since folded....
What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence
This has more to do with Amazons clame to having more books than anyone else. They no longer make this clame.
As for the idea that B&N would have gotten the patent if Amazon didn't... Maybe... and maybe thats exactly why it should have never been issued...
However if B&N had gotten the patent they would have (of course) sued Amazon.. They would have been demonised for it... and clammed things would be worse if Amazon got the patent... in short nothing would be diffrent... Still corprate giants going after each other...
If Amazons real intent was to protect themselfs from B&N they wouldn't have bothered to use the patent. Just stuff it away so B&N can not clame it.
As it is Amazon is in a battle with B&N protecting a patent that Amazon admits should have never been issued....
Yes the patent office is defective and needs a huge amount of work but the person who abuses it can not be held blameless
I don't actually exist.
Let's face the truth: the idea behind behind 1-click is so extremely, obviously simple that it's also very easy to duplicate it, since it deals with software. Mind you, the ideas behind most patents are simple, but they involve operations in the hardware realm, so copying isn't necessarily that easy.
This argument leads us back to square one: software patents are evil. Amazon shouldn't have patented this thing in the place, since it isn't a very novel idea.
Of course, now that they do have the patent, they have to use it, because Amazon is accountable to their shareholders and has to do everything to give them more value. The purpose of the boycott is to convice not only Jeff, but also the shareholders, that by using the patents as a blunt weapon, Amazon is not increasing its value.
Sorry, Jeff, you got no points from me. You will remain in boycott. If you cannot stay ahead of your competition without patents, then you shouldn't be competing at all.
An open patent pool could be made to work, if there are rules such as: you can use all the pool's patents of a specific type (e.g. software patents) only if you give all your patents of that type to the pool. That way your patents are still a defense against others' patents.
"...Is this world not a call I can screen out" --
Actually, what's worse is that this is total hipocrisy on Apple's part. A while ago, before Quicktime 4, before Apple's site redesign, back when Jobs was just taking the helm again, there was more then one porn site in Apple's Quicktime Showcase. Why? Simple, Quicktime is the best quality :P
Fine, so they buy into the patent bogosity to protect themselves. Why can't they then license the patent to B&N (and others) for a fair return, or until the patent licensing fees are paid for, then sit on it? IBM has many patents that they hold as protection, but which they do not litigate with. And many of those patents are far more legit than the Amazon patents.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
rather than respond to communities and markets, he tries to get things happening behind closed doors
Didn't you see the picture of him talking to Jeff? He was in a restaurant. Talking on a cell phone. That's about as public as you can get (not to say about as rude as you can get - I wonder which is worse, filing a bogus patent or using a cell phone in a restaurant?).
Seriously, I do think that Jeff kind of doesn't get it about defensive patents. They are for defending yourself against patent attacks by others, not for defense against any possible competitive attacks. One of the nastier truisms of human relations is that we tend to become what we fight. As Microsoft became a sort of bizarro version of IBM (forcing IBM to morph into the warm and cuddly giant that we all love so much these days), so Amazon is likely to become some grotesque giant, stomping any and all who get in its way. Andrew Carnegie started out as a champion of labor and ended up stomping out labor unions.
It's a sad fact that as we go once more into the breech again and again, we lose sight of our original goals, and often of our humanity. I think we owe it to Jeff Bezos to do him the favor of never again buying anything from Amazon. Let's help to remove him from the fray, and give him the time to regain that peace and serenity that will allow him to see that suing people over patents is just not very nice. And mean people really do suck.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
Shut the fuck up. Which lame ass moderator labeled this as funny? It isn't. It's bullshit, it's redundant (not to this topic but Slashdot in general) and it's offtopic.
I tend to agree. At some point they have to stop trying to build their "brand" and start concentrating on making a profit. From what I remember reading somewhere, they're losing money because they are putting so much into building a brand name. According to Tim they are already the place to go to search for books or publishing info etc. So it seems it's about time to start looking at turning a profit.
Hell, a company that uses 2-click shopping but turns a profit will kick Amazon's ass if they don't watch it.
Certanly, you don't think this was an issue of trademark infringment, Unless you think BN has a right to decided who gets to call themsleves a bookstore and who dosn't. They might have had a case if amazon tried to call themslevs "The Barns and Noble of the web" or somthing like that. But that's not what they did.
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I really liked O'reilly's metaphor of the net as an ecosystem, one, that like the nascent PC industry stagnated under corporate control. He really makes an interesting point, one that I think is pretty much true. We all remember how cool the Internet used to be, and how much it sucks now... An advertising network awash in pop-up windows, Spam, and "push media". Where "portal players" compete for "eyeballs". The term, of course is from the television industry, where it actually makes some sense. But the fact that they borrow metaphors from the that industry really tells us what they think of there customer base, and where they want to take the Internet (Just look at iwon.com shudder)
Well, I'm never one to pass up a chance to bash the current state of the Internet, but O'reilly's statement really got me thinking. Could the 'ecosystem' idea be applied to the Open Source movement? The Free Software Movement has been around for a long time, helping people get good, quality software programmed mostly for fun. But, Ironically, there's money to be made in it. ESR came around and renamed the movement, and made himself quite a bit of money. And now the corporations are all over it. Some, such as IBM (witch has really always been about hardware and support) see it for what it is, a way to get good software. But others, most notably VA and RedHat depend on it for their livelihood.
We are already seeing the results of the corpiritzation of open source, and I wonder what will happen when it is completely commercialized... (or even if that will really happen)
it's 2AM, there's some marginal spell checking, but other then that...
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It's not just commissions, it's commissions on the internet man.
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The entire patent system really needs an overhaul for the 21st. century.
Of course, I doubt we'll get it.
Oh, we'll get it. Just like we 'got' copyright reform in the form of the 'Digital Millennium Copyright Act'. Of course, it wont be what's "right" or what's "best". But it will certainly be in the best interests of those organizations that have lots of money...
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence (like, ahem, Barnes & Noble) and hence shouldn't be able to call themselves a "bookstore"? And I'm pretty sure there have been other little squabbles that slip my mind at present.
:P
Huh? I don't think you can sue someone just beacuse you dissagree with there use of a word. That dosn't make any sense. If you say "I'm cool" does that mean I can sue you if I think you're an idiot? hrm... maybe that would a good thing
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Wow, I figured Anything from apple would be bad, but the review sounds like somthing straght out of AFA propaganda/FUD "Parents should be aware that children who go exploring there are only a couple of clicks away from some serious porn. " wow...
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This whole Amazon one-click patent schpiel has probably quadrupled the amount of press coverage of Amazon. I'm sure their sales are through the roof. No wonder they applied for some more over-broard obvious patents. Its no doubt cheaper than advertising. All the mass-market consumer droids will ever be able to remember a few weeks from now is that there was "something in the media about Amazon a few weeks ago, wasn't there?
Here is the article I replied with:
Amazon is unquestionably an innovative company, given a definition of "innovation" that refers to implementation of ideas as opposed to merely theorizing about and coming up with ideas. (Like an Open Source development "show me the source" request versus long-winded non-productive discussions.) It's their excellent implementations both in programming and in management that makes them an otherwise excellent group to do business with and makes amazon.com such a well-run site.
But the fact that they spam their customers with an opt-out list instead of an opt-in list, and the fact that they're offensively using their patents against someone else, means I simply won't do business with them until both problems are resolved.
Other than those two things, I think they're a fine, upstanding business; however, when they do either or both things, they instantly become in my mind a business with questionable ethics, and I will simply not purchase from them.
Both problems are eminently solvable, and from the conversation it seems that Bezos would possibly consider softening his stance on licensing and enforcement of Amazon's patents. Now if both problems were solved, I would remove Amazon from my personal blacklist, and I would be vastly relieved after having done so. It really bothers me when a company that does so many things right, and does so many things well, has just a few minor (in that they are easily solvable) problems that mean I simply can't in good conscious deal with them. I have no qualms about a badly-run company that consistently provides poor quality service or shoddy merchandise going out of business; on the contrary, it's one of the most important things about economic stability that bad businesses fail. But I hate to see an otherwise well-run business try to slit it's own throat like this. I'd love to see them fix both problems, so that we can all put their past behind us in Internet time, so to speak.
That being said, I would suggest two solutions:
On the spam issue, Amazon should switch from an opt-out spam list to an opt-in spam list. It's an easy thing to do technically, and it would buy them goodwill. That's pretty much all there is to the spam issue, and since it's also off-topic, I'll not mention it again in this message.
On the patents issue, I would ask that Bezos seriously consider a patent cross-license agreement. I have to admit to a strong personal bias in this area, because I want to promote the Open Patent License in progress at www.openpatents.org. (Plug, plug.)
Without boring everyone with the details of the Open Patent License, (and if you read through it, you'll find that it can be boring to a mind-numbing extent--I welcome any help at improving it, BTW), one of its Options allows you to license all your software patents to everyone who similarly licenses theirs, allowing the patents to be incorporated into products or processes which only incorporate compatibly-licensed covered patent-ish IP. You still otherwise keep your patents, and you still keep the defensive value of them, but you'll be gaining the use of a growing pool of patents that can be used among participants' Open Patent products and services. (The patents can also be used in Open Source code given some conditions.)
Bezos says one of the reasons he's acquiring patents is for defense against future patent lawsuits. This license will help him there.
Granted, it won't help him against Barnes & Noble if they decide to sue him again for saying he has a greater market capitalization than they do, for instance, or for any other sort of almost-frivolous non-patent-related lawsuit, especially if Barnes & Noble agress to a compatible Option of the license. But, it can help him against Wal-Mart, because if Amazon agreed to the license-all-software-patents option and didn't otherwise license it's patents to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart wouldn't be able to incorporate Amazon's patents without licensing all of its software patents too.
Note that in the license I've defined business method patents to be included within the definition of software patents.
I would think the advantages of Amazon leveraging its own software patents to gain the defensive value of a larger portfolio far outweigh the advantages Amazon currently has in using their patents defensively in non-patent-related lawsuits.
(BTW, the license covers not only patents, but some other IP that from a practical point of view creates restrictions that are similar to the restrictions of patents, such as copyrights on API's, reverse-engineering restrictions, user-interface copyrights, etc. That's why I said patent-ish earlier.)
At the expense of the ability to use patents defensively in non-patent-related lawsuits in which the other party is also a license, by agreeing to this license-all-software-patents option of the Open Patent License, Amazon can gain the use of any other patents compatibly licensed, can regain community goodwill, can end the patent-caused boycott, can protect themselves and the community from (some) software patent hindrances to innovation, and in so doing can even be said to be giving back to the community by taking a public stance that will help nurture the development of future software that would otherwise be stifled due to patent concerns.
I would ask that Amazon consider using the Open Patent License.
-Mark Shewmaker
mark@primefactor.com
www.openpatents.org
(Note, the license is still in development. I would obviously not want them to agree to a beta version of a patent license.)
Anyone who's interested in helping edit the license during the development stage please join the mailing list.
Now he has considerable influence - the fact that "Jeff called me" should be proof enough of that - but is using that influence in a mature way. Just to get Amazon's real position on the whole thing out in the open is a major achievement. I've really changed my views on the patent after reading both articles - I think Amazon does have points in its favour and judging from some other posters here, B&N don't seem to be pure as the driven snow.
Tim O'Reilly has shown that just by being polite and fair to the other side, you can get further without necessarily compromising your views.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
On the other hand, unlike Amazon, B&N has yet to send me marketing spam as a result of an order.
Clearly the reason why no one ever patented 1-click before was that they simply hadn't reframed the problem in the correct way. Apparently the correct way to reframe it is to ask "How can Amazon.com patent a simple idea and thereby squash competition and discourage innovation." It took a brilliant man like Jeff Bezos to reframe it this way, and we should be proud of his profound insight and dedication.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
What more do you want? It appears Jeff called Tim out of the blue in a coffee shop or something, and the next day Tim posts as much as he can remember about the conversation on a website, asking the community to join the conversation. Short of putting his cell phone on virtual speakerphone, I think he's doing everything but work behind closed doors.
Just thought it was an interesting "coincidence".
Tim, thanks for pursuing this issue. As a developer, it is one that concerns me a great deal. Jeff has some very valid points. I often work for months coming up with new innovations which once produced are easily copied. My company puts a great deal of time and money into this research to maintain a competitive advantage. When other companies come along and copy these inovations without having to develop them, it puts us at a disadvantage and discourages further development.
Even though the idea is distastful to me, I have often considered patenting some of our ideas in order to defend our company. In a perfect world, my inovations would inspire further development and visa-versa, but when other parasitic companies leech our ideas with out contributing themselves, we need defences.
Maybe so but that doesn't mean amazon should be getting nasty with other companies who haven't patented it. The patent is downright ridiculous.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Do you really think you could organize a boycott against anything with a market as large as Amazon has? It strikes me as rather like trying to kill a bull elephant with spitballs ...
