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The Great Library of Amazonia
theodp writes "Amazon had a dream. To bring the world a modern-day Library of Alexandria. Apparently they had a second dream. To own the patents on it. Interestingly, fears of lost cookbook and reference text sales voiced by the Author's Guild are echoed in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's patent application for the Suppression of features in digital images of content and a9.com CEO Udi Manber's follow up Access to electronic images of text based on user ownership of corresponding physical text, which discuss how one might block content from viewers who have no proof-of-purchase for a book on file with booksellers."
Oh my. Hypocracy in corporate America. I'm shocked.
Yes, there's a reason why I don't buy anything from amazon.
Pirahnas?
I never can fully understand these patent writeups but I want to know if this will only allow you to search through full-texts of books you have proven you own.
;)
Why can't you be shown a snippet of the text through fair-use? You should be able to retrieve that information freely w/o restriction IMHO but IANAL.
What about libraries that own these books. Could they setup a link to this searchable database so their patrons could look through books that the library owns? That sounds like a good idea to me
Looking at your post I get the feeling they are already here...
"...discuss how one might block content from viewers who have no proof-of-purchase for a book on file with booksellers."
Because this was an issue back in the day in the library of Alexandria too, with those pesky raiding marauders burning books without a proof of purchase on file from booksellers!
But it seems to me that if they were supressing images and images of text to people who didn't own a proof-of-purchase, it would defeat the purpose of having that information available.
At the time it was published, it was easy to look on Richard Stallman's story, The Right To Read, as dystopian hyperbole. It was easy to believe that he was writing about an exaggerated worst case that could never come to pass. Sadly, with each passing year it looks more and more like the only thing he was wrong about was how quickly it could happen.
So what?
If you don't like what Amazon is doing then vote with your feet and walk away from them. If enough consumers make the same free and voluntary choice that you do then Amazon will have to change or close their doors for good. Remember Amazon only exists because they give people what they want.
Libraries generally do not own books. They own copies of them, but have no copyright to any of them.
I wonder how this will work if you give an Amazon-bought book to someone? As the registered buyer of the book, the gift giver would, presumably, have access to the electronic copy even as the give up the physical copy.
That way you can give the book and read it too.
I suppose the solution is a transferable ownership certificate (paper receipt with code or online transfer process -- yay, another claim for a patent), but I wonder how many people will actually bother to keep/give/input the certificate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yes, there's a reason why I don't buy anything from amazon.
Don't you want to know what customers also didn't buy?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
If Amazon can pull off a successful digital rights management for text, then I'm all for it. As long as it's the publics right being protected more than the copyright holder. I think that is the biggest glitch with DRM for entertainment media - no one can figure out how to do it so the public rights are not infringed upon. With music downloading, there is no real way to determine if you own a copy or not. I know some movie/music publishers have tried to include some sort of access code along with purchase, but it is all very cumbersome.
The thing is, a company as large and with such a dominating internet presence as Amazon, has the both the $$$ and the desire to invest in good old fashioned R&D, which is something the MPAA/RIAA has been to stubborn to do. They would rather pay lawyers and elected officials to do their bidding.
The bottom line is, if Amazon can pull this off, then they will have created a succesful model for others, which just doesn't exist right now.
Another silly patent
,where you can "supress" Advertisments.
"1. A method for suppressing one or more features in an image of a page of content, comprising: (a) acquiring an image of a page of content; (b) identifying one or more features in the page image that are to be suppressed or not to be suppressed; and (c) preparing a substitute page image that only includes images of the identified features that are not to be suppressed. "
This sounds to me like a log-in site , with a feature kind of like that which slashdot subscription has
Really its worded horribly This patent.
The rest seems to mutter on about things like text recognition etc and image recognition
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I didn't read the whole article, but, it seems that this tool is going to require you to already own books to be able to search them? How is this anything like the Library of Alexandria?
Unfortunately I don't trust Amazon to do anything for the public good. Well, I don't trust most corporations to do such things. A repository of all the world's knowledge is awfully stupid if it requires you to pay for it. It will simply create another case where you have the haves and have nots.
I think all the projects on WikiMedia are probably the most likely to present us with a repository of knowledge that is accessible to everyone.
I don't want to look at pictures of books anyway!
