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Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words
theodp writes "To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
This bugs me about patents. This sounds like an exact copy of what they've done with maps for years. They add/remove/rename tiny roads in the middle of nowhere and if you distribute maps with those roads then they know you copied their stuff.
Everything is a damn patent these days. Yo dawg, I put a clock in your clock so I can sue you while you check the time.
Sig: I don't spell check and this is legit. This was written while I was drunk, and quite possibly with m eyes closed, b
a diff on a couple of copies of the book fixes this?
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yup - that's the killer application.
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
If this doesn't happen, I will eat my hat/del/ ACME Brand Prestige Fedora TM.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
This is just the Canary Trap, which is nothing new. It's in fact been around long before Tom Clancy gave it that name. Why do they get to patent it if it's demonstrably older than that?
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
Quick! No one's said anything stupid yet! Let's construct a straw man so I have something to ridicule!
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.'
Sabotaging your product out of fear someone might violate your copyrights. Where have we seen that before?
If it wasn't obvious infringement prior to the changes, what's the big deal?
why is it, that these companies do the exact opposite of the reasonable thing? and its getting worse every time. someone (we) should really do something about these things called 'patents'.
Little do they realize, I've already patented all known methods of filing lawsuits! Ha!
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I have no doubt the patent system is broken when "synonym" is an important part of a patent.
My webcomic
One of my programming lecturers would do this. He told us at the start of the semester... "I have changed some small parts of the assignment from last year. If you copy last years solution ... I CATCH YOU!"
If Amazon (of the licensee of the patent) is not providing the content purchased, then they're either committing theft-by-substitution (not the same as bait-and-switch, in which the customer is actually sold an alternate product) or outright fraud by not delivering what was sold. A text product is not simply a collection of words, it's a specific selection of words in a particular order ... and spelling counts, even in the case of Lord of the Rings where Tolkien creates whole languages.
Can fraud actually be patented?
I love watermarks that can be defeated with a spellchecker and a thesaurus!
My girlfriend writes government proposals for armored vehicles. A lot of the stuff they deal with is top secret, and the stuff that isn't is still subject to corporate spying. The way they find leaks is by doing exactly this.
Additionally if people know Amazon is doing this, you just have to misspell some other words, change a few more or run a spell check. If people know, it doesn't work.
Can Amazon change copywrited material at its whim without violating the AUTHORS copywrite?
That thing looks better all the time.
Amazon, free tip: words matter. Especially in books.
First, I read about this in a Tom Clancy novel in the 80s. Sounds like prior art to me. Second, if I buy a book, I expect the words in that book to be the ones the author (with the help of his editors) put there. If I buy "Tale of Two Cities" and they deliver something that starts with "It was the best of eras, it was the worst of eras," then I'm not getting what I paid for. Sounds like false advertising.
swinging a dead cat over my head. Said patent will cover swinging the cat both clockwise and counter-clockwise as well as different species of cats. For big cats like lions and tigers the patent will cover swinging dead cats with mechanical devices. As a variant to said dead cat spinning process the patent will cover live cats as well as required protective armor for spinning live big cats.
A synonym is not reflective of the intent of the author.
As Al Franken points out, 'friendly' is a synonym for 'intimate', so coulter obviously stated she was having a trist with franken when asked by a reporter!
Authors choose their diction carefully, at least good ones do, and that should not be tampered with.
Lesson learned: do not shop at amazon if you respect artistic integrity.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The Bar Ilan Responsa Project has been doing this for quite a while now. Not by changing words to synonyms, but by adding or subtracting letters to the some of the Hebrew words in ways that they don't change pronunciation or meaning.
This technique has been used to find spies for decades, if not centuries.
Ironically, something akin is even explained in literature... an old SF story, about a doctored "galactic encyclopedia" or some such (Saberhagen or Asimov?). The story line there was that it was common practice for cartographers and encyclopedia/dictionary publishers purposely add minor bits of fiction to the reference work, with the idea that it won't do any harm, and if it gets copied, we'll know.
This reference work embellishing is not the same as rendering each copy as individually identifiable, but it still reeks of prior art.
BTW, I thought there was a term for this intentional "salting" of material to make it identifiable, but it escapes me right now. If you know the word, please educate us.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I just don't understand how they hope to apply this in any kind of sensible way. The whole idea kind of reminds me of a wiki - turned inside out.