Just as a related note, the Amazon 1-click patent is soon going to get much more messy.
I say this because people I know who work at HP have told me, quite reliably, that they plan to develope their own "1-click" software to sell printer pins to customers on AOL. As far as amazon is concerned, they really don't believe Amazon can win the lawsuit, and have the lawers/money to fight it out.
Whether you pay attention to rumors or not, and if this thing ever materializes, an Amazon-HP-AOL battle over software patents could turn real interesting, real fast.
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
I signed O'Reilly's petition, and now I wish I could take it back.
The problem isn't with Amazon, the problem is with the patent office. Until such time as the patent office gets its poop in a group (dunno where the hell that phrase just came from), Bezos is doing the right thing.
And like it or not, the Netscape analogy isn't inappropriate. Yeah, Amazon hasn't always been perfect, but relatively speaking, they're not so bad. B&N ranks among the most evil corporations on the planet, and if Amazon hadn't drawn their patents, B&N (or Microsoft? or IBM?) could've... and you can bet B&N wouldn't be as polite to the little guy. And remember, the guy who runs the internet division of B&N is clumsy, stupid and malevolent, like Darth Vader as played by Homer Simpson, and we definitely wouldn't want these patents in his hands.
It's not an ideal world, folks, and sometimes you gotta pick the lesser of two evils. The proper place to vent your disgust with this stuff is with your friendly neighborhood legislators, and try to convince them to throw some heat on the patent office. That's where the problem lies. Unless Bezos is abusing people with his patents, which I don't see happening, then I say he's just doing what he's gotta do.
Dave Winer over at Userland has an interesting take on Bezos' comparison of A* to N* (among other things). There's a bit of cant about Amazon's "converstaion" with the Web community, a phrase that's getting beat into the ground with the success of The Cluetrain Manifesto etc., but on the whole it's a good rebuttal. (And he's right that Amazon's customer-service form letters truly suck.)
>This patent appears more obvious in hindsight >than it was when Amazon first began the practice. >Take the brick and mortar world
>for instance. Show me a store anywhere that lets >you just walk in, pick up some merchandise, and >walk out the door (legally).
1) Our company has an account with the local electronic supply store. We go and ask for something, he gets it and gives it to us, we sign a notebook at leave. He sends us a bill. Not exactly the same thing, but close.
2) If somebody *did* do that offline, it wouldn't be patentable either.
Why is everyone so hostile against B&N for putting 'mom and pop' stores out of business?
B&N bought my favorite bookstore, BookStop (not a 'mom and pop' store) and then shut them down. BookStops were large, had great locations, were very popular, had lots of customer traffic, and offered a 20% discount to members. I think BookStop deliberately stocked a few out-of-the-mainstream books just to make browsing more interesting. I've bought some great computer books there--books that you would never find on B&N's mass-market only bookshelves. What a shame.
Mea culpa, I do have some genuinely socialist beliefs, so I think to some extent people do have to serve society. The reason for this is not that I feel they should, but instead that evolution suggests that that would be a very good idea. If people do not band together and create a society in which many of the rules are laid down by the community, then something else happens. Instead of having a government or community dictating the way things run, you get the strongest competitors (be they Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Barnes & Noble or your local fascist boss) running the show. And you certainly don't need a "monopoly" for this to be the case. Just go and read some Dickens
At the same time, I'm not a socialist in other senses because I don't believe that human beings are capable of enacting the "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" socialist ideal. Humans have way too much evolutionary baggage to form a sensible communal society along those lines.
At the moment, the world economy is dominated by massive "competitive" organisations with negligible "co-operative" accountablility. Instead, IMO, we need a society which balances co-operative and competitive structures- one in which competitive incentives are designed to foster co-operation (kind of like open source software really :).
I even have the beginnings of a "crackpot" model as to how one might do this, which I've been meaning to write up for a while. The economic model I based it on seriously spun out a commerce student friend of mine when I described it to him, so perhaps it will even cause some trouble :)
Anyway, that's enough babble for one posting...
Fixing copyright
But what we really have here is a gapping hole in the theory that competition is necessarily a Good Thing. Sure, it can prevent some (and certainly not all) kinds of stagnation. But patents like these really point out that sometimes, what people should be doing is co-operating, rather than competing.
Fixing copyright
I teach some patent economics, and this poster doesn't have it quite right. The argument for patents is *both* that they encourage innovation (this is by far the most commonly cited reason) and secondarily that they encourage the publication of ideas. The legal and economic literature explicitly realizes that there is as a trade-off between these goals and the establishment of monopoly power.
Following your reasoning, the problem lies in trying to enforce the patent. As has been suggested in the past, getting a patent for some original open source work might not be a bad idea as a way to protect the projects that utilze it. ---------- "Men despise great projects when they don't feel themselves capable of great successes" Luc De Capliers
Hrmph. The "Please post your responses here" link at the bottom of the article should have been a link to this Slashdot discussion, instead of the O'Reilly forum.
A lot of Bezos's argument seems to be, "we're really the little guys." Well, sorry Jeff, but Microsoft was once a garage operation too. I'm not in the practice of supporting small businesses because they're small, I support them because they hold themselves to higher ethical standards than that evil big companies. So if Amazon wants to keep my patronage once they do become as big as BN, they've got to establish now that they're going to play nice. So far, they're failing miserably.
You forgot to add the Sonny Bono extension of copyright to perpetuity (or there abouts, any one care to place a wager that copyrights get extended again in ~2035, when Disney needs to protect its IP again).
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I wonder why anyone purchases from Amazon.com (particularly computer books) in the first place.
Apparently, they have excess disposable income. I go to Bestbookbuy.com and use their search engine, to ferret out prices from numerous resources.
I have never found Amazon to be even closely competitive with any of the other retailers listed with bestbookbuy.com.
Sometimes I even use Amazon's search engine and read the reviews of a particular book, then go to bestbookbuy and look up prices and availibility.
On average, say for a book that retails $59 U.S.,
Amazon and B & N both, are never even closely competitive in price.
I save a bundle on books (I buy alot of them), and
redirect my funds from Amazon at the same time.
Ain't it great?? Oh, and I'm polite too. I sent a thank you note to Amazon for use of their search engine, and reviews format, and explain why I'm buying elsewhere (the patent issue), yes on the rare occassion that Amazon is the only one that carries that particular book, or has it in stock, I pass, until I can find it elsewhere.
Does a jock itch?
Patent laws aren't at fault here. It is the misuese of the patent. Like Jeff Besos said, he just grabbed the patent before anyone else could. Great. Amazon.com saves the day from some company suing all these tiny internet startups for using one-click shopping.!!!WRONG!!! I don't even think that this whole thing is about the money. I think that amazon just wants to scare little sites away. "I AM AMAZON.COM. HOW DARE YOU TRY AND COMPETE WITH ME!".
This is NOT about the matter that amazon is suing Barns And Noble, but it is a matter of amazon trying to kill all small competition
I suppose that's why AMZN has been on such a tear, and why the company is worth several billion dollars. Who would of thought it, but "irrational" investors end up being right after all.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
They claim that doing it electronically through links is different from what's been done before with sales commissions. Otherwise it would not be original and would not qualify for a patent
Now I was under the impression that a patent can't be granted if it's simply more specific than an existing patent: For example if I have a patent on selling a product, you can't get a patent for selling the same product in Florida, because it is overwritten by the first patent.
I would expect the same thing to happen with commision sales -- it doesn't matter where the commision sales take place, it's both prior art and extremely obvious.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
I live in Europe, and have been doing my ordering from amazon.co.uk. When I order from the US, I have the choice of paying +/- %15 shippig charges or wait 5 weeks for my books to get here.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a working web mailorderhouse that sells English books in my country (.nl).
So... Does anyone know of a good alternative to Amazon? One that lives on my side of the pond.
What if Amazon didn't patent it but stopped everyone else from doing so argumenting that they have prior art? Can you do that? Implement something new and innovative, NOT patent it, argue in court that no one else can patent it because you have prior art.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
Then why is he being a jerk about it? If he really just wanted to avoid abuse, he'd have gotten it and ignored it.
So far, that's exactly what he's done. The only company Amazon has sued for patent infringement is Barnes & Noble (who as far as I'm concerned deserve whatever they get and then some, for filing a cynical lawsuit against Amazon at a time when Amazon was vulnerable, strictly as a crush-the-competitor business strategy).
After seeing why he did it I think he probably deserves a patent. I do think that such patents should be limited to 3-4 years instead of the normal 7 years but if they really were the first site to do this then let them have it. Anyone notice that he's letting sites like fatbrain.com get away with this kind of thing? He isn't targetting purely online competitors. He's targetting the old boy network that wants him and the rest of the online book stores out of business. B&N is one such company. Jeff probably knows that there is room for more than 1 online book seller if the online book sellers are strictly web based. B&N would love to kill off all purely internet-based book sellers. So as long as he restricts his suits to the old boy network sellers like B&N.com I say.... the more the merrier since they haven't done a bloody thing to innovate, period.
I find it interesting how O'Reilly is apparently having his half of the conversation in a public place. I wonder if those folks in the background are aware that they're a few feet away from a conversation between two luminaries talking about what could be one of the more important issues in the internet era.
Probably not, They're probably talking about last night's episode of 'Who Wants to be a Millionare'.
From my understanding of patent law, if you don't enforce your patent when you know of violations, then the patent can become invalid.
This is no excuse, however!
All I hear is spin. Let's review:
Amazon.com has sued Barnes & Noble for using its 'innovation' -- 1 click ordering. Barnes & Noble switches to "2 click" in response. The internet at large figures Amazon.com as a patent bully, knowing that 1-click ordering is an obvious technology (remember, patents are for implementations -- not ideas as Jeff might have you believe). Recently, Amazon patents another obvious technology: "Affiliate Programs". Ut oh, bad PR for Amazon! So Amazon frames itself as the underdog, using patents to defend itself against "bullies". OK, let's check out the stock market today:
Volume Price
AMZN 6059500 shares at 62.50
BNBN 787600 shares at 8.94
BKS 712300 shares at 18.44
BNBN and BKS are two different symbols for B not sure which represents the online portion.
So -- who is the bully?
At the risk of being redundant, I must say that I completely support the position expressed by the italicized quote above, and would like to clarify my own thoughts on the matter.
As someone who has spent literally thousands of dollars buying books and music CDs from Amazon over the past couple of years, I was saddened to see that Bezos seemed to be taking Amazon on the route of the monstrously greedy, snatch-everything-for-their-own, closed and propietary corporations. But before I could willingly respond to the appeal posted by Richard Stallman and others on various Linux sites-- to boycott Amazon until Bezos "came to his senses"-- I felt compelled to give it a lot of thought beforehand-- I like Amazon, and the "cut of their jib," and it behooved me to be absolutely certain that Amazon deserved to be boycotted for filing these patents.
In mulling it over, the thought occurred to me that if Amazon had not filed the 1-click patent, or the Associates patent, then the Great Devil of Redmond or one of its tightly bound business incubi might have filed the patent, and then we all know what would have happened: the patents would positively have been used against all of their competition, to make bigger strides toward proprietizing the internet for their own oppresively selfish gains.
In the light of that thinking, I cannot fault Jeff Bezos for filing for these patents-- provided his motive was just for the reason of keeping them out of the grasp of the evil forces, and Amazon does not intend to use them to try to proprietize doing e-business on the web.
And, if I am wrong in this post, and Amazon starts to use these patents to emulate the Evil Forces present in the e-business industry, then I shall cease doing any more business with Amazon. And that is a promise.
If anyone at Amazon wishes to track my previous purchases with Amazon, they can start with my latest, which Amazon identified with Order ID 102-4824324-8143250 on their invoice dated January 16, 2000.
Erchie
We should not go after Amazon, or any other company that uses the patent system to fight the competition. A company is supposed to use any legal means in order to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition. It's the logical thing to do, and we should expect them to do it. It's why they exist on this world: to do anything legally allowed to perpetuate themselves, and make money.
We should not ask commercial entities to refrain from using legal means to protect themselves. What we should do is ask the lawmakers to level the playing field. We should pressure them to make software patents and business model patents unavailable to companies, on the basis that allowing them hurts the ecosystem, as Tim brilliantly puts it.
Doing that will force companies to rely on the other means left, which were the only ones available to them when software patents weren't being granted: better customer service, better prices, superior selection, branding.
Don't ask hockey players not to hit each other as long as the rules allow it. If you want them not to do that, change the rules. Yes, they will continue to do it, but they will lose points in the game. And the ecosystem is protected.
I am glad to hear the Mr. Bezos has his heart in the right place, more or less. I think I agree with the tone of Mr. O'Reilly's opinions, if not always with their exact form.
One comment I have after reading the account of this conversation is that Amazon's survival is far more important to Mr. Bezos than to the rest of us. As we keep hearing, the barriers to entry are very low, and we can count on seeing zero economic profit in this business. That's the best outcome we can hope for in any event. That also suggests that Amazon stock is way over-priced!