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
I was thinking abut this the other day when I looked something up at Amazon - at some point Amazon will have to decide if they are a reserch tool or a bookseller. Looks like they are leaning to bookseller. This is not a huge problem for me. I suspect that they will allow you to serch for a passaage, but not read much around it if you haven't bought said book. I think they so something like this now for people without active CC# on file. This seems fair, espically in the case of cookbooks; I for one buy a cookbook, read it and then only use 3-5 recipies.
I tried. The response (a good 3 years later) was:
So, like the rest of government, get a lawyer. There's no room in there for common folk.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Does this mean I'm going to have to give the bookstore my Personal information when I buy the Anarchist Cookbook ?. I suppose there is no chance my book buying habit could fall into the hands of the feds ?
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
I fear the Candiru Vaudellia Cirrhosa more than I fear piranhas
My take on this patent application is to "sell" access to reference books - probably more for trade books than the the casual "Idiots Guide To XP".
I can see a subscription service that allows you to browse through some medical text seeing bits and peices relevant to your search, but, not the entire page. To see the entire page, you gotta "buy" the page. The implication that you must first own the physical text is a red-herring - its really about rights to use the book in "whole, or in part".
I can see it being useful to ME for access to pages from the Chilton manuals etc.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Not much different than doing a conditional print from Word to a PDF file, does it?
Well, since you clearly represent the holier-than-thou asshole brigade, we might as well let the others have their say too.
and rightly so -- the world he writes about is very alarming -- and we are flirting with such a world. By calling him "not an alarmist" you're degrading those people who rightfully raise red flags. People who were right about bad trends that happened to take a bit longer than they predicted. Stallman was smart, he made his predictions far far off into the future (yet, a bit less than the term of a copyright...)
Being a paid member of a digital library allows you to "borrow" an electronic version of a book. After reading it you "return it" by deleting it from your reading device.
How is this different than a library? Am I gonna make a fortune off of this one? Great business model eh, Jeff?
sigh...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Quite frankly, you're not going to find [m]any public libraries with the resources to digitize their entire collections and the desire to actually manage something like that. It would almost certainly be cheaper for them to license the books from the copyright holders for electronic use. And most of them aren't going to have the funds to do that, either.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/humperdinck/634/ Anarchy.htm
Posted anonymously for my protection.
however the expression of that information might be copyrighted.
I am buying fewer and fewer books. Most of what I want to know is available on the web. The information that isn't on the web isn't there because nobody took the time to put it there.
I guess that what I'm saying is that restricting access to books mostly won't work. There is darn little information that doesn't make its way onto the web some way or another. For some things like law and medical libraries people have been able to cash in on information services of course but for most things that isn't the case.
It's really a lot like music. For a few artists, the web results in the theft of their work and they lose lots of money. For most artists, the web is a really good way to market their work and make more money. So, for most books, restricting access won't make them more profitable just more obscure.
Many books cite copyrighted passages within them and obtain some limited right to do so from the publisher of that work. That right probably doesn't extend to Amazon reproducing the page so if a publisher wants their book to be searchable they need a way to block access to portions they don't have the full rights to.
"We live in an open society in which the concept of widespread knowledge is embraced as a goal of governance,"
Maybe in the overall big picture that is true but in the current political environment that statement is most certainly not true.
The current administration has done and continues to do everything in its power to suppress the flow of knowledge and information. Witness the recent suppression of an EPA-funded study conducted by Harvard which found that the recent changes to rules regarding mercury emissions from U.S. power plants would have health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA said it would .
Why the difference? Because according to the EPA and the Bush administration, more stringent controls would cost too much to industry compared to the public health benefit. Thus the analysis was stripped from the final report even though the findings of the analysis were used in a briefing by the EPA to the Washington Post on February 2nd.
Even outside the administration the flow of knowledge is under attack. Witness the current effort by the Florida legislature to pass legislation which would allow students to sue professors who the students claim were punishing the students for their beliefs. Included would be a situation when a professor challenges a student to explain their theories by using the Socratic method. In other words, simply state you have a belief but you don't have to provide any evidence or rationale to support this belief.
Let us not forget the fiasco in my home state where Intelligent Design is being taught alongside Darwinian Evolution as a valid scientfic theory.
Along those same lines, this very site posted a story yesterday about some IMAX theaters not showing a film because it contained references to evolution.