I'm wondering...would they be foolhardy enough to use this technique on distributed fiction? You know, like non-fiction I can maybe understand because of its emphasis on information over form, but some fiction, literature in particular, is based on poetic structure. For example, if the piece has some alliteration like "Wendy's Weird Wedding Waltz" (no, this is not a good example, just the best I can come up with right now), and this program got hold of it, "Wendy's Strange Wedding Waltz" lost some of that alliteration and possibly some literary depth. I think that if that was the case, people would be up in arms, simply because they're distributing what is essentially a plagiarized work, because it's not the author's original, but is absurdly similar.
Of course, I may not quite understand what the program will/could be used for.
It's an heretical thing when mapmakers do it, lying (even trivially) and corrupting their craft because of the threat of being copied. It should not be tolerated there nor should the practice claimed by this patent application be tolerated, not because the patent is bad but because the practice itself is an affront to all of us.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Canada and some other countries have "moral rights" which belong to the author.
Changing words without his permission could violate these rights.
In some countries these rights are inalienable and non-assignable. This means the author can't be ordered to waive them by the publisher or other copyright-holder.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Dictionary and encyclopedia publishers often put a fake word or article in to catch copiers. See Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, the fountain designer/photographer who appears in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia despite never existing. Still, not good. I feel safer with paper.
I saw another post that already has the wikipedia on exactly this, and, as a bonus, includes:
A Fred Saberhagen Berserker science fiction short story, "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron," has a Berserker directed to a star system by an encyclopedia salesman. The salesman is put on trial for treason, but reveals that the encyclopedia article for the star system, with population figures, resources, etc., was a fictitious entry included in the encyclopedia to detect plagiarism; thus the Berserker actually ended up in an empty star system where it ran out of fuel and ceased to be a threat to humanity.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
And people complained about the King James version being altered. I can just picture it, 20 years from now, a group of tomorrows theologians are busy studying the Authorized Amazon Version of the Bible trying to deduce the 'real' meaning of the text/God.
I was about to say it. If they do that, I'll never buy a book at their e-shop. I don't care about watermarking that does not change the visual quality of a rendering (despite each video technology improvement shows the imperfectness of previous records ), but changing the content is not acceptable. why not change the color of the hair of actors in movie while we are at it ?
I know about this patent. They're trying to patent adding advertising into ebooks that they sell. Want to read Old Man and the Sea? Get ready for Hooters advertisements selling oysters in the page. It's sick.
I refuse to sell my ebooks through Amazon because of bullshit like this. Yes, I'm probably shooting myself in the bank for doing it, but I feel as if I should retain some integrity.
I'd rather the world pirate my ebooks, at least YOU, the reader will respect them better than Amazon will for a buck.
It's a bad practice, but encyclopedias and dictionaries have been doing for years. See Lillian Virginia Mountweasel, the fountain designer/photographer who overcame non-existence to be featured in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia as an anti-piracy measure.
If I was an author who had slaved a year over a book, and anyone but my editor (with my approval on each change) altered my precious words and distributed it as my work, I'd sue the pants off of them. It'd be like if someone was selling prints of my painting and changing a brush stroke. You just don't do that. Words are the author's paint.
Prior Art in every creative writing class since, oh I don't know 500 years ago. Certainly a dozen generations before Shakespeare. Thanks Amazon, for taking a great way to be creative, and fucking kill it, claiming this form of creativity, done by others, all belongs to you, Rat Bastards. Well I'm not paying! If you try to sue, I'll sue your ass!
I can't believe they would actually try to apply this to others' works without their consent. This seems more likely to be used *by* authors. Or at least some of them in certain situations. Could definitely be useful for corporate memos, etc. to find leaks. :-)
Now Tom Sawyer wont have nigger in it. Unless you want it too. And Lolita will be 'just' 18. So you can watch it legally. Lets all change words to be more acceptable to the audience right? I mean 'What fools these Mortals be' is the same as "ppl r dumb' right?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I was doing this with Cliff Notes 35 years ago
be it in stone or the internet. good luck in finding out the liar and the truthsayer.
memento mori
This exact same thing was demonstrated in Kijk magazine over ten years ago (when I still subscribed to it) as a stenography method. It used the Microsoft-and-the-pilot joke as an example.
...that is, introduce deliberate errors into their maps to detect copyright violations. Here's an example of an island that was simply "dropped" in the middle of a lake.