Now a comment about the patent system. The U.S. patent system is intended to encourage innovation by letting folks earn monopoly rents from their innovations, for a reasonable period of time. Reasonable, I think, should be defined roughly as: "long enough to make it worth while to develop the idea". I think it's obvious that for an idea like using a bit-wise operation to change lower-case to capital letters, the cost of developing the idea is pretty low. I came up with this one, and was rather proud of myself, until I learned that every programmer I talked to about it had dreamed it up too (I'm not too far past the "hello, world" stage myself). A 15 minute patent would have been about right... that is, no socially worthwhile purpose could have been served by patents on this sort of thing. Many of the software patents are on ideas obvious enough that no-one bothers to publish them; anyone faced with the same problem gets the same solution.
I would suggest that for someone who develops a rocket ship ( there is at least one group which has made a successful test flight! See the back issues of Analog Sciencefiction/fact, they've nothing I can link to.), or who is developing an improved method of producing steel, or a new drug, there is a much higher cost to innovate, and patents on truely new ideas would have to run for some years, in order to have any significant affect on innovation.
My point is that a "one-size-fits-all-inventions" patent system is proving itself to be a very bad idea! Different sorts of inventions need different durations of government-granted monopoly, and for many innovations which have very low cost, such as software, it seems possible that no monopoly period at all is the socially optimal solution.
Why should some ideas not be patentable? I think that Mr. O'Reilly's article puts the idea in a nutshell (...hey, that's a really neat phrase... "in a nutshell"... I should patent it!): If Amazon could only defend itself by innovation, they would have to keep on finding newer and better ways to serve their customers. Since they have gone down this blind alley of paying lawyers rather than programmers and marketers, innovation will slow. Resources are being switched from productive work to nonproductive lawsuits. This will be true in any industry in which the cost of innovation is low, and I suspect this category will be expanding for the immediate future at least.
I suggest that we need to overhaul our patent law to take into account both the degree of obviousness-after-the-fact and the cost of innovation. Patent protection should run a long time for innovations which could only come through the expenditure of a great deal of resources. I think that new drugs probably fall into that category. As above, patents for "innovation" which take little or no resources should be disallowed. An innovation which would be obvious to anyone faced with the same problem should probably not be patentable, either. Why should we reward anyone for being the first one stop his work and file a patent application? This sort of innovation will probably fall into the "little-or-no-resources-required" category, anyway.
We must remember the original intent of patent law: it's not intended to enrich inventors, it's intended to enrich all of us by encouraging inventors. In the cases where no encouragement is needed, enriching the inventors makes our society worse off.
In the mean time, the idea of a non-profit corporation to hold and NOT use defensive patents is a really good stopgap!
See what I've been reading.
When was the last time you bought something from a manufacturer or distributor? Did you pay less than MSRP? I doubt it.
Most distributors won't sell directly to the public because they know that while they may make more money on an individual sale, they will have a hard time moving the quantity the sell wholesale (just try buying directly from Ingram, for example).
While many manufacturers do offer their products direct, they almost always sell their products at suggested retail price. Why? Because they don't want to undercut the retailers. Retailers act as free adverising. And don't forget that for every item a retailer has in stock, the manufacturer has already received their share.
I have a question for Slashdotters; Is Barnes & Noble really that bad? I am one of those people who has never bought anything online from either, so I do not know. Is B&N really ripping all of Amazon.com's innovations tag per tag?
You know, innovation is not something that you can really fake. It is there or it is not, but the web moves so fast that they can copy overnight. Do they?
Answering this question will help to set if Amazon really does have a point in creating a patent. It will help me to decide on where I go for those cisco books I need later this year.
Umm, NO, O'Reilly got it right. Why should I put all the R&D work into something and let my competitors get it for free? Look at the drug industry where the length of a patent is a hot issue.
You have to jump through a tonne of hoops in order to get a drug approved. Developing a new drug is a huge investment. If generic drug companies could start making the generic on Day 1, there is no way I could recoup my investment and then I probably would invest my money elsewhere and the drug would never be developed.
Having a window where I can recoup my investment is critical to me wanting to invest the time, effort and $ to develop a new drug. It would be societies loss if nobody had the incentive to develop the newest drug treatment.
Now it is a different ballgame when patents are misused and trivial things get patented, but originally it was for good reason.
The patent system has a lot of problems when applied to software. For one, they last too long. By the time the patent has expired, it's usually so archiac that it's been replaced by newer software technologies that perhaps didn't have such restrictions. Another problem is that when the patent HAS expired, the patent itself is worthless, since it doesn't provide and subtancial information on the implementation to make the release of "intelectual property" worth it. I read part of the Powerquest partitioning resizeing patent, and gathered absolutely no useful information from it. I gathered more information by actually using Partition Magic a few times, and observing it's behaviour. If patents on software only lasted say 2 or 3 years, and required a sample implementation to be submitted with the patent, perhaps the patent system would be of some use, however since it's not, it'll never benefit the small developers.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I wouldn't think that an open letter with over a thousand signatures, and sharing the conversatin that resulted from that letter counts completely as "behind closed doors."
You can't fall for the little guy spin Bezos is using.
It is how one reacts to the pressures of life that shows the real person underneath. Everyone is the best CEO, the best husband, or the best mother when there isn't any stress around - it's easy to bat a thousand when you're hitting lobbed softballs. Turn up the heat in some one's existance and how they handle it will tell you more about that person then knowing him a lifetime. _How a person reacts under stress is how they are_.
If you pound on your wife, but only after a bad day, you're still a wife beater on the good days.
If you yell at your employees, but only when they make a mistake, then you're still a shitty boss the rest of the time.
If you sue other people for patent infringment, but only when they are trying to crush you, then you're still slimy scumbag.
You can never excuse behavior because of after-the-fact spin. If you do, then you discount reality at the expense of someone's smooth words. Reality is the rule - is Amazon patenting obvious mechanisms and using it hurt other companies? If so, then that is who they are - a bully (a bully among bullys, but still a bully).
Think about this: imagine the shit Amazon will start to pull in the second quarter when the money from their IPO and their upcoming European bond sale runs out. You don't think they'll be lashing out at everyone? Sueing everybody in a deparate attempt to buy more doors for desks?
->Jeff
www.noamazon.com
Mr. O'Reily,
Like so many, my frustrations grow every day with stories like this. I do not directly blame Amazon, considering what they are facing. My frustration stems not just from what Amazon is doing (and feels they justifiably need to do), but also from the lack of effort to turn the "Open Source" philosophy into a defendable method.
Why is it so hard to imagine "Open Source" patents along the lines of the GPL? I do not need to ask how hard it is to create a GPL'd repository of patents, because we all know it will be difficult. However, if we do not do this, it will not be long before open source is a thing of the past. This is not a prediction, it is a fact. How many more patents can software companies get on their code or algorithms or even business models before the open source community sees the light?
On the other hand, with an "Open Source", GPL'd repository of patents, we will have the same group of tools to use with commercial companies in trades for use of their patents. This is EXACTLY why they patent in the first place! What makes us different today? How can we make a difference tomorrow?
Does anyone in the U.S., or the world for that matter, really believe we are going to change the patent system in time to save us? I am not counting on it, not because I think the government is corrupt and never would, but because I think the government is of and by the people, who do not seem to understand what is going on until it is too late. We need to take action now, and allow time and history to aid us in the greater battle.
I welcome reply comments directly to me on this, because I want to better understand all the sides. Email me at ronmlgaw@umich.edu if you have additional comments. Tim, I invite you to discuss this further, as your voice is heard far and wide and will certainly garner significant input in a more timely manner.
Ron Gaw
Why would it be sad to see Amazon go? They're just selling books. Bezos is just a salesman. What has Amazon done that's even remotely groundbreaking? 1-click ordering?
The comparison with Netscape is ludicrous. If it weren't for Netscape, Amazon wouldn't have any clicks to use for ordering.
I'm trembling just thinking about typing this, because I know the development community is divided on this, and it verges on being off topic here. But software patents are just a bad idea on so many levels:
1) The patent office isn't qualified to judge what is an original idea in the field of software. Perhaps no one is.
2) Software patents are relatively new; there's no evidence they aid the state of the art or society in general. We have plenty of evidence to the contrary, however.
3) Software patents never help small developers. If a small developer gets an important software patent, a larger company will almost always show prior art and have the patent revoked. If a large developer gets a patent, then its used as a club.
4) Software is at its core the representation of an idea or algorithm. However, the idea of patenting a particular string of literal code doesn't make sense at all, so we're now in the business of granting patents to ideas.
The reason for governments granting patents isn't to reward the inventor; it has to be balanced against other effects it has on society. In the case of software patents, I can't see any positive effect to come from it.
To those who insist on software patents; would it make more sense to limit both the scope and length of time? Perhaps a software patent should only be granted for 1 year.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It seems to me that Bezos is perfectly justified to, at least for a limited time, attempt to regulate the use of a new way of approaching the internet shopping idea. Take for instance the "Flaming Moe's" episode of The Simpsons. According to my interpretation of the patent classification system as described on the PTO's site, Homer could have indeed patented his drink and/or the process for making it. After Moe stole it from him, Homer was out of luck, and had no recourse other than to beat the tar out of him (which he didn't). When Homer eventually went nuts and told a barful of people the secret ingredient to the "Flaming Moe(/Homer)," everybody and their brother picked started up their own "Flaming Something" stand, and, because of the lack of centralized control over the public use of the recipe, the marketing of the drink was ruined for everybody, and, I'm sure, after a few weeks, nobody would want one ever again. I guess it's kind of like coffee in Seattle. The explosion was neat for a while, but then suddenly it was everywhere, and it was just too much.
Granted, Amazon's 1-Click approach to internet shopping doesn't seem quite as patentable as a mixed drink, but I feel Bezos does have some claim to the centralized control over how widespread the distribution of 1-Click "technology" goes. Were everyone to suddenly latch on to this idea, Bezos in effect loses some of the fruits of his labor. Sure, he and the Amazon staff dreamed up 1-Click to make shopping easier, but they also did it to turn a profit, to drive people away from traditional "shopping cart" sites and onto theirs. If everyone turns into a little Amazon, Bezos loses -- but so does everyone else.
I've been thinking of something along the lines of this (though completely unrelated) for the last few days. I recently found out from a residence hall neighbor that every hotel room within 50 miles is already booked solid for my 2003 graduation. I had no idea people would think so far ahead -- I certainly didn't! When I asked why this was so, he told me the hotels had booths at freshman orientation and took reservations on the spot. It occurred to me that, at some point, one hotel had decided that they were going to solicit business at freshman orientations, and started doing so, and for one orientation reaped great benefits. However, after that first year, I'm sure every hotel with a little money to spare for a booth set one up and started doing the same thing.
It made me wonder; by setting up booths, were the hotels helping or hurting customers? For those who stopped at the booths and inquired why they were there, perhaps it was a help. I don't think, though, that this idea was ever intended to be a service to the customers. It was meant for one hotel to beat out the others by getting a huge head start on reservations. So, for those like my family, who will now have little to no chance of finding a place to stay (four years in advance!), I see this as something of an annoyance, that within the span of a few days, hotel rooms for the families of 3,000 students for four years in advance are reserved unnecessarily. After that first year, this "innovation" ceased to be an innovation and became a necessity to keep up with the competition. So the hotels gain little (their rooms would have been booked anyway, and they're not getting a head start anymore), but some customers are greatly hurt.
1-Click may follow the same pattern, if its use is not regulated. After widespread use is implemented, it may prove to be a burden for customers. Perhaps a spike in internet sales will follow as people start impulse buying. Maybe soon after this buying spike an online depression will result as people shy away from internet resellers because it's too easy to drop a lot of money on 1-Click impulse buying sprees. I'll admit that right after Christmas this year I fell victim to such a disease, so I turned off 1-Click as fast as I could and now keep away from Amazon and other online department stores because I'm just too tempted to buy stuff. I'm just speculating, of course, but I do think that, for at least a limited period of time, it would be useful for someone interested in the future of internet commerce have control over where, how, and when such features are implemented.
And from the summary of a Congressional recommendation report by the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown regarding intellectual property rights and the National Information Infrastructure (NII):I wanted to talk about this passage a little also, and how, though it's really intended toward situations like the DVD fiasco, it also applies to the stuff I said above. However, it's getting pretty late, I can't hardly keep my eyes open, and I'm starting to write gibberish, so I'll quit for now.
Respond with questions, concerns, or, if you live within 50 miles of Ithaca, NY, and have a spare room for ma familia in May 2003, your phone number and address.
enmity.
I think it's great to see how when two parties have a problem (the public vs the evil something), two people actually go together to talk about how to resolve it. As opposed to the usual slashdot way, (these people suck, flame them in the forums), this is kind of nice...
I don't know if it'll do anything, but it's still kind of nice.