While Kahles overall sentiment is correct the current political environment is not conducive to the flow of knowledge and won't be for a fairly substantial time.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Well, as long as certain sections of the book aren't being copied at the same time I don't see the problem.
If someone is copying information out of a reference book as part of fair-use and that book cannot leave the library why can't someone else be accessing a completely different section of the same book?
I like to read and there are a lot of writers whose work I enjoy. I like the fact that they get paid enough so that they can write full time since that means there is more for me to read. I may not be happy in thirty years when I can't obtain a copy of a book because its out of print but still in copyright but I'm not going to hold that against the author who wasn't involved in making the law.
The difference is that the RIAA is better at lobbying than book publishers.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The library of Alexandria was so extensive (and so important) precisely because they didn't do anything like this.
Back in the day, any ship entering port at Alexandria had to declare any books, maps, written works, etc they were carrying as part the customs process. Anything that wasn't already held by the library was taken over and copied by hand, then returned.
The library also allowed others to copy works that they held.
The idea was that ships would create and add to star charts and other navigation tools that could be quickly (for the day) shared with other ships, who would then add their own observations. Everybody benefited, and the Mediterranian became a whole lot safer.
The hoarding and guarding of knowledge didn't become popular in Europe until the Age of Discovery, when nautical charts and chronometer designs were the most closely guarded state secrets.
Having all the books in one place (virtual or otherwise) certainly does make the knowledge more accessible for purchase, but locking down the contents is not quite what Alexandria was about.
A technology where the chilling effect of software patents is a GOOD thing. Let's hope this is another area that goes stagnant due to patents.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
As I said in another recent comment, an image might work well if you're reading on a large screen, with a large window, reasonable resolution, a fast processor, reasonable storage or bandwidth, and so on. But there are umpteen other circumstances in which images would be inconvenient or impossible, yet text would work fine.
And that's not to mention the malleability of plain text. If you have an image, you're stuck not only with the font, rendering, layout, colours, resolution &c they give you, but you're also stuck with the formatting, spelling, &c. You can't convert between British English and American English spellings, or do other automated translations. You can't cut'n'paste quotes. You can't read the text out loud. You can't easily split a work into chapters, or join stories into collections. You can't search, index, or compare. You can't do so many other useful things.
(And of course, there's the obvious fact that plain text takes an order or two of magnitude less storage or bandwidth.)
Plain text is so incredibly versatile. I'm surprised they expect people to be so willing to give up those freedoms.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I may not be happy in thirty years when I can't obtain a copy of a book because its out of print but still in copyright but I'm not going to hold that against the author who wasn't involved in making the law.
Really? The author signed the contract granting perpetual exclusive rights to a given publisher. Authors who know what they're doing insist on clauses that should the work go out of print, the publisher's exclusive rights become nonexclusive rights.
Last time there was a Amazon patent article on /. I posted saying they are patenting concepts. But this one is even worse. In fact I don't even know the appropriate word. What are they patenting, common sense? The very concept of (or conclusions you can make from) business?
24 foot long man-eating pythons, head hunters, giant lesbian women...
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Hello, dumbshit, parent post was actually +1 Funny. Kill yourself, useless piece of shit.
Maybe its because I expect more of people and am simply fed up with all the lies this particular administration throws about and then tries to justify that it seems like I'm a leftist.
For example, five days into his first term, Bush was told by Richard Clarke that an immediate meeting was needed to discuss the Al Qaeda threat. Clarke told both Bush and Rice about this meeting and gave them memos stating the urgency of the meeting.
Both Bush and Rice denied ever having been informed of such a meeting. Too bad the memo was released on February 10th of this year proving that Clarke was correct when he said during Congressional hearing that Bush was warned about the threat.
Am I giving Clinton a pass? No way. The dingbat had his own issues. I am merely harping on the current officeholder because he's the one doing the stupidity. When the next person comes into office, I'll rail against them as well.
Don't automatically assume that because I or anyone rails against Bush that they are leftists. You'd be surprised how many Republicans are just as disgusted by his antics as the Democrats are.
As a side note, your final comments echo almost exactly what the morons in the Florida legislature were saying about leftists. I guess when people can't back up their arguments it's easier to shoot the messenger than disprove the message.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Lets say for a moment they can create another Alexandria, this time digital.
Then most print books go out of style..