This is yet one more reason not to get a Kindle or buy any eBooks from Amazon.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Two words: One click.
You want to prevent piracy by altering parts to later attempt to prove it was pirated? Ok, do it. Then the pirates will just do the same and systematically substitute synonyms themselves in order to delude this technique. Sure it may not be perfect, but this sounds almost like a challenge by the industry. And you know what happens when you tempt hackers with an apple. As the saying goes, "Security through obscurity has never worked, and it never will." But I bet you can still market it to the drones who think they are paying for adequate technology. And if it reduces piracy out of sheer fear, and just gets people scared, then it is akin to "bad" publicity. Although it may be negative, it could still be considered successful.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Hmm? Does this mean Amazon has re-invented and patented The Dialectizer? -- http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/
Or the lolcat translator? - http://speaklolcat.com/
"SPEEK SOFTLY AN CARRY HOOJ STICK" -- Theodore Catavelt
"Speek sufftly und cerry a beeg steeck" -- Theobork Borkevelt
First, there is already pre-existing examples of this practice. Indeed, Tom Clancy described this very technique in one of his novels and called it, "The Smoking Word Processor."
Second, as an author, I go through quite an effort to ensure that the spelling and grammar are correct throughout any work that I created. To have Amazon completely throw away my efforts and ruin my work would really anger me. This might encourage me to inhibit Amazon from selling any of my work.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
They needn't change any words: They can just add duplicates of of small words and most people will never notice.
Even tables of logarithms have been doing this ages ago. The preface in one table informs us that a few places where the suppressed digit is a 5, the table entry is rounded in the wrong direction. This slightly increases the potential error from 1/2 of the least significant digit to something like 0.55 of the least significant digit.
Acquires two copies of the work in question. Merges the differences- compares those lists and generates a copy that fingers someone else or no one.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We can set the copyright lawyers, representing the authors and publishers, against the patent lawyers representing Amazon. With any luck, they'll sue each other into the poor house and leave the rest of us alone!
Alternatively, we could establish a special court that handles these copyright vs patent cases. When all the lawyers arrive, wall the area up, cut the bridges and toss in a few spiked baseball bats to let 'em fight it out with. Maybe in New York...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
See "Canary Trap" in "Patriot Games"
Mapmakers have been adding fictitious towns for many years (as many have commented).
People who sell lists have been doing this for many years. (Who's Who, for example, adds a few fictitious people for this purpose, and I believe so do the Yellow Pages.)
People trying to catch spies have been doing this for many years. (I first heard about this during the Thatcher years in the UK, and it wasn't new then.)
So, how, exactly is this new and non-obvious ?
Wow.... just, wow.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The new Bezos contest: Who can be more evil
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Great. I'm looking forward to a whole new crop of engineering textbooks with references to "water goats" instead of "hydraulic rams"
Two words: Ted Turner.
This idea has been around forever - and it works.
The plagerist - the infringer - is almost by defintion a lazy son of a bitch. Reviewing text line-by-line. The movie frame-by-frame. That's hard.
Al Franken is a big fat liar who uses lies to lie. Or something like that.
Unless they have specific permission from the owner of the copyright work for any such modification. Any operation such as this would be an unauthorized derivative work and be in violation of the original copyright. The variations would be derivative works, not works in their own rights. Their creation would have to be authorized by the owner of the original copyright material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies...; (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; (3) to distribute copies...of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending....
I seem to remember Tom Clancy using this in one of his Jack Ryan books about a decade ago. Called the 'canary trap'. Used to mark copies of classified documents. When the leaked document was analyzed, the specific source copy could be traced to catch the leak.
If this becomes widespread, here's how it'll go: first, pirate groups will only have to pay for/obtain a couple extra copies, and come up with an automated reconstruction system that will compare the copies and perform error correction. Then the publishers will start obfuscating things more and more, and the pirate groups will develop more and more advanced algorithms. Eventually, the publishers will be publishing near-100% noise, with their heads too far up their asses to realize it, the only people buying copies will be the dedicated pirate groups, who will afford it by charging for their services, and before you know it, "content miners" will just be another step in the chain. The establishment is just last generation's rebels, am I right?
Someone buys 2 books (same), should be different right?
So make diff on them, mix some words from one and the other randomly.
Then you have a new copy.
People always find a way. Just see in YouTube all the people using cams to show you a video so they don't match the video or audio recognition.