Erf, I'll shut up now...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
I found this read immensely interesting. In the past we could all only assume what Jeff thought about the patent - I, and im sure most others, assumed he, as everyone else, saw the patent as indefensible, but pursued it for purely greedy motives. But from O'reilly's synopsis, Jeff seems to genuinely believe it's a fair patent - and that's a key point one should consider when subscribing to the Amazon boycotter's views.
It's nice to see that Jeff is willing to consider making a public promise not to pursue lawsuits against 'non-aggressive, innovating' companies. He had a good point about the harm it could cause the suit against B&N though.
In light of this interview, I think a lot of people should reconsider their boycott. I never did boycott Amazon, simply because I love their service. If I order an out-of-print book from B&N, they don't query a network of used bookstores, send me an email with the cheapest price available within 24 hours and have it at my doorstep within a week - and that is a truly amazing feat when it comes to some long out of print books.
signature smigmature
- James
That's all. He has no responsibility to OSS or anyone else's ideals about intellectual property. As much as the law permits, he has to answer to his stockholders. The law requires it, not just business sense.
The real problem is with the patent office. Human DNA sequences, one click ordering, etc. These are patents that can only result when technically ignorant people are making the decisions. When our patent office is staffed by those who are easily befuddled by lawyers. If not Bezos, with his large war chest, it would have been someone else.
As for Amazon itself, I personally think it's the largest Ponzi scheme in history. After it crashes (and probably takes a chunk of the market with it), we'll be renaming the Ponzi scheme after it. For those advocating boycotting Amazon, you'd be more effective buying from them - they lose money with each new customer.
This uses an innovative pointing device called the "silent mouse", a sleek stealth pointer that doesn't make a clicking noise at all when the button is pressed, thereby circumventing Mr. Bezos' One-Click Shopping patent.
In this business model, the customer must keep continuously clicking the mouse, or else our company's hired goons come to his house and steal all of his stuff.
We feel this is necessary, because if a customer stops clicking, it may be because he's dead, and if anyone inherits his stuff, they'd get copies of our merchandise without even paying for it!
We feel that this practice of "copying" other people's property after they're dead violates our intellectual property rights. After all, is it really fair for those big mean dead people, who don't even buy our merchandise anymore, steal our customers among the living?
Not a chance. I'm sure you don't like dead people any more than I do-- they smell bad, they rot, and they remind us of our own mortality (which is really bad for bu$ine$$!). If these nasty cadavers keep ripping off our profits, we might end up just like them! Is that what you want to see, dear, beloved, precious, financially-secure customer?
Of course not. That's why we're taking the ghosts of everybody who ever died to court. And if that doesn't work, we're considering a business partnership with GhostBusters.com, Inc.
Finally, we've also patented dying, especially for anybody who's ever used the Internet, as well as the concept of death itself.
To protect our customer base, we're seeking an injunction against dying for everybody on the planet. Violators will be shot.
We remain committed to being a pillar of innovation, since innovation has an incredible market potential, as long as it's exploited correctly.
And, to show our devotion to our customers, we're lowering the mandatory click frequency of infinite-click shopping from 100 clicks per second to a mere 2. (We can't make it just 1, for patent reasons.)
Sin-cerely,
Biff Jefos
See Eee Oh, Amazinglygreedy.com
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
What about one-click? if "location, ambience, marketing and other intangibles" are everything, then why all this fuss about one-click? Why doesn't Barnes&Noble stick to their location, ambience, marketing and other intangibles? Why do they seem to want Amazon's one-click (one of the other intangibles?) so badly if it's worth nothing?
From the patent point of view, it boils down to this: either B&N (or RMS, or anybody) *proves* there is a prior implementation, by showing which company used one-click before Amazon, or they admit it's an *original* idea, to which Amazon has as much right as any other patent holder. If it's so obvious, then why did nobody think of it before?
For me, that completely misses the point! I don't fault Amazon for filing for the 1-click shopping patent. If they felt they needed to patent it to protect their own usage of the technology, more power to them -- in that case I'd just rant about the USPTO. Its the fact that they are SUING another company over the patent that has me riled.
LOTS of companies that produce software have big patent portfolios -- the responsible ones don't go around waving their patents like a baseball bat, and truly use them only for defensive purposes.
Jeff is just rationalizing, and it seems to me like Tim O'Reilly is blowing a lot of smoke because the issue is on the frontburner for many of his readers, but he seems very unlikely to take any real action. Of course, I DO understand he has obligations to others than himself, so I don't really BLAME him for inaction, but if he's not going to do anything substainial about the problem, he shouldn't posture like he is.
Also..I dislike many of Microsoft's tactics are much as anyone else, but Netscape's failure was more due to their own lack of understanding of what users wanted than with Microsoft leveraging the OS. For me, "Netscape Communicator" was the beginning of the end. Sorry, I don't need a bloated e-mail/news read, etc, etc inside my web browser.
That is partly true. I understand and respect amazon applying for and getting this patent. All major companies do this for protection. If they don't, someone else will. This is not the point. The point is that they are using it as a weapon going against B&N. After having gotten the patent they should have sighed in relief over never having to worry about someone else filing an injunction against them. As Tim O'Reilly wrote; their entire online business is based on someone else's invention. They are free to use it, but they shouldn't simply add another brick to the wall and go after others that do the same.
This is not the way that competitive advantage is supposed to work. We are a capitalist society, and fierce competition is what we believe in - I don't think the laws governing the economy were designed to develop that economy through legal wrangling like this patent, and that's what we're fighting against. Amazon can't "make it right" by saying someone else would use it against them, and they can't make it right by selectively enforcing that patent against the companies that they see are their biggest competitors.
Strip away Amazon's stock price and the result is clear: Amazon's business is failing. Does that make it right to support itself through offensive patenting like this? Are alldirect.com's or borders.com's businesses thriving through this type of strategy? No! They're making money because, with true business sense, they've managed their businesses properly. Amazon innovated four years ago when they brought books to the web, and they grew exponentially for it. But they must keep innovating or they're going to sink further into their hole. They can't defend what they're doing with statements like "what would you do if you were in our shoes?". Hell, if I knew that, I'd be running my own amazon.com. Maybe they just got into a line of business whose margins are too slim. What the hell do I know! And Amazon, if you don't know any better than me, I start to wonder what in the world you're doing in business at all.
Grow up, Amazon, you're not on any moral ground here.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
This patent is an innovation in commerce, not software design. I cannot see how we are supposed to feel sorry for corporations that Amazon.com got this patent first.
The days of the mom and pop store are dead, and not because of patents like this. Even if this patent were enforced against smaller stores, it would make no difference to their success. The smaller stores need to differentiate themselves in a different way to succeed. Industries that depend on consumer purchases have started to weed out the high margin middlemen. Larger corporations and scaling up the supply chain, until companies start selling direct to consumers.
I'm against software patents, but the more time I look at this, the more I see that this patent doesn't effect me at all. As a software developer or as a consumer.
I don't see Jeff Bezos's "we-have-to-patent-it-to-save-us-from-the-big-bad- megacorp" argument holding any water. While Amazon is an innovator in the ecommerce world, I don't see that fear of being taken over by a huge corporation like walmart justifies what Amazon has done.
Right on !!!!
Bezos is clearly wrapping himself in the "Little Internet startup against the big nasty corporations" flag, and O'Reilly inhaled the smoke. At the same time, Bezos is using the "corporate playbook" to patent this 'technology' and to beat up Barnes and Noble.
He can't have it both ways, can he ? Bezos needs to be careful. There is a certain comfort in having the markets view Amazon as 'one for the future', particularly if they don't look at its burn rate too closely in the interim. If Bezos starts throwing his weight about in public, he risks attracting the kind of attention he doesn't want, and lavishing the kind of legal fees and management focus his company doesn't need.
As a customer, I hope Amazon succeeds. I fear that they will not, as they seem to be wasting a lot of valuable energy on these patent issues.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
The problem with this is that part of your duty as a patent holder to actively enforce it. You can't have 9000 cases of 'patent infringement' going on and then bring 1 case against B&N just because they are your competitor. The courts are not going to allow you to selectively enforce your patents only in cases where it directly affects your bottom line.
Bezos should have never opted to patent the idea. His site already held proir art - so B&N or whomever - would not have been able to get a patent for it anyway. So Bezos now has a couple of options:
The best thing to diffuse these stupid lawyer tricks in the future is the idea of a public database for prior art. A site that accepts submissions from the general public (ie small developers) that list the technology that they are using and a link to a working example thats in use. As the submissions would grow - this would effectively bring all of these useless patents brought to the USTPO null and void because examples of prior art would exist.
IBM patented LZW and then Unisys got a patent on the same exact algorithm. Even non-patented ideas count as prior art, but for the USPTO to overlook its own patent as prior art was _very_ bad
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
There's a really simple way for Bezos to demonstrate that Amazon isn't going after the little guys: offer to license the patents to them for extremely cheap (like $1 or so). Licensing patents is perfectly legal and, if anything, would strengthen the case against those who haven't paid licensing fees. The law doesn't require Amazon to license to all comers, or to offer the same terms to everyone. Amazon can establish or decline commercial relationships with whoever they want. Bezos can put his money where his mouth is. Who knows, they could even make a profit at something...
Look, I buy lots of books from Amazon.com and so far the service has been excellent, BUT how the hell can you patent a method of doing business?, are their any constitutional scholars out there?, This is nuts!, the next thing is some giant superconglomerate like M$, IBM or AT&T will attempt to patent retail sales.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
While Amazon may be acting inappropriately by suing B&N, the idea of setting up an "organization" to hold patents makes no sense.
The acknowledged purpose of these bullshit patents is to defend yourself against a suit based on _an entirely different patent_. For example if Slashdot/Andover were to sue Yahoo! over "threaded discussion forums" Yahoo! could countersue for the use of "preprocessed templated HTML" (for which it really does hold a patent.) If Yahoo! had given that bullshit patent away, it couldn't defend itself against another bullshit lawsuit.
In order to make an idea like a patent holding organization work we would have to totally subvert and destroy the system by paying for every possible patent people could dream up. Aside from the cost (who is going to pay for such foolishness) it would stalemate the USPO and make it impossible to get valid patents.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
"It's probably in the best interest of my company to murder my competitors"
No, it's not. That would mean you'd go to jail, or whomever you hired would go to jail, you'd be charged with accessory and your company would break up as a possible result.
"The fact that it increases share value does not justify any action, not even for a business."
Yes it is. What do you think a business is there for? The greater good of mankind? No, they're there to turn a profit, and pay their employees.
"Unfair and wrong business practices do not become alright because our profit margin is increased. "
It may be morally wrong, but in the business world what they did is perfectly valid. The problem is not the business, the problem is the process that lets the business do such things. That's what needs to be changed, and business has no choice but to follow suit.
"They are not meant to do anything at all that increases profit."
That's completely and utterly wrong. What are they meant to do then? Go under?
They're not though. They're just covering their asses, albeit in a rather paranoid fashion. Read the article again, Jeff allegedly states that they won't be going after anybody just for using it, only the big boys who attempt to step on their feet.
This of course can lead to Amazon utilizing their patents to some form of unfair competition (though not the type that would hold up in court, since they do have valid patents), but name one large company that isn't litigous in nature for their own benefits to begin with. It's how "corporate america" likes to work, and it'll take a lot more than an Amazon boycott to change that.
I say we start by nuking the lawyers. =)
You're taking it out of context and referring to an earlier statement in his post, which I did respond to as well. If you notice, I agreed that it would be a bad thing. However, who has Amazon killed? Nobody.
He seemed to be implying that profit was not an issue for a company, and taking fully legal steps to attempt to increase shareholder value etc, should not be the concern of a company. That is what I was replying to.
Well yes, that could happen, and I wouldn't put it past them either. I can't honestly say I know how the company works on the inside, or what Jeff has in store, but from the public image they've portrayed to anybody paying attention over the past while, it definitely seems like a possibility.
However my post was in the present tense. At this point, they are not doing that, which the person above me seemed to be implying.
In all reality, what Amazon does with the patents NOW, won't affect the good majority of us at all. Why sue a small site that has maybe a few thousand dollars in the bank (thus having a lawsuit cost more than its worth)? It's the fact that people are getting more and more inane patents through the office lately, and that should be a sign that something is wrong. Something needs to change; maybe varying degrees of patents, or stricter patent rules, I don't know. That's not the career I chose. The people who are there however should smell the coffee, or seek new work.
IMHO.
I agree on the profit part. I think that amazon is going down, no matter what. Their only chance of survival is to start making money. That's not going to happen by filing and/or enforcing patents.
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
Don't get me wrong; I'd feel bad if Amazon went under, got bought out by a corporation like AOL or Wal-Mart, or got swallowed by the earth in a massive earthquake. But I still think that patenting something as generic as one-click shopping is like patenting the concept of a circle -- this just isn't a process complex enough that others couldn't easily arrive at it independently. The fact that this was allowed to slide through the patenting process worries me even more. Sure, Amazon -might- have bought themselves some protection from a mega corporation taking their 'idea' and running them out of business, but they did it at the expense of every other online storefront.