Who is to stop someone from changing the text, to fit their needs/views/beliefs and claiming its 'always been that way'.. With no hard paper evidence to prove them wrong it gets accepted as fact.
This already happens with book 'revisions' over time.. Subsequent generations get different 'facts', all twisted to fit the views of who is currently in control.
Or even ought ban of information. "sorry, you don't need to know this" and poof it no longer exists. This is harder to do if people still own the hardcopy..
Ok, so I'm paranoid, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And I'm old enough to have seen it happen in the schools.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, thank God they refused your patent. Otherwise you would have been one of those assholes everybody hates and write about on Slashdot!
Rather than saying that they block images from people who don't own a proof a purchase to saying that they allow you access to the electronic images of the text if you purchase from Amazon, then you get a completely different picture of the meaning of such a patent.
Basically, Amazon would be able to give people who purchase through Amazon more than their competitors. When you purchase a book through Amazon, you get both an eBook and the book. While if you purchase through the quaint bookstore down the street, you get just the book.
Giving both an ebook and a book when you purchase through Amazon.com, and using a patent to essentially block other dot coms from doing the same could really firm up Amazon's position in the book selling industry.
This looks a little bit like the Beam It Up case that cost MP3.com its hide. MP3.com said that if you owned a copy of a CD, then that entitled you to add it to your MP3.com playlist. The record industry quickly extracted the soul from MP3 for its beam it up technology. I doubt the author's guild has sufficient power to extract Amazons.com's soul. First, the pirating of music on Napster made it easy for the RIAA to paint the punk kids using MP3.com as anarchists. Books are often purchased by staid and true baby boomers. There are even some Republicans who read books. Amazon.com is probably smart enough not to put their technology forward as something that will move the earth. MP3.com seemed convinced they were transforming the enire culture.
They suppress access so they can charge people to use it if they don't own the book. You have to have the patent first before you can make the money... otherwise it's just another free internet-copyable service.
Actually, they own the book outright, it's the information contained within the book they have no copyright to.
I'd wager if a library washed all the ink from the pages of all their books so that the information was completely obliterated, leaving only the paper on which the information used to be printed that not a single, solitary publisher would balk at their giving away their entire collection.
I think I like it better that Egypt is attempting to do it again the old-fasioned way:
http://www.sis.gov.eg/alex-lib/html/front.htm
Wow! that must have been inefficient. You sail into port with the latest issue of 'Saucy Sailors' magazine, the library wants to copy it so they have to send another bozo off to find the intellectual copyright holders and open negotiations for the right to copy the work.... There must have been boatloads of lawyers sailing back and forth all the time. I am suprised they had any room or time for cargo.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
not so much a model for others as it is a revenue stream for amazon...
amazon [bezos] hold the patents. others will only be able to do this if amazon licenses the patents. amazon has a history of not playing nice with e-commerce patents [eg one-click].
sum.zero
EXCELLENT point that only a lousy anarchist would pay for the book.
Honestly, I'll chuckle about that one all day. Thanks!
At least not all publishers are adverse to the idea of open access to electronic versions of their publications. Check out the Baen Free Library at http://www.baen.com/library/ Baen is a publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature.
"That sounds like a good idea to me ;)"
Sounds like a good idea to you?
Well, you're not a writer. Hard enough to make a living already, without giving it away for free.
Fair use as you describe it applies, I think (not a lawyer, but I used to handle photocopy reserves at a University library). I expect down-them-all type extensions complicate the matter, though, and no company wants to be exposed to the joy of 'assisting in infringement' - Amazon as the next Napster?
This is why I do chemistry now, instead.
In a lot of respects, sure, the American legal system is needlessly baroque, but that wasn't the case here. The problem here wasn't that on-point precedent was buried in one volume of a legal reporter among thousands. Everything you need to write patents is in the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. That's the very same book patent lawyers / agents keep on their desk. It's available online for free at the Goverment Printing Office web site.
There's this American pathology where the people with no legal knowledge think they're capable of practicing law as well as any lawyer. I'm totally mystified where it comes from. Maybe it's from watching too much TV, or maybe it's from a belief that they're really smarter than all those lawyers out there. I'd like to see those people take the LSAT (which is all logical reasoning, no law) and apply to Harvard Law or Columbia and see whether they get in.
