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?"

Comments

canary trap

[dwbassett42]

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?

Re:Canary trap

[jeisner]

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.

But the classic Canary Trap requires someone to modify the document manually, which is hard to do on a large scale. Here it is being done automatically by an algorithm.

However, I am aware of published methods for this problem dating back to 2001 by Mikhail Atallah at Purdue. In fact Atallah received a patent for followup work in 2007, a year after the Amazon patent was filed.

Here are a few hundred papers on the subject, via Google Scholar. Some adjust whitespace, some modify images of the text, and some attempt fairly sophisticated syntactic analysis and restructuring of selected sentences.

I apologize that I haven't read the Amazon patent, or read the prior literature carefully, or gone to law school, so I can't comment on whether the patent seems valid or not.

Re:Quick! Someone say it's only defensive!

[osu-neko]

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!

Canary trap

[dido]

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.

Moral rights

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Moral rights

[mrbester]

Even if that was agreed the rights are still non-assignable, so the author can cheerfully take the money and then sue anyway. It can't be considered breaking a contract as the contract was unenforceable in the first place.

Re:Prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

... the word "aluminum". Some use the US spelling, the other use the correct spelling.

FTFY

Re:Patentable?

[Your.Master]

I don't blame people for not reading the claims section, because it's necessarily an obtuse fusion of legalese and jargon.

But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this. Patents cover implementations, and not ideas. Some have argued that the line has been blurred with certain classes of patents, but it hasn't blurred so far that the concept in the slashdot summary is actually locked up as IP.

Frankly, I can't be bothered to look at the claims either. But the idea itself certainly lends itself to ideas that are patentable (whether they should be patentable or will be rendered retroactively invalid is another question). For instance, I'm curious how they identify which words should be replaced, and the system by which they choose a synonym that hopefully doesn't destroy rhyming patterns, metrical rhythm, puns, shades of meaning, and ambiguity in words with multiple meanings that don't completely intersect the candidate synonym's meaning.

Also, whatever they are they doing to prevent the trivial case of three copies being compared to recover the original. Maybe they have a bunch of sets of synonyms that are commonly replaced so you need more to get the original, but even then, do they arrange it in some way so that the source of the leaks can be traced down despite the alteration? Or maybe they just assume that book pirates are morons.

They might do nothing for any of those cases, mind you. Once again, I can't be bothered to read these damned things. Which is part of why I don't submit articles about ones that I've decided I think are actually stupid.

Re:Patentable?

[pvera]

Yes. And that is a variation of the classic canary trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap): copies of classified documents that are not 100% identical. When the leaks surface, you can trace the original recipient of the compromised copy. I like the thing with the maps because it is the kind of thing that makes the violator look like a complete idiot, and it's impossible to defend in court.