What do you think... is this beneficial or detrimental to the average consumer in the long run?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Yes, but it's not as though Amazon hasn't been stealing ideas from everyone else as well. Have you seen all the different stuff they're trying to sell on their site? What with the auctions (an Ebay ripoff), the electronics, the movies, etc., the book-selling business of theirs has become lost in the noise.
I think they're a bunch of hypocrites for stealing from everyone else, and then suing Barnes and Noble for stealing from them.
Amazon's strategy of protectionism does not fly. Restriction, legislation and litigation never serve the community, the market or any entity which uses them to benefit itself. From what I gleaned from the article, Jeff is being unduly influenced by his lawyers or, Amazon is encountering an internal dearth of ideas brought about by Amazon's corporate investors and their restrictive ideas about the market and what the market means.My approach to this can be summarised as follows. First and foremost the idea of markets being a zero sum game has to go out the window - ideas(including the idea of the marketplace) can only be limited by the beings which create them(us).Secondly, Fear(false evidence appearing real) has never served our species well and obviously Jeff and his company are acting on fear. Thirdly, if Amazon acts confidently and trusts the market,(us),by not involving the government ie.. THE PATENT OFFICE, Amazon will grow steadily in goodwill and green paper.Therefore, rendering Jeff's arguments and his cleverly crafted PR attempt to make him and his company look like the victims null and void.
I think your idea is excellent. To start with our system treats corporations as if they are individuals. From my analysis of your idea - why not protect individuals instead of large institutions - Corporations. By the way Corporations have more rights than the average individual. Is this what the citizens of the USA want? Not only that but most Corparations represent us. Do we want this? Do we want to be associated with an Inc. by the rest of the world. How can a legal entity act with compassion? To add insult to injury we bail them out when they go bankrupt. Next time you fiel for bankruptcy ask the .gov for help. It probably will not happen, no matter how much you have paid in taxes in the past.
Don't buy into it. This is the standard approach of any con.Make yourself look like the victim. Appeal to the hearts and minds of those that really care then, grab the mother fuckin wallet of the empathetic target before the target realizes what has happened. Jeff requested that this BS be posted- this leads me to believe some clever PR person is behind Amazon's approach. FEAR does not protect.Just rememberthis that a dog attacks a fearful person more readily than a person without fear-this is how nature works.Clever people try to twist this to take advantage of good hearted and generous individuals.
Corporations are not people.Why should they have more rights than individuals?
It is true that Barnes & Noble is not an alternative, but there are other options - try your local bookstore or smaller dealers of books online. Whatever the case is involving the government and patenting ideas that many of use as a matter of course is not the answer. There are more creative ways of battling large corporations. For instance, if Amazon was really concerned with the competition from B&N they could have been honest and explained their situation to all of us. This would have generated far more support than obtaining patents. FYI, I am also aware of large corporations stealing inventions from those less powerful then they are but in todays world it takes a small fortune to obtain a world around patent.In other words there must be another answer(I am still contemplating that).
Although it seems the marketers of Amazon have cleverly leveraged O'Reilly's advocacy to create a grassroots PR campaign which makes Amazon look like the underdog. I would venture to say that some very large corporations hold a piece of Amazon. It is obvious to me that Amazon is *owned* by corporate idealogies, lawyers, and clever marketers. Why else would one use the archaic system of patents to protect recent technology. As we all know there are more efficient ways to protect "inventions" and "innovations" in software than lousy highly "crackable" patents.
Legal caveat- My syntax for the quotes above which relate to the use of corporate buzzwords such as "innovation" etc.. .Are not quotes taken from the article which Slashdot refers to ,or the participants therein( Jeff Bezo and Tim O'Reilly), or the discussions contained anywhere within the information embodied in the entire internet site known as Slashdot.org You know it's best to protect yourself and parse your words when disagreeing with corporations. YEa right like I buy that ie .. calmly argue as they march you of to the Gulag.
Hmm... That would probably work for any great idea. Patent the idea, then open-source the patent. :)
GPL'd hardware. I like it!
"Early to rise, and early to bed / Makes a man healthy but socially dead" -- Yakko Warner
I definitely see Jeff's point. If they wouldn't have tried to get those patents then someone else (mabye B&N) would have done. And then amazon might face a law-suit now.
But still, it would be a lot more gentleman-like to allow everybody to use this patent and just use it as a protection against law-suits of competitors. I also see that this isn't really the point because they want to kick B&N out of the market (they want to make profits, sure), but is this really achieved just by suing them? I don't think so. I would rather just keep the patent and don't do anything about it, just as a self-protection.
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"It may be your sole purpose in life to serve as a warning to others."
The subject line says it all.
-N
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Perhaps we sould compare "one-click" with other uncontested patents in the past. What about the paper clip, for instance. This seems a pretty obvious thing, to bend a piece of wire to hold together sheets of paper. If the paper clip was accepted as a valid patent, then I think the one-click patent is just as valid, if no one did it before Amazon.
But with the paper clip, you're talking about a fairly novel and unique application of a flexible wire device for holding paper together. It is unique because it clearly isn't like other ways (stapling, binding, etc.) of accomplishing the same thing.
How are you going to buy something on the Internet? (Unless you are using lynx) you are going to click on it!
It hardly seems that the number of those it takes to accomplish something is truly a unique application of any sort.
Linux: The ultimate Lego set.
Actually Ingram is a distributor - both of books and periodicals - rather than a publisher, which would have had further reaching consequences had the purchase not been in violation of monopoly laws. Still the question remains how much better it is that Amazon is trying to get it.
Build the mountain. Then climb it if you're bored.
its all about money
in the grim world of hello kitty there is only war
...is the length of time these patents last. I actually think Bezos had a decent point about why he applied for it.
When the patent system was invented, people were seeking patents on machines and such, and industry moved a lot slower. It probably really took 17 years or more to recoup the investment on the "innovation".
However, now we're in Internet time. Being able to control fundamental aspects of the Internet or trivial applications of them for 17 years is outrageous, ludicrous, and unacceptable. We NEED to reduce the length of time these things last! Seems to me like 2 or 3 years is about right.
Having said that, I will continue to support the Amazon boycott until #1) we get a promise that they will NEVER sue smaller companies (less than half their size or so) over this, and #2) the affiliate program patent is dropped. Even if Amazon really was the first company to do one click ordering, they did NOT invent the affiliate program.
Manufacturers are happy to sell wholesale to anyone who buys large enough amount to keep distribution costs low. Now they can't sell it to consumers because they have no shipping infrastructure that will be cheap enough to do that with individual users, so they need retailers. When large enough percentage of consumers will start using search engines to look for products, retailer will become an unnecessary middleman for the whole classes of products -- cheap low-maintenance web site and warehouses would give more profit when selling at prices lower than retail and higher than wholesale.
Because they don't want to undercut the retailers. Retailers act as free adverising. And don't forget that for every item a retailer has in stock, the manufacturer has already received their share.
Retailers are nowhere close to "free" anything -- they take the huge difference between retail and wholesale prices. Advertising is good only for classes of products that no one would buy online anyway, and retailers have their own means of forcing manufacturers to reduce prices or otherwise do favors to them -- manufacturers end up competing for retailers, not consumers.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If Amazon's business doesn't support itself, it should die -- possibly even earlier than when it will become useless by its base idea. There is nothing wrong with that, and if so, society will better without them -- after all it's a business, and if someone else (big company or not) successfully wins over it in fair competition, providing equal or better service, nothing is lost to consumers. No one, including me, you or O'Reilly has any obligation to support Amazon just because it competes with "big businesses" -- if they don't have anything to offer that will be better than B&N, they can kiss our collective asses.
I dislike Microsoft and its likes not because they are big but because they make bad products and cause trouble for people who are trying to make good products. If Microsoft made the best OS possible, sold it at reasonable price and allowed others to easily improve it, no one, even Open Source supporters, would attack it, just like no one would attack Amazon if it managed to keep its position as top online retailer justified. But since we know that Microsoft abused its ability to dictate terms of contracts and turned development of alternative OSes into a struggle with hardware manufacturers at one side, application software file formats at the other, and OEMs that refuse to sell boxes without Windows, we hate Microsoft with a passion and will do everything that is in our power to prevent such abuse in the future.
By the same logic I don't see why Amazon that instead of providing better service abuses USPTO stupidity and courts' technical incompetence, deserves anything better than a place in technology-related ideas junkyard, next to DVIX, STREAMS, DOS and X.25.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The whole point is, Amazon is doomed. I can't know if they will ever turn a profit, but I am absolutely sure, their business model will not be viable after manufacturers themselves will start organizing their "e-commerce" sites, and noncommercial search engines (or semi-commercial -- ones that aren't paid for advertising in their search results) will become smart enough to look for those sites automatically. When that will happen, there will be absolutely no point to have central distributor -- if something is worth ordering by mail, manufacturer/publisher/... will just see users coming through search engines and ordering stuff, so he will send it by himself, probably with some help of low-overhead warehousing/distribution network that will work completely behind the scenes, and no customer will ever know how it looks and how little it charges for storage (no consumer-marketing and accessibility only to carriers => cheap warehousing). Amazon will have no place in such world, just like it had no place in the world before large number of potential customers started using the Internet.
Maybe Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that (he doesn't look smart enough), but he definitely understands that some kind of "dilution" of his business will happen soon, and instead of accepting the fate and trying to be something that competes in quality (what is actually hard to do in this kind of business -- it's just too hard to screw up such a simple process, so everybody except complete crooks will look good), he is trying to pour money into advertising and scare competitors away by bogus patents. Of course, his patents will be sooner or later overturned, and his advertising will be unable to overcome information from search engines, but probably he thinks, it will give him some time, and this is the only thing, this situation is about -- keeping Amazon from its inevitable, and beneficial for the society as a whole, death.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
One example: there's a local record store I've always frequented. The owner is a personal friend. I've been looking for specific records there for _years_. When one shows up, it can be $50, for instance Steve Vai's out-of-print original pressing of 'Flex-able'. That's the way things used to be. Now, I can look on eBay and within five minutes find every last record I ever searched for, usually for something like $8. What am I supposed to do? What is my friend supposed to do?
Jeff could be exactly right that Amazon is small business compared to his heavy corporate competitors. Unfortunately, if that is true I don't see how he can survive any better than the local small business is. Amazon tends to run more expensive than competing online booksellers, and still loses money. That's not good.
It seems that long ago, we needed corporations because their efficiencies allowed them to bring certain things to the consumer which otherwise would be totally nonexistent in a village economy. Well, now that the 'global village' economy is actually happening, 'bringing things' to the consumer is a nonissue: the awareness is a mouse click away, and shipping is just a matter of mail or UPS or FedEx. In this new context, the corporations are no longer the means of bringing stuff to isolated, poorly-resourced consumers. At this point they're basically using the same resources and fluidity the consumer now has, to fight amongst themselves. Those which try to hold the moral high ground are likely to be obliterated.
The trouble is, the end result is not success, or wealth, or consumer wellbeing. The end result of this fighting is basically the obliteration of all small business (_everybody_ shall be a consumer and work at Wal-Mart. On the bright side, Wal Mart pays much better than it used to!) and indeed the obliteration of a lot of big business. It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't a healthy development. It's cancerous.
Patents have become simply the method for scorching the earth so that, once all business but a few winners is obliterated, no new business can ever grow again. It's really irrelevant what role patents play for battling companies, because their very battling has been taken to unhealthy and unproductive extremes, and is not justifiable behavior- it's societal suicide to encourage it, but it's positively trendy now. The role of patents in this new context is solely to scorch the earth and prevent new business from arising.
I suspect Jeff Bezos is right that he must either scorch the earth and prevent new business from happening, or see his own business stumble and fail. Where he goes wrong is in behaving like this illustrates a healthy economy and society. I refuse to sanction his scorching the earth and killing the future, just to save himself in a present where he's trying to survive in a damn slaughterhouse- particularly since survival for Amazon (still losing money rather than making it) means establishing itself as the _only_ choice for online bookbuying. It can't carry on like that unless it can convince Wall Street that it _will_ scorch the earth. Some of us aren't okay with the idea of only Amazon getting to play...
There's a naval aviation anecdote that fits, here. A pilot began shouting over the radio, "I've got a MiG at zero! I've got a MiG at zero!" meaning that he had an enemy plane behind him, shooting at him, and was unable to shake the attacker. Another pilot, exasperated, cut in, with "Shut up and die like an aviator."
Jeff, shut up and die like an aviator!
If you think this is all about ability to compete, you're out of your mind. It's yet another example of corporate leverage, and it's yet another way that people in general are losing choice, losing a free market, and approaching a sort of balkanized Communism in which the only access to goods is not through the government, but through particular companies which entirely control the market sectors they serve.