As far as writing patents pro se, it can be done. There are good self-help books out there. The problem is that a patent by itself doesn't make money: you either have to sue somebody or license it, both of which require money and/or an on-going presence in the industry. If you've got the money to do that there's no reason not to hire a lawyer to do a good job on the patent application in the first place. After all, the cost of getting a patent is almost non-existent compared to the sums of money at stake, not to mention that the lawyer's hourly costs are about on par with what the PTO itself charges when you count application fees, maintenance fees, etc. It's really a false economy to try to write one's own patent applications.
There's this mystique about patents, but really they're no different than any other industrial tool. They're not magic. Trying to make money off a single patent is usually like trying to make money off of a truck full of rubber hoses.
If I had $350, I sure wouldn't have deliberately wasted it on a patent application that I knew was invalid, but I guess different strokes for different folks.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Burn it down!!!
funny how in one sense we deride Amazon for being restrictive yet in another we applaud Firefox when it comes with Amazons search plugin by default, perhaps we could include Microsoft while we are there
so if i ran a bookshop can i get my search plugin installed on millions of desktops by default too ?
and if i delete the search plugins from the depths of the Mozilla program directory , on upgrading from 1.0.1 to 1.02 they come back again !, sounds like the sort of thing spyware manufacturers do
keep your commercial s[h]ite off my fsking PC
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article83 47.htm
"But only if..."?
This is what modern libraries already do now! Their card catalog system knows exactly what books they own, how many copies there are, and where each of them is at the moment (either out on loan, on the reshelving cart, in transit between libraries, or on the shelf). If anything, it should be easier to do with e-books.
The only hole is that someone has taken a book off the shelf since someone started looking at the e-book copy. Throw an RFID tag in there and you're done!
I never can fully understand these patent writeups
:-)
Hey, don't feel bad! You're not alone. The patent examiners don't understand the patent writeups, either.
--
AC
"Shark" jokes and such aside...
I think the reason why the grandparent poster would be upset by refusal of a patent because he didn't use a lawyer is that, if he had done it right in all other ways, requiring a lawyer is an arbitrary barrier to entry. If the response he got had said "This is wrong, that is wrong, this other thing is wrong. We recommend you seek a patent lawyer", then that would be one thing; but saying "This is wrong, that is wrong, and you need to use a lawyer" puts using a lawyer as a neccesary prerequisite even with all the other requisites of proper application. What if [this] and [that] were fine? Would he have gotten a response "Author did not use a patent lawyer. Application rejected."?
To use your doctor analogy, it would be like if you accidentally cut yourself and, unless you went to the hospital and had it professionally treated (when a simple bandage would do), your insurance would refuse further treatment of that limb because it was not treated by an authorized medical professional, even if you treated it perfectly well yourself. Or say, if you got a fix-it ticket for your car for something simple that you know how to fix yourself, but you were *required* to have the dealer fix it.
Such arbitrary barriers to entry are fascist constructs in the literal sense of the word (fascism has corporatism as a major componant). It's the government enforcing the use of certain industries' services even when the individuals could perform those services themselves; a cartel between the public and private behemoths, in essence.
As a personal aside, to touch on some of your comments about lawyers being needed due to the complexity of law: I consider that a sign of a fundamentally flawed system. Any government whose laws necessitate the use of lawyers is too complex and opaque. An average citizen of a country should reasonably be able to understand the laws he is expected to obey in full; otherwise, he cannot justifiably be held accountable for the infraction or violation of those laws.
If ignorance of the law is no excuse, as our government claims it to be, then the law should be so simple and obvious that we can teach it in its entirity to our children in school, so by the time they are adults and held responsible, they know in full what they are responsible for.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
As far as I can tell, they are only limiting the rights to books that have copyright issues. They are making these books more accessible than before, but without violating the wishes of the copyright holders.
I wouldn't blame Amazon for this because they are merely respecting what the authors intended and upholding the law.
If you want to fight Stallman's bleak vision of the future, the important thing to do is to ensure that there are no limitations on what code you can read, write, examine, and execute. Make sure that when information is published, it is always published with the same rights or more rights than the author allows, but never in the opposite direction.