They essentially patented rollovers, the kind you get with an HTML "title" attribute used with Div, Span, etc. If not, then just use "title" as a work-around. (Not all browsers support it.)
Table-ized A.I.
I love King James-ers. Usually what I do is first hand them a scan from a 1611 KJV and ask them to read it. They can't. What people call the "King James" version today is actually the early 19th century revision of the King James version. Second, I have them read the preface to the KJV, which says specifically that new translations will be needed. That usually shuts 'em up.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Isn't context more important? I can use similar words in similar sentences and they can come out as completely different things. So, if I am sufficiently clever then I will be able to manipulate the source ins such a way that the context will remain the same, but the words will be so different that it'll pass their tests.
Sure, it was for spotting email leaks, but it's the same thing: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/2243209/IBM-Seeks-Patent-On-Digital-Witch-Hunts
Everyone here is focused on how illegal this patent might be in practice (changing the author's words). But my question is more fundamental... What are they trying to prevent? Is it illegal for me to loan to a friend a copy of a book I purchased?
From the JiveSpeak Translator
Oops ... just killed the patent.
Would the author consider this as some form of plagiarization?
After all, the author has probably only given them permission to distribute his work, not to distribute numerous altered versions.
For that matter, using synonyms can actually change the feel and meaning of a sentence when viewed in context of the whole.
And for documents relying on factual materials, quotes, and many sciences, swapping out words for synonyms will completely destroy the statements.
Just imagine this for your research, "Fermilabs has discovered a new capture that has a reel -3/4".
That just doesn't work, it's completely wrong, and should never be done, but is a real possibility with an inane patent like this one.
If Amazon actually starts doing that, they can kiss goodbye to sales from anyone who desires unmangled books.
It's been known for years...decades...that the way you catch an information leaker is to send out an important memo with the wording in the key sections varied slightly in each copy. Then wait for it to appear in the New York Times (or wherever) and you instantly know whose copy was leaked.
Why is it a new invention just because a computer does it?
First of all, this is, of course, a copyright infringement itself because Amazon does not hold copyright on the books it sells, the authors and/or distributors do.
Two, it's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. One, it will not stop piracy in the least. Contrary to the Canary Trap already pointed out in comments, e-book pirates will very much have access to several versions of the book. A simple diff will fish out the "key" words. Then you can mix them so that at least they don't point to any of your actual sources.
Three, it's another example of reducing the quality of your product in order to max your profits. Also known as "punishing the honest customer". That's a really good idea... not!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Anyone remember the A86 assembler? Its author also claimed to have inserted a way to put a signature into code using variations of mov ax, bx and push ax, pop bx (or similar cases), which he was ready to prove in a court if necessary.
Now you can be tracked via your book! What a great idea if you're Big Brother! If you're a reader this should put a last nail in the coffin of electronic books. Anyone who buys an ebook now is an idiot.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this.
You're incorrectly assuming that a common shorthand for talking about those kinds of patents implies ignorance of the patent system.
To spell it out for you: the "way" they patented this is an obvious engineering solution to the actual problem they are trying to solve. If you gave the problem of "alter the text so that each customer gets a unique copy" to a CS undergraduate, this is the kind of engineering solution they'd come up with.
(Actually, the first engineering solution they'd come up with is to alter the whitespace.)
...to apply your patent to this work.
I haven't bothered to read the patent application, but there's a brief description of this in my books Disappearing Cryptography and Digital Copyright Protection . In addition, Mikhail Atallah's group at Purdue has explored many similar ideas:
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/faculty/mja/
1) Take the original, convert to PDF, OCR back to text. Voila... enough errors to make it untraceable.
2) Hack into the head of Amazon's computer and download HIS copy of a book. Now release via torrent and wait for the witchhunt to start. He is obviously guilty because it is HIS copy that was pirated.
It seems to me that there's a pretty easy way to defeat this. Use the technology against itself.
If you ever want to distribute something, make your own minor spelling variations and substitute your own synonyms into the original, thus further altering the altered work. If someone sues you, just point out the fact that their copy "proving" you're guilty doesn't even match the copy of the work that was distributed.
You could use this idea for just about anything that is digitally watermarked. Don't want that MP3 traced? Introduce your own small, imperceptible variations into the waveform. Don't want your printer tracing you through microdots on your hardcopies? Write a driver that adds its own microdots, and lots of 'em. And so on...