So, the vast anticompetitive practice you're missing is the ability to take and hold a vertical monopoly, seizing the means of distribution much as trusts bought up railroads long ago. Whether or not you consider it shady, it certainly is not free-market, and I suggest that it is no longer capitalism.
Don't be so hard on Tim, guys, he's just trying to help out the community and hammer out some ground rules.
:)
I see nothing wrong with patenting innovative ideas, although I still wouldn't put Amazon's "1-click-shopping" patent in this realm. I don't like the shopping cart metaphor, and I also don't like storing people's credit card numbers on the server, so I wouldn't consider it "innovation" in the first place.
Patents are a tool. Like guns and computers, they aren't evil for merely existing. They can be used and abused like anything else. I think the FSF should patent any innovations they come up with, and allow anyone writing "free" software to use those patents, and offer to license them to corporations for some reasonable price, or use them as leverage, to cross-license some proprietary features into free software. (that may be the only way The GIMP ever gets the features it needs, for instance...)
But I'd prefer it if the patents are of the innovative variety and not of the "rename an old concept now that it's new on the web" variety. (Drat, I should have patented "e-business" before anyone ever thought of it!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Umm... tons of sites store profiles in a database and use cookies client side to simplify things. All Amazon did was include credit and shipping info so that you only had to click once to make a purchase.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Bzzt! Sorry, but you lose. I don't know what country you're from, but in the United States, the purpose of patent laws is defined in the highest law in the land, the US Constitution. Specifically, the Constitution says:
If you don't live in the US, then maybe things are different in your country, but considering that this entire issue is about US patent law, it is the US legal justification for patent law that applies.I really hate it when people go off on a limb and claim that the justification for patent law is this or that pet idea of theirs. The rationale behind patent laws is very clearly spelled out in the Constitution. If you don't like the legal justification given in the Constitution, then, well, tough luck buddy. While individual laws come and go and change, the Constitution is hardly ever changed.
As a side note, you claim in your post that patents and copyrights rest on different legal foundations, but that's just not true. Both patents and copyrights derive their legal legitimacy from the very same Constitutional clause that I quoted above.
Not odd at all. Our courts are based on how much $ can be thrown around. The "little guy" generally doesn't have the cash to fight the corp in court. The corps know this and use it to gain victories in court by simply dragging the case out until the "little guy" can't afford laywer fees anymore and has to withdraw. The corp wins, AND gets a legal prescedent to call upon in future cases.
Basically, they talked, and solved nothing. Jeff is filing patents to protect himself, but won't pursue them. Why bother? It would be more impressive to make a damn profit for _once_ in his companies life, but that doesn't seem to ever occur to him. Last time I checked, the stock market is losing their interest, and all the patents in the world won't replace what a few quarters of profit would.
nice try Jeff, but you're still a loser.
Why is everyone so hostile against B&N for putting 'mom and pop' stores out of business?
My understanding is that they simply can't compete - sad, but it's not B&N's fault. They simply do the same thing more efficiently.
Is there some vast anticompetitive practice I'm missing? It certainly can't be price dumping, as they price more or less around the same as any other bookstore I've been to.
Is this just a 'root for the little guy' thing, or has B&N seriously done shady things to take out the independants?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
A boycott sends the message to the entire industry, that a critical mass of the public finds a certain behavior unacceptable. The first strategy is all very made-for-TV drama in which one instance of an injustice is addressed, but the second is more reliable as a way of getting things changed in an entire sector, and possibly even in getting the underlying flaw (the broken patent system) fixed.
And guess what? If Bezos is convinced on ethical grounds, but the stockholders of Amazon aren't, then it's quite possible that Bezos would get overruled, as well as facing liability for failure to take the most profitable route.
The patent doesn't cover the `number of those it takes to accomplish something'. The patent essentially talks about storing user profiles in a database and using cookies client side to simplify things, IIRC. The process, as described in the patent ( which you obviously haven't read ) , would appear to be as `unique' as a paperclip.
If the patent office routinely grants obvious patents, to make money, you only need to patent something obvious and then keep your licensing fees below the expense and risk you create for potential infringers. This is particularly lucrative if you are a lawyer or have a staff of lawyers as part of your normal business operations: then, the cost of pursuing obvious patents is much lower for you than for the people you go after.
If you manage to get an important but obvious patent past the patent office (and that isn't so difficult), and if you have reasonably efficient legal representation, you pretty much have written yourself a check for a few million dollars. And that's money that ultimately comes out of what you pay for goods and services.
Furthermore, the US patent office is activist and expands notions of patentability far beyond what used to be established practice. Some of the software and business practices that have been patented recently were obvious to many people in the 80's, but they weren't patentable then. You are rewarding boldness in pushing patent law, not innovation.
The idea behind patent law isn't stupid. But the actual implementation and politics in the US that surround it, the special interests, the lobbying, and the unchecked expansion of its scope are.
It's amazing to see someone on a site so full of open-source advocates complaining about someone "copying everything you do".
If I thought a competitor was trying to copy everything I did, I'd try to make sure that I did it *better*.
Amazon, by contrast, has stuck to its opt-out mailing guns, abused privacy rights, gotten patents, and used those patents aggressively (not just as a "defensive" measure, but as an attempt to kill competition).
They're not good guys. They've never, ever, been good guys. Amazon is one of the first companies to really exploit the fact that Internet users assume that Internet companies are somehow "nice guys". Amazon are a bunch of lying scumbags who are *VERY* good at *TELLING YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR*.
But every so often, the truth will out.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Well, right there you answered your own question. IBM did research and invested money. Amazon patented the web equivalent of hammers and nails. They said that it's illegal for anybody else to use a cookie to allow someone to purchase something out of an email. That's not research. IBM is an innovator. Amazon is not, at least not technologically.
As for the rest of your argument, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I was trying to put the Netscape vs. IE battle in a world with no MS. Netscape sure had the right to patent a bunch of stuff, but we're all much better off that they didn't. It is this spirit of openness that Amazon is killing in the name of business interests. They are, as O'Reilly said, giving a slap-in-the-face to all those who came before them, on whose shoulders their still-losing-money empire rests.
You can take the "they're a business and their only responsibility is to make money" attitude, but if everyone from this point on takes that attitude, the web will be dead on ten, maybe fifteen years, guaranteed. This is about more than just money. This is the future of the internet, which is the future of the world. If we destroy it, or let others destroy it, we may never be able to take it back.
_________________
rooooar
The interview ended up as a defense for the one-click patent. And I'll admit that One-Click was a Good Idea (tm). It was said well, the Web let you just point, click, and have. But what on the Associate Program? I may agree with the idea of Defensive Patents, but I'd prefer they be made by organizations like the EFF.
/. and news sites.. But hey, Unisys was all nice over LZW for many many years of it's existance :P
Amazon now has a patent on something that is the furthest thing from original that I can put to words. They can claim it to be a defensive patent, but after seeing them take agressive litigation against B&N.. I don't trust them. They can look noble, they can have nice stories on
Jeff Bezos is right in many ways, as are some of the comments posted so far... Patents are as much a defensive tool as an offensive one.
B&N could have patented 1-Click(tm?)... Or Jhon Doe could have patented it... it could have been worse... Amazon might be affected by public pressure and "release" the patents back to the "public".
Why not set up a non-profit organization to hold patents and license their use freely? Hey, Jeff could fund it to show his "good will" (and he can "donate" the 1-Click and Affiliate patents).
It could charge a less-than-nominal fee on for-profit uses, so it can support itself and all the paperwork involved. Or even better... it could live out of voluntary donations from people like you and me, who don't like ideas to be patented.
As long as the current patent system remains, we'll need patents to protect us from patents. All we need is those patents to be in the "right" hands.
Jeff, help create the "Amazing Ideas Foundation", transfer the ownership of your patents to that organization a give a couple million bucks so other people can send their ideas and get them patented and keep the bad-guys(tm) from doing so.
While I empathize with Amazon, and anyone in the role of a startup trying to remain independant, even if they're worth billions, I can't condone their practices.
Patenting 1-click is like patenting giving change instead of requiring the exact ammount, in retail. You'd be laughed at for trying to patent being open on Sunday's.
So why is it okay to patent an obvious form of customer service?
It's not like there's *any* new technology in it, it's all old stuff (cookies, CGI, etc) used in exactly the way it was intended. Amazon didn't invent anything, hell, they didn't even *discover* anything, they simply were the first to use an obvious tool.
It's a blatant abuse of what the law was meant for and "They're doing it too" isn't a valid excuse. If the only way your company can survive is by abusing the spirit of the law, then maybe you shouldn't be in business.
Why?
And I will start feeling sorry for Netscape when someone demonstrates they weren't trying to own the entire Internet.
uh, duh. Any for-profit organization is going to try and capitalize as much as possible. What's your point?
Netscape, more than any other entity I can think of, damaged the viability of a free non-proprietary WWW.
You obvious can't think of Microsoft, ActiveX, non-pure Java, etc. etc. etc. etc.
You might disagree with me, but the entire DOJ agrees with me. Why do you think Netscape died? MS bundled IE into windows, and reduced it to a commodity item.
Big deal, I just buy elsewhere. I do most of my book shopping from borders.com, who have never e-mailed me except for my actual order details.
There's a big history about "spamazon" in news.admin.net-abuse.email. Use deja.com to do a search on spamazon and see for yourself. You'll be shocked.
Bezos acts like bn.com is evil because they are bigger than him and have real stores. Give me a break. At least the bigger stores know enough about the net to respect its culture. Bezos is trying to reshape it to profit himself. I hope a big store does buy out amazon.com. Someone needs to go in there and clean house as far as I'm concerned.
BTW, the one thing CEOs care more about then profits for their company is face. They care about saving face, image, etc, etc... I would bet most of that conversation was centered about how the two of them could present this to the public so they both appear to be good guys. Tim has to look like he's championing "the cause" and ole Bezos tries out the poor underdog image, fighting the good fight against big business. If Bezos loses Amazon.com, someday he'll want to head another company. If O'reilley books get bought out and Tim goes away, he'll want to run another company. It's all about their own images.
Think for yourself, don't let the various marketing machines do all the thinking for you.
It is interesting to see what Jeff had to say but the proof will be in what he does over the coming years. Will he panic and go the way of Apple and Lotus or will he roll up his sleeves and get to work on beating the competition?
It seems that all to often companies that start out trying to do just that go either one of two directions. They either give up and become like the rest or they lose but go down fighting.
In the first direction is the argument, "Everybody else is doing it so I have to survive." I understand that on a business level. If you are playing a game and someone is cheating and you want to win, you have to cheat, right? Perhaps. I think that playing better, harder, smarter, etc. can still win the day. Sadly, though there is proof of the contrary. Or is there?
Netscape's demise is the noted as the perfect example of why to fear trying to "be the good guy". Netscape did all the right things but lost. Was it evil marketing, monopolistic practices, bad software, bad business decisions? IMHO, all of the above. This suggests to me that a good, smart technology company can still beat a "cheating" company. Netscape can not be used as the reason to cheat; although their competition cheated, they made a ton of their own mistakes. Their products became inferior. They cheated a little themselves with their own extensions to HTML.
Jeff Bezos should try to lead his company to keep their technical edge. They need to keep their marketing edge. They do not need software patents. It seems that Jeff is a bit afraid that he can't win without cheating. He is a student on test day and although he studies hard he is worried it will not be enough to beat the curve created by cheaters. Come on Jeff, you have set the curve so far; just study harder (hire smart people), worker harder (hire more of them), and you will do fine.
-- soldack
Remember the "largest bookstore" lawsuite? Amazon used this line to note the size of their massive list of books. B&N sued because they claimed that they had more books in stock then Amazon. This is what really got the web book wars going.
-- soldack
I'm not saying he should enforce it at all, but the fact that he is so open in his ideas of selective enforcement suggests to me ulterior motives.
Of course there are ulterior motives. You seem to imply that a patent is an end in and of itself. Patents are a tool. No one gets a patent just to say, "look at me! I got a patent!"
As tools, they can be used for good things, bad things, or nothing at all. Jeff was spelling out his intent for the patent. So the "point" of the patent is to "[go] after the big guys who are going after us". Whether that is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
--GnrcMan--
Do two wrongs make a right? Bezos' defense merely another form of the question. The trite answer "of course not" is naive, because in many situtations, two wrongs do seem to make a right. For example "The Prisoners Dilemma" in modern game theory.
More important is the fundamental question of intellectual property rights. IP has piggybacked onto physical property rights. But IP & RP are fundamentally different things, and the most important commercial use of IP, publishing, has no analog in the real-property world.
When you sell wheat, you aren't worried about someone copying it. You havent sold the farm. When you publish, you have sold the farm because copying is trivially easy. But you won't necessarily notice copying the way you would if someone stole your bushel of wheat.