If Amazon took books that don't have copyrights, or have copyrights that expired, and applied this kind of scheme, I would be upset. But they are not. They are in fact trying to give the readers more rights, because the readers didn't previously have the options Amazon is providing.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I'm not too worried about finding stuff for free on the internet.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article, nor so far here on /., is that OCR does not produce a digital copy of the text -- at least, not without a great deal of editing. When Google and various libraries announced their Google Print deal, they specified that the searching would be on "uncorrected OCR" of the text. I also suspect that Amazon is using uncorrected OCR, just for cost reasons. OCR also means that things like images, their captions, and any data in tables are not searchable. So although the images aren't as useful as text, the text that they produce is not equivalent to the original publication either. In this sense, Bezos is correct when he says he is not creating ebooks, but just a search mechanism.
.sig was here a minute ago
I just read
Wouldn't it be great to sweep away all the legal and technical problems created by copyright? It's not a simple problem.
We could eliminate the whole concept of music copyrights with minimal impact on musicians. By "musicians" I don't mean Madonna, I mean the 99.9999% of musicians who make no money from sales of copies. For reasons involving the way record contracts are written, which you can read about here and elsewhere, most musicians make zero money from sales of copies. They make money by actually performing, same as they did for thousands of years before recordings were invented. Records just give them exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs, and they get that exposure whether you buy, rip or find a CD on the sidewalk. Eliminate music copyrights and record companies would have no reason to exist, but other than a handful of big hit artists who have managed their business affairs brilliantly, the vast majority of musicians would be just fine.
Authors present a different problem. They make a living directly from sales of copies. But in the filesharing world there's no difference between text and tunes. So to enforce copyrights in the book world we would still need DRM. So what we really need is some brilliant genius to come up with a way to pay authors for their work. Maybe with tax money, I don't know, but some system that lacks the overhead of withholding the material from people who haven't individually paid, and all the side-effects that slop over into restricting the way people use technology.
We really can't afford a future in which every image and printed word is owned and locked down. It won't work. Is there anybody in the world smart enough and forceful enough to put forward a practical and politically do-able fix?
I'm wondering if this is somehow aimed at eventually preventing Google from a) searching Amazon.com's site and b) throwing a spanner into Google's efforts to scan the contents of several libraries into its archives.
Their prices aren't too bad. It's their lousy customer service and slow shipping that will eventually kill them.
For example - I ordered four books recently. All four were in stock and could be shipped in 24 hours. (Plainly stated on the website - Usually ships within 24 hours from Amazon.com) Yeah, sure. It took Amazon nine (9) days to get them out the door! Then the USPS took a couple of days to get the order to me.
No excuses. That's just a shitty way to do business.
And don't get me started on how much they charged for shipping vs the actual costs of shipping.
I thought I would update you on this issue following recent developments.
This issue is far from settled as there is a considerable difference of views between the European Parliament's first reading position and the political agreement reached in the Council (which has only just been formally adopted, but with growing reticence in some national governments).
The text can only become law if it is approved in identical terms by both the Council (national ministers from each country) and the European Parliament, with up to three readings in each institution.
My position is as follows:
- I am not in favour of patenting of software as in the US.
-
Europe needs a uniform legal approach to stop the drift towards extending patentability to areas, which would not have been traditionally allowed, and to stop patentability of pure business methods, algorithms or mathematical methods.
-
Software products as such, must not be patented.
-
Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive must not have adverse effects on opensource software and small software developers.
-
Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti- competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies.
Thank you for contacting me on this important matter.Richard Corbett MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure it can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure everyone can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and does not patent it, someone else could come along later and patent it, then prevent the first company and everyone else from using it.
It's true that the inventing company could just publish the idea somewhere and thereby prevent others from patenting it later-- but the level of description that must be published is effectively equivalent to a patent application. Filing a patent application also guarantees the Patent Office knows about the invention. So why not just file the patent?
Wait to see if Amazon tries to use this patent against anyone before you try to deduce their motives for getting it.
. png
Well, if you want to come down to the storage facility I run and scan a hundred thousand old books and stick RFID tags in them from free, be my guest.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I'm surpised the Bezos hasn't applied for patents covering the use of words like "moron", "retarded", and "kneebiter" so that folks have to pay him when making such obvious statements as:
"Jeff Bezos is a completely moron and a retarded kneebiter to boot."
Does anyone remeber when this bozo tried to patent the conecpt selling things online? Hopefully his most recent patent application will evaporate just as quickly in the face of all the obvious prior art.