By changing the work, as it's in an intended form (as they make sure the change happens on purpose), so they are really creating a derivative work.
That is not a typo... it's a intended change on purpose.
Did they have the author authorization for doing such and at the same time imply that the author doesn't know how to write???
I hardly believe that...
Never again will I ever bye a book from 'Large-single-breasted-female-warrior.com'.
Okay, so aside from the copyright violation this may very well be, map makers have been doing this for centuries. They make subtle yet innocuous errors in maps to make sure that other map companies don't steal their work for their own. How is this any different or innovative? Oh right, it's not.
Three words: "Phone me Ishmael."
I always look at my Bezos before I flush.
Surely this would lead to a case of fraudulent misrepresentation.
You buy a book "Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'".
But it isn't.
It's a derived work based on his book and this program's output.
This would be fraud, would it not?
And additionally, Stephen King's work is no longer his work, so any copyright infringement is infringement of whoever ran this process on his work (one would assume that the distributor has modification rights to the work...), so either
a) SK is being stiffed because it's not his work any more
b) The distributor is committing widespread commercial copyright infringement (the REAL definition of Piracy wrt copyright)
They do say "the 4th of July".
Sillier, they say the first of may too.
This will REALLY suck for the technical books, though! What if it ends up changing the content of an example computer program or something similar, where close just isn't good enough? And how are scholars supposed to cite something if every version is different?
One little word can completely change a quote. All I can say is that this idea is positively [moronic|imbecilic|ridiculous|horrible|stupid].*
*Depending on which version of Slashdot you're paying for.
To me, it just seems that one should simply NOT BUY Amazon's e-books... I have always aquired/bought at discount book stores my faves.. sometimes two... if I need em on a device, I scan them, seed them, and you might get them.. Enjoy
fix all the instances of 'should of' and 'could of' in the Great Gatsby
Actually, I've seen the idea of doing something like this with movies before here on Slashdot, and thought it was a clever way to try to pinpoint the location of leaks. Say the main character in a movie drinks a soda at some point. Have the can that he actually lifts up to his mouth be blue, and then edit it to be a Coke or Pepsi in two different versions of the final reel. Repeat this with, say, 16 different unimportant changes and you've managed to encode your movie with a 16-bit pattern that unambiguously identifies each one of the original reels. Now when your movie leaks before release date, you go and download the copy, watch it, and figure out where the leak came from. I think that just so long as nothing significant was changed nobody would mind too much.
Develop a robust, redundant code around substituting two spaces for one after a period/full stop, or adding spaces at the end of a paragraph. Or occasionally substitute em- and en-spaces. It accomplishes the goal, and it doesn't vandalize the source.
I certainly hope there's more than enough backlash to kill the idea of changing words. Otherwise, after ten or twenty more years of natural-language understanding research, we're going to see them trying to do the same thing with plots, or character development.
I wonder if they ever stopped to consider that writers choose what words they use to convey a concept rather carefully, and that they might not have an overwhelming appreciation for a scheme such as this. Is it really so important to catch someone redistributing that you have to stomp all over the integrity of the work itself? If it diminishes the value of the work then doesn't that work become worth less? These are questions that they ought to be asking themselves before venturing into such an obsene effort. I certainly have no interest in reading a book with this scheme applied to it.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Also what if a word they pick is also the name of an item? This would break the work they modified.
An example works for both: "Grill" do they mean to cook or to interrogate? And what if it is a grill as in the item to cook with?
And as for changing the spelling of words, well what if it becomes another word? Or maybe it gets changed into a name used in the book - this would cause confusion. And what about people learning the wrong spelling for words?
Of course there is also the issue of possibly violating the authors copyright by changing the work in question.
If I pay my own hard earned money I get a fucked up copy of the book I bought?
If the pirates cross reference out those errors then that means the pirates are handed a monopoly on the original work as the artist intended. Hand you opponent a monopoly on your own product. Genius plan.
Surely this counts as a deriviative work, and as suck breaks copyright? Okay, not on Shakespeare, but on Dan Brown for sure.
The Works of William Shakespeare with additional dialog by Amazon
This is something that should really tick off writers. An author puts a lot of work into choosing the right words for what he wants to say and wrestles with his editors over word choices until the work is finally in print (or published, by whatever means). Now Amazon is going to take a damned computer and change the words willy-nilly? Please!