-- Robert
I would say that Tim is simply working in the world of business. The fact is you have to work with people that you have violent disagreement. If Tim joined the boycott, posted an angry letter to Bezos, do you think this dialog could have happened? It would have been an attack rather than a discussion. I know business nowadays is run by committee, but never underestimate the value of the CEO taking a firm stand on an issue. I just think it's far more valuable to convince on principle than use the clumsy club that is a boycott.
Walt
Actaully, their entire case on the "commission patent" is based on the fact that it has not been done before. They claim that doing it electronically through links is different from what's been done before with sales commissions. Otherwise it would not be original and would not qualify for a patent. Now, I happen to believe that the affiliate program is not original, but that won't stop Amazon from arguing that it is.
Walt
What is there to convince us that the same is not now true about Amazon? Jeff uses the word "protection" a lot, when he really means "competition". Yeah, sure, it may give defensive ammunition for aggressive competitors, but don't believe anything about "protecting" against some other "bully" applying for the patent and using it against other retailers. That's the wolf guarding the hen-house there.
And is Amazon really the ultimate in internet retailers that we couldn't do just as well with someone else? Isn't the point of competition that the best product that people will buy will naturally rise to a place of dominance? Where does securing intellectual property enter into that process? It doesn't.
I wouldn't have too much faith that Amazon will formally allow use of their patents without fear of legal action. Doing that would undermine the effectiveness of any suits they do pursue. The defense could claim that, since they're allowing all these other uses of the patent, it implies permission for anyone to use it. Not to mention, Amazon may say they'll let you use it now, but what about when you grow too big for their tastes. Just ask OS/2 users how far cooperation will get you.
Then what? Sue the New York Times for their best-seller list?
This is something I'm not so thrilled about. Amazon has just one goal: to make money buy selling things to visitors of their web site. Before the internet, where did you go to find out information about something? Sears-Roebuck? Macys? No, you went to a library, not some store. Sure, you can become informed at a store, but that's not what the owners of the store want you to do there; they want you to spend money. So when you go to Amazon.com, even if you can find out lots of information about books or movies or whatever, the site's primary, and for the most part only function is to get you to spend money. The effective result is the site will only provide service to you so much as it is profitable for Amazon. Just take a look at how Apple's iReview is coming about. Everything presented there has a pro-Apple slant. May I point out a critical review of Real.com? (Real, makers of RealPlayer, a competitor to Apple's Quicktime. hrmmm)
The point is, Amazon exists to make money (for them). If they act nice and try to be friendly to consumers, it's because they expect it to increase their sales (as well they should). Anything beyond that should be treated with scepticism.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Of course, I'm sure B&N would have sued Amazon if they had patented the 1-click shopping idea first.
Again, this whole ordeal is a mess. The fact remains that the patent shouldn't have been awarded in the first place. ^_^
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Let's take a case study. I open up a b&m (that's brick&mortar not Barnes&Mobile) bookstore on the corner and I get a brilliant idea. Hey, I'll help my business with a new idea I just had. I don't think people should have to wait in line if they only want one book. I'll put a mini-cash register at several places in the store. If you want a book, you drop your money in, it gets scanned, you get a receipt, (optional: if I'm using those electronic tags, the tag gets turned off), and you walk out the store. One-stop book shopping. It's smart enough that people who use it would probably remember and keep coming back, and that's great for me, repeat business. Even if someone else used my idea, I'd still be first in the minds of those customers.
Am I entitled to keep other people from using this idea? Maybe. Probably not, since I won't be making the hardware required to do all of this (I own a bookstore, not a scanner/cash register business). But here's where JB's argument REALLY falls down: I don't feel entitled to own the entire book market because I had the idea. I own a bookstore. There's millions of them. If someone walks into a bookstore, sees my self-serve cash registers and thinks "hey, I can buy those pieces of equipment and put them together myself", maybe I can stop them, maybe I can't, but I probably won't try because I JUST OWN A BOOKSTORE. Stopping them from using it won't help MY business - a successful bookstore is all about location, ambience, marketing, and the other intangibles that make people choose to shop.
And believe me, Amazon is in the same boat. Marketing, ambience, and intangibles make Amazon successful, not its flipping patents. They've built themselves a customer base that will rely on them in the future, and that's fine. If they market enough, they'll get new customers. If they can keep their business going with just THAT, then more power to them. But what they won't do, what they don't deserve to do, is be the multi-billion-dollar-IPO golden child forever, because IT'S JUST A STORE. There's millions of them. JB feels entitled to own the whole web because his website was first and his stock valuation is high, and I'm here to say, not only were you not first, you won't be last.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
If Bezos seriously believed in his patent for 1-click, would it not make more sense for him to go after all who (allegedly) violate it? What is the point of a patent if one does not enforce it against known (alleged) violators?
I'm not saying he should enforce it at all, but the fact that he is so open in his ideas of selective enforcement suggests to me ulterior motives.
How would YOU react if you'd spent all the time and effort Bezos has, only to see that a competitor is copying everything you do, and trying very specifically to put YOUR company out of business? What other methods are there, legally, to stop this sort of thing?
The whole "Tipping Point" thing was a fairly good analogy. It makes sense. I think Amazon could actually garner much more support by using the Internet community, not by ignoreing it, and going the legal route (Customers be Damned!). You tell me, would you stand behind Amazon if they used methods that focused more on inovating and expanding on what the Internet is all about, rather then using a Legal system to try and maintain dominance?
My Two Bits.
-= Rhyas=-
These days, if it says "patented" or "patent pending", and it's not hardware, I just walk away from it. I'm not about to pad the pockets of those who enjoy patenting trivial software technology.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Could you give us some examples?
Unfortunately, I see no good alternatives to software patents. Open Source is fine, if you happen to work at a large university that gets public subsidies, ultimately supported by taxpayers. But, given the choice, I would prefer to support large corporations by my careful shopping, rather than having the government (the ultimate large organization) tax me and let some committee allocate research funds.
Copyrights have the inconvenience of lasting too long, three times longer than patents. Perhaps, if software copyrights were drastically reduced in duration, they could be the answer. But no copyright should be allowed for what isn't published. This means that, if you only release binaries, that's all your copyright will protect.
Reverse engineering should be completely free, if you want legal protection for your ideas, you should publish them.
With that said, I think Bezos and Amazon should use this opportunity to point out the obvious flaws in the patent system as it applies to the software/web industry. My radical idea: allow patents on anything at all, but do not allow individuals and other non-corporations to be the target of patent infringement cases. Corporations can tear each other apart as much as they like, but they cannot go after an individual. The benefits:
- Corps like Amazon receive patent protection against bigger corps like B&N
- Individuals, small businesses, and open source software are not affected by patents.
- Information will flow freely for those not obsessed with the bottom line.
What more could you ask for? I mean, Joe Bob Smith may start up his own bookstore, but he certainly won't be competition for Amazon and B&N. He can use any patented idea he likes. When M$ opens the M$ Printed Information Exchange Network TM, they will be subject to patent law.Does any have any problems with this?
Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.
A choice of masters is not freedom
6 weeks ago I might have agreed with the boycott and all the Slashdot tirades. Then I found out my startup could be put out of business by a company without a product that essentially invested all their money is a patent - a very specific patent that will be expensive although not difficult to challenge.
We don't have shareholders - its just me and my partners (and a few VCs who don't have a controlling interest.) The way we see it right now we have two choices:
1) "Buy" a patent of our own from the patent office that covers something that both we and our competitor are doing so we can block any future suit, or
2) Wait until its obvious that they can't compete with us, let them obtain an injunction against us, shut a major part of our flagship site down as well as our software biz, borrow another $200k from the VCs for the legal fight get their patent thrown out and watch us both sink to the bottom.
The idea that Bezos is thinking only of his stock holders is ridiculous - Amazon.com is his baby, his mark on history. He is bound and determined to see it succeed. Patent law has been used historically to really screw up competitors and he is realizing that it could be done to him. Its very personal.
I'd like to think there was a third way for us or for Amazon or for any other company - but there isn't until US patent law is reformed. Want to end this _stupidity_? Lobby your senator or representative. Write a letter to the editor. But don't pretend that Bezos should risk his company to prove how inane the laws are.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
I'm not sure how to feel on this to be quite honest. From a business persons viewpoint, what they are doing is in the best interest of the company; and that's what companies are meant to do. From a consumer stand point, I don't think it really matters. There will always (hopefully) be competition and alternatives to places like Amazon.com, and if they're not doing their job, then you go elsewhere. The patents don't directly affect the consumers until you get to the third possible viewpoint.. the actual competitors, developers, entrepreneurs et al who have to put in extra effort to implement what should be standard features, but have been previously patented by Amazon.com or whomever else may come along. At this point it /can/ harm the consumer in the fact that it's restricting the competition from getting their job done.
:)
All in all, I think this particular subject (Amazon patents) along with the plethora of related subjects where people have been patenting either inane or minute processes simply to raise barriers, should be used as a wake up call. The way things are done in our society as a whole need to keep up with the times. Nothing is horribly behind, but processes such as patenting need to be looked at, and continually monitored to make sure they're beneficial to society and not detrimental.
If any of that made any sense.
As was mentioned above, a company's purpose is to make money for its shareholders. Worrying about how nice they are being to the rest fo the field is only important so far as the state of the rest of the field effects the company's P&Ls. Squashing competition is a legitemate part of that, unless it strays into illegality(eg. a monopoly).
I think Jeff Bezos is attempting to avoid being a bad guy, because that would be bad for his company's image. I doubt his real concern is the freedom of the rest of the internet. And that's good, with respect to his responsibilities. So, if we give commentary that we really want a company to listen to, I think we should talk about it in terms of benefit to the company, not some moral code. I think Tim's done a reasonably good job of this, but even he strays a little too much into the assumption that Amazon.com and Jeff Bexos should somehow be concerned about the welfare of the rest of the world.
If we social critics and OSSers and etc would keep this in mind, then maybe companies would listen to us more often. Notice how well it worked in this instance. I bet if Tim had come up with some concrete and convincing exampleds of how hording patents could hurt Amazon.com specifically, then Jeff would have been been more enthusiastic in his agreement. More of the conflict of interest would have been removed.
That's what I think, anyway.
-N
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
The big company almost always wins the lawsuit, too, if one is ever filed. Odd, that...
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
I never really understood what the big uproar was about this patent, we all know there have been stupider ones out there. I remember the first time I saw the 1-click thing, it was really cool and I'd never seen it before in years of net shopping (that doesn't mean they were the first, it was just the first I'd seen). Sure it might be somewhat obvious in hindsight but what isn't? What casts a shadow over Amazon's intent with the 1-click patent is their recent patent on affiliate programs. I was a member of the CDNow affiliate program before Amazon had anything resembling an affiliate system. Bezos would be very hard pressed to explain the patenting of affiliate programs in the same way he explained the 1-click patent and it makes me even more suspicious of their motives.
This doesn't justify Amazon, however: Amazon doesn't want a free market either. They, too, want to be in a position where there's no choice anymore. Unlike B&N, rather than seize control of the distribution channels, they are trying to seize control of e-commerce intellectual property. That's just as bad, only in a totally different sphere.
B&N couldn't patent it because Amazon would have prior art. Patents have to be original work.
Sheesh!
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
And his objection to the boycott is based, weirdly enough, on the value of the service that Amazon provides. That's missing the point of a boycott: 'boycotting' companies with inferior products or services isn't boycotting, it's just shopping. When you choose not to give a company its business because of the moral and social aspects of their business practices even though they may have the best service in the market, thenyou have a boycott. Why is Tim opposed to boycotts as part of a multifaceted strategy against harmful business practices?
Barnes & Noble has never liked the idea that an on-line concern might, theoretically, do to it what B&N itself does to the little independent bookstores wherever it puts in a shiny new B&N franchise. They'd be very happy if they could put Amazon out of business, and have been trying to throw whatever monkeywrench they can into Amazon's plans ever since it first came to their attention. Not to mention, as I've noted elsewhere, ripping off pretty much the entire look and feel of Amazon's site for their own.
I dislike the necessity of having to use patents defensively. But I'm finding it harder and harder to blame Jeff Bezos for protecting himself and his firm using means that others would use to try to bring him down if he didn't.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
It occurs to me that in addition to boycotting Amazon.com, you can send them a more immediate message by disabling 1-Click ordering in your Amazon.com account.
To turn off 1-Click ordering, go to Amazon.com's web site, click on the "Your Account" button, then click on "Access or change your 1-Click settings", then click on the "Turn off 1-Click ordering" button. If the button says "Turn on 1-Click ordering", just leave it that way.
I just did this. It felt good. :-)
--Roger
If he didnt patent it, B&N or another competeter might have and used it against him. and been a lot more nasty to everyone else... Remember the LZW patent...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
I appreciate what Tim is doing, trying to bring his position to bear in this matter. And I certainly hope that he and Jeff are able to work out a situation where Amazon can give assurances to the little guys, while protecting themselves from the big guys.