Of course, this may someday lead to an ironic situation in which someone purchases a digital copy of a book or something, and one of the most oft-quoted sentences in the work has been changed, so that the reader is cheated of finally reading the sentence in context. I can see it now, the famed "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" from MacBeth, changed to "Out, wretched stain! out, I say!" Or, perhaps worse, the quote with the changed word(s) becomes more widely known.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Not to be a heretic, but, wouldn't you rather a company like Amazon hold the patent than some random patent troll? In the current climate, I could see them patenting some kind of similar (bullshit), charging a nominal fee to license the patent, and everyone's happy. (As compared to some patent troll getting their hands on the patent and suing God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost for infringing on their "triune divinity" patent.) As mentioned by a previous poster, btw, this method has been in use for years. Like, hundreds. Canary Trap. Wiki.
Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.'
They're claiming to have invented the Canary Trap? The prior art on that is 30+ years old...
The canary trap is easily defeated by rewriting leaks in "your own" words.
Just summarize the classified document in a writing style randomly similar and dissimilar to your own writing style.
...I can sue Amazon for damages when my "Hamlet" paper is docked points for inaccurate direct quotations.
if you REALLY wanted to copy and distro it, just buy it with three accounts. Do a simple compare and find the few words changed, and rebuild the original and distribute that instead.
This approach doesn't work for maps for several reasons, but would be ideal for books.
I've already seen this in action where watermarks are placed on digital software downloads. Just a matter of obtaining it from two different sources and comparing the two to find out where the watermark is. Then either remove it or change it to something else. One of these days they'll get smart and start signing it after they watermark it, but that's processor expensive so guessing they don't feel quite that motivated yet.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You can always tell whether someone is trying to preach to the choir, or whether they really want to convince others of their viewpoint. It's too bad so few understand that publically making arguments that serve the former, actually hurts their cause with respect to the latter.
"After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
Really? "Won't somebody think of the children?" Kids can't be taught to spell if there are mis-spellings in some material they might see? Get off it. Strained argumetns like these only make you and your entire cause look desperate.
The problem with this technology is, if I buy a book and you change a few words to synonyms, then you haven't sold me what I bought. You've sold me a defective product, and I should be within my rights to sue you for it. (And yes, I think the same applies to mapmakers. If I buy a depiction of an areas geography, I expect every mark in that depiction to reflect a fact about that area. If some marks appear to but don't... you may think it's a "minor" change but it might make a difference to me. Map is defective should mean lawsuit.)
On the other hand, technology like this would be useful for enhancing full-text search capabilities. It's never about the technology, it's how you use it.
I'm 95% certain that a music publishing company has been doing this for decades. I don't remember which company off hand, but on every page there is one wrong note. It's a very respectable company as I recall.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
isn't this where it all starts? with one word here, one there. after a few "generations" of changed books, the originals may lose context and meaning. I'm maintaining a healthy skepticism of this being amazon's plan, to eventually censor books it doesn't agree with and profit from it. Hiding behind anti piracy and protect the children can only last so long... I'm not saying this IS their plan, just that it could easily be possible given their recent actions (suing people for having public domain books (animal farm and 1984 actually) on kindle devices)
HoneyTraps, have long prior art, Jack Ryan re-invented it in one of Clancys books, but it is attributed to David Niven, then of SIS, not Hollywood c. 1942; but if some idiot at Amazon sells me the wrong book, or one with deliberate misspellings I will enjoy sueing his ass off for 'passing off, or goods not of merchantable quality'.
Why does not a day go by without some corporate jackass trying some stupidity like this, is this all MBA courses in the US teach?
Everyone knows M$ has been caught more than once copying functionality of other OSs and suspected many more times. You think they might actually create something now?
Oh, this is hilarious.
Kindle books are riddled with typos, presumably caused when print editions are scanned to make e-books. (Why don't they get electronic gallies from the publisher? Who knows?)
So either they have been causing them on purpose to track redistribution, or this is a fine example of making patented lemonade from the technological lemons produced by their scanners
I love my kindle, but I hate Amazon more and more each day.
Your idea won't work if the falsified section of the work always are falsified with 50:50 chance. ;-)
On the other, you would be able to put together fake marks easily.
However, a countermeasure to fake marks is to only use a subset of the marks, for example those that match a number produced by an algorithm or have a certain checksum or hash with certain properties.
(I hereby dyspatent that idea by publishing it
The patent by Amazon at the core is not a new idea, it is just mixing A and B and patenting that feels somewhat silly. There's a guy a round somewhere who works with a matrix method to find such new inventions. I would love to see his website, but I forgot his name ..
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
This method is a solution to the problem known in cryptographic circles as "Traitor Tracing." The patent sounds awfully similar to the traitor tracing method used in Blu-ray discs and the old HD-DVD discs. It's a capability of the system licensed by the AACS Licensing Authority for encrypt those discs. Basically, they can substitute one of multiple short chunks of video at multiple places in the movie. After a decrypted movie is released, they can figure out what system was compromised. Interestingly, the traitor system has never been implemented, even though all licensed players must be able to handle it. That's probably because the AACSLA knows what system was compromised - it's one of the software Blu-Ray players.
The software players are all identical. The hardware players can be tracked down to a specific player. Isn't that nice to know.
Finally, Amazon can put to use their secret warehouse full of monkeys and typewriters!
Honestly, I did think of this sometime around 2004. I may have posted something about it on Usenet. I will take a look. Others could search too. I have no idea what newsgroup I would have written it in, perhaps a Microsoft one. I have always used the name "Grant S. Robertson" for my Usenet posts. That should narrow things down a bit. Also, I thought of it in connection with publishing and distributing e-books, primarily in .PDF form if that helps.
This is one of the reasons I have started my www.ideationizing.com blog. Simply to post my ideas which I don't expect to be able to work on, and thus provide prior art to stymie patents such as these. I urge everyone to blog and post as many ideas as they can think of. This seems to be the only way we are going to prevent the big corporations from patenting everything under the sun.
This isn't new art at all, the CIA and others have done this for many years, and it's widely known, even used often as a plot device in novels about spies.
And, of course, all the other objections apply -- this is just stupid, and I will not buy books *ever* that have been through this process. When I wrote one, it was bad enough that my editor who was trying to preserve my meaning - and understood most of the content (book was about digital signal processing), actually messed it up quite a lot. True became false, signs in equations got wrong, you name it -- and they were honestly trying to get it right.
I can't imagine Amazon trying so hard to get it right. And I learned to spell and many other things as a habitual reader.
This totally sucks.
I'm sure this had to be mentioned more than once in the comments above.... But isn't it actually Tom Clancy who should have the patent before Amazon, as he wrote up the same idea in Patriot Games?
Isn't this just another nail in the coffin of e-books & e-book readers? I've tried the Kindle and I've tried a few other media for reading novel-length works. None of them come close to the feel of reading print on paper. E-book readers are uncomfortable to hold, easy to break, and lack nearly all the conveniences of a book while returning hardly any of their own. About the only advantage I can see is multiple volumes on the same reader, but that's just a cue for the DRM weenies to come out of the woodwork.
Books are just one of those things that really don't need improving on.
A method for thwarting a brain-dead scheme for unique "watermarking" of text, consisting of:
- A means to download multiple copies of the same text, each with unique "watermarks",
- A means to compare the multiple copies against each other to determine which differences exist,
- A means to determine which of the different expressions is most likely to not be part of such a "watermark", including but not limited to checking for misspelled words, checking for inappropriate use of homophones, and "majority vote" of the multiple copies of the text,
- A means to obscure the watermark, including but not limited to replacement of the corrupted text and randomly shuffling the known "watermark" corruptions between copies to alter the "watermark's" signature.
An alternate means consisting of using DMCA takedown notices to stop distribution of corrupt copies of copyrighted works
You have got to be kidding me? I don't understand why no one is as outraged as I am about this. You don't rewrite the past simply because it is "inconvenient" or not "politically correct" or to protect corporate greed. Leave an authors original words alone!
:D
I think this would be copyright violoation on Amazon's part.
They are making unauthorized derivative works. They may (and probably do) have authorization to distribute copies of the original work, but that in no way includes the right to create a derivative work and sell that. Such minimal substitution as they do in no way would constitute a new work, at all.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps this is incorrect, but it seems accurate at first glance to me.
These greedy bastrds would destroy art and literature for just one more buck...
Flash news on Fox...
Recently scholars have found and decoded the lost corners of the Rosetta stone and it contains an image of the great pyramids and a copy of law that reserves all copyrights for 7000 years.
It turns out that the copyright image is the same image that the US uses on paper money and demands payment in gold for each violation or 300 licks of a coptic jar lid.