As good as these talks are to this particular instance, they are just a band-aid to the greater problem, which is the US Patent Office's general cluelessness in dealing with software and new technology patents. It seems that any real reform has to be done on that level, or else the "worst case" that Tim talks about -- the big tech companies who try to use patents to crush smaller companies -- will happen, it's only a matter of time.
BTW: Say it's not so! Say Tim isn't one of those people who talk on their cell phones in the middle of restaurants!
-- "God, Root, what is difference?" - Pitr, "User Friendly"
As I was reading this article I began to realize that I'd been extreme. Bezos does make some good points; and Amazon has so far done nothing worse than sue Barnes and Noble, who are definitely guilty of copying Amazon's site (tacky, at best), as well as pulling a "You've Got Mail" and putting lots of small independent bookstores out of business. Amazon on the other hand has done neither of these things. And in certain areas, they really have innovated.
Nonetheless I'm going to withhold my judgment for a while yet. I haven't bought anything from Amazon since the 1-Click patent; and I don't intend to until there appears to be some resolution to this.
BUT KEEP THIS IN MIND: So far Amazon has NOT sued ANYONE except B&N over the patent. It's not like the eToys business; they're not running over any little guys. Maybe we all just have a problem with the theory of what Amazon is doing; but they don't seem to actually have DONE anything wrong. Regardless of whether the patent is valid or not, that by itself should not be enough to condemn a company.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
He used that patent offensively, not defensively. (And as far as was mentioned, B&N wasn't throwing Amazon any legal punches before Amazon did).
Read my earlier post about the punches that B&N has thrown Amazon or even better do a search for Amazon, B&N and the words lawsuit or sue and you'll be rather surprised to see the amount of blows that have been thrown by both parties. The rivalry between both companies is similar to the irrational hatreds that run deep within the Sun and Microsoft camps. The reason few geeks know about is that it's been mainly news for the book industry and few else.
If I had seen a serious statement as to WHY they were taking action against Barnes and Noble, what their opinions and beliefs were, and if they had presented a case on why Barnes and Noble were wrong in doing what they did in the manner in which they did it, I might well have been boycotting B&N now instead of Amazon. Lord knows I loved Amazon when they first came online. But I have lost my faith in them, and at this point Jeff Bezos needs to do something to restore that faith.
And here's where I'm out of luck. It's not an issue of cost, it's a matter of customer service. In my opinion, Amazon's site has always been and will always be much more informative than their competitors. That's why I would shop there, even if it cost an extra buck or two. I did not mind paying for that service. But I cannot condone a corporation who appears to be building a monopoly through lawsuits.
If Amazon wants to impress me, it can create a small non profit organization whose sole purpose is to patent and hold the patents for the things required for the internet. This organization will be based upon the concept that it will NEVER use these to initiate a lawsuit against another company. (They can be used as evidence in a countersuit for all I care.) This organization will handle and hold patents for all companies who are serious about patenting for defensive purposes only. Any companies patenting outside of this organization can be assumed to be patenting for agressive purposes.
Do it Jeff, and you'll have me as a customer forever.
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No Zen is good zen
That's not the idea behind patents. The patent system was created to insure against trade secrets dying with their inventors. Classic example: Antonio Stradivari's violin making techniques. That's why "obvious" ideas aren't patentable, they will inevitably occur again to someone else. It's different with copyrights, there's nothing in the law stating that a copyrighted text should not be obvious. All it needs to be is original, i.e. never having been written before.
Probably the "one-click" idea is obvious, so this patent should never have been granted, but courts exist to decide about such things. The only problem is how to make sure that judges and juries understand the application of laws in a context where technology evolves so fast. Perhaps we sould compare "one-click" with other uncontested patents in the past. What about the paper clip, for instance. This seems a pretty obvious thing, to bend a piece of wire to hold together sheets of paper. If the paper clip was accepted as a valid patent, then I think the one-click patent is just as valid, if no one did it before Amazon.
I'm not joining this boycott. I have bought from Amazon since all mess this started. I don't think Richard M Stallmann is such a god that I should blindly follow his lynch mob.
The first sentence is true: Amazon announced record losses in the fourth quarter of 1999. The second sentence, however, is apparently false: Amazon claims that it is now making money on books alone; the losses come from expanding into other products (CDs, videos, etc.).
On a related topic.... Note that Amazon's profiting on books just might justify the view that losses taken to build market share can turn into profits later on.
Regardless of who did it first, the trend leading to this patent was set long ago and has been continuing for some time. This is simply the first time the implications extend outside the book world. Why is it Amazon doesn't use the New York Times bestseller list on their site? It's not because of it not representing what Amazon sells, but because of a cease and desist order sent to Amazon and Borders last June (notice any prominent bookstores missing? Selective enforcement, you might say.)that resulted in the list being removed. Or look at the discounts on bestsellers - Amazon ups theirs, BN follows suit. Both Jeff Bezos and Leonard Riggio, CEO of Big and Nasty, seem so concerned over their fight with each other and other online competitors that they lack any judgement concerning the implications of their actions. There is more publicity over this issue than previous ones simply because they've moved out of the industry. The pattern for this behavior was set a long time ago. Bezos' lack of foresight should not be surprising since his company not only has never shown a profit, but has no plan to do so in the near future. But what is the best way to stop it? Since the procedure for getting a patent isn't going to be improved any time soon and people aren't going to stop buying books online the only thing that we can do is pay closer attention to what is being patented and hope that more prominent figures like Tim O'Reilly take a stand on similar issues. Or let them patent it, and then come up with something better ourselves.
Build the mountain. Then climb it if you're bored.
He uses Netscape as an example. He says that maybe if Netscape had patented some of its ideas they wouldn't have fallen and been acquired by AOL (the king megacorp on the internet). The problem with this is that if Netscape had patented all its technology it would have hindered the growth of the Internet. If all the web browsing technology was owned by Netscape, Netscape would be the only browser around. This is sort of a bad example because the entity helped most by Netscape's not patenting the technology was Microsoft, for whom none of us have any great love.
But setting aside arguments about IE's incorporation into Windows and all that stuff, and looking at IE as a product, I think in the long run we are much better off with Netscape not having patented its technology. Companies need competition in order to keep making new, better products. In the end, the main benefactor of competition is usually the consumer. Prices are driven down and product quality is driven up.
Now, the death of Netscape was sad, and it was due mostly to the fact that their playing field wasn't level (when the competing product is included on every computer for free it does tend to kill your own product). But imagine that IE was made by a company that wasn't MS, and their only product was IE. I think Netscape would still be alive and kicking, and with each one trying to one-up the other, we would be the ones to reap the benefits of this contest. This is not a new idea, this is what all industries do. The problem here was that MS had such an enormous advantage.
Assuming that if Netscape had "filed a few patents" it would not have been swallowed, I don't think this is any kind of a good goal in itself. Filing for patents as a way to keep out competition is great for the filer of the patents, but it sucks for consumers. IE 3 sucked, I didn't like IE 4 much either, but I sure like IE 5 (and, even better, IE 4.5 on Mac). Before IE, I had only one choice: Netscape. The ability for consumers to choose what product to buy or use is the basis for all the antitrust legislation we have. Filing patents to stifle competition runs directly counter to that idea. And while Amazon should be rewarded for its innovations in ecommerce, this is not one of them, and they have really gone about it in the wrong way. The way to maintain marketshare is to one-up your competitor. If they are afraid of B&N, too bad. They must adapt or die, and not patent frivolous things in an attempt to fence off technology.
I would be sad to see Amazon go, but I think the market should decide who the winner is. Using patents to keep out competitors still seems like a very underhanded and dirty trick to me, and in the end it will most likely be the consumers who lose out.
_________________
rooooar
Jeff B: listen you little geek, post a total suck-up letter on your website, or I'm not selling your books.
Tim O: Oh, now I see your point about the intellectual property stuff, it's downright +1 Insightful. But what will I say?
Jeff B: Make it up, I don't care, just get it done.
Tim O: Yes, master.
[click] [bzzz][beep][last message repeated 9 times]
Tim O: RMS? Could you help me out with a letter I'm writing to the ... um er... EFF? What should I say about patents and stuff.
RMS: Dear EFF, Patents [voice rising] are [voice rising] very [shreiking] bad. Information wants to be free. It's a free speech issue.[/talking][/shrieking]
Tim O: thanks dude, good enough! [click]
[tap tap tap] s/good/bad/ [oops] s/good/bad/g [tap tap tap] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/g [oops] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/gi
RCPT TO:Jeff B
My Dearest Friend, How's this?
[connection lost before line could be traced]
Echelon is unable to determine identity of parties.
Barnes and Noble would have patented it and may have been much worse than Amazon. After all Barnes and Noble sued Amazon the day after barnesandnoble.com went online because it claimed Amazon was not "Earth's biggest bookstore" as the Amazon slogan said.
Barnes and Noble has been out to crush Amazon the same way it bullied and crushed independent booksellers for at least the past two years. After all B&N was trying to become a true monopolist by buying up book publishers then using that against their competitors. IMHO opinion Amazon got this patent just to protect them against B&N which has showed itself to be a completely ruthless and unscrupulous competitor.
God only knows how much worse things would have been if Barnes and Noble had gotten the patent. That said the patent is still wrong but if the USPTO is going to be stupid enough to grant those patents then Amazon has a right to grab as many as possible to protect themselves from Barnes & Noble.
Here's what I posted on their talkback...
I don't mean to flame here, but I really don't think the summary you provided reflects a very good discussion. On the one hand you had Mr. O'Reilly pretty much arguing by analogy the whole time, and on the other hand you had Mr. Bezos doing the classic used car salesman's pitch of "I'll get back to you on that" and "I'll have to talk to my manager". The "I'll get back to you on that" is accomplished by pushing the problem out to a place where he can make a promise to "try" (i.e. see to what extent he can allow independent developers to use "his invention" without harming his case against B&N) without having to commit immediately. The "I'll have to talk to my manager" allows him to be the good cop and Amazon's patent lawyers to be the bad cop. The upshot is, he still basically represents a big business trying to rake in as much as possible, consequences be damned, and I'm afraid that all that happened here is that Jeff talks a very good talk and told Tim just what he wants to hear. The "I'm just a little guy against giants like Wal-Mart" and "I'm just like Netscape" angles are simply attempts to get on Tim's good side and turn the discussion from "me against you" to "us against them". That is, after all, what a good used car salesman does.
As far as the patentability issue, there should be no compromise: this simply must stop here. Someone in an earlier post said (roughly) that the reason for all the outcry over this is that this one click "innovation" is so simple and obvious that even people who can barely write "hello world" in a programming language are disgusted. And they should be. There is nothing more here than an attempt to use the law as a crowbar, to get any advantage, no matter how tenuous and no matter what its consequences, against Amazon's competitors. For Jeff Bezos to compare his company to Netscape is indeed arresting, but only because it's incredible that someone in the retail business whose company simply uses tools that others (including Netscape) have developed, would have the hubris to compare themselves to Netscape.
Tim says, "The social norms of the Internet and of the Open Source community, which have proven so productive in the development of the Web, need to be recognized, honored, and upheld. The public relations cost of violating those norms needs to be high." Everyone knows that the patent system is totally broken. Not everyone chooses to use it. Those who do, like Amazon, deserve all the flak they receive. The only thing these companies understand is dollars, and the only way to make them behave is to make the consequences of their actions translate into lost revenue.
If Bezos had simply obtained the patent, and kept it in the company's portfolio for defense, then he would have some merit in that point. But he took B&N to court, and stopped them from using the "1-click" system. He used that patent offensively, not defensively. (And as far as was mentioned, B&N wasn't throwing Amazon any legal punches before Amazon did).
Bezos talks a reasonable talk, but his company's doing exactly what he fears others would do to him. Net negative gain, folks.
iSKUNK!
http://www.wired.com/wired/arch ive/7.06/barnes.html
Specifically, they talk about how they implemented most of amazon's functionality, almost feature by feature.
Bezos has a point about not wanting to be "Netscape." Barnes & Nobles is just like Microsoft - they are leveraging their wielding power in the brick and mortar stores (operating systems) and trying to gain a presence online by providing an Amazon clone (web browser).
We should be boycotting B&N, not amazon.
Now, I don't agree with these patents being awarded to anyone. However, I think Bezos realized how stupid the patent laws were and took advantage of them. I agree that if he wouldn't have, someone else would have, and that company would be the target of our flames instead.
The real problem is with the patent office and the laws itself. I think most of on Slashdot agree (or at least it would seem by the response to these things) that the patent laws in the US are very messed up. This is due to big companies lobbying for years to get patent laws that allowed them to screw over competitors. The entire patent system really needs an overhaul for the 21st. century.
Of course, I doubt we'll get it. ^_^
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Of course if you actualy *wanted* to hurt them you could join the affiliate program, link to a specific title (15% commission), buy a best seller with "one click" (30% discount), pocket your 40% net savings, and watch Amazon sink deeper into a sea of red ink.