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

Patentable?

[OnlyPostsWhilstDrunk]

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.

Advertising

[Kell Bengal]

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.

Sounds familiar

[cjfs]

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?

Huh, so the nook won't be able to corrupt books?

[straponego]

That thing looks better all the time.

Amazon, free tip: words matter. Especially in books.

Sounds Dodgy at Best

[sed quid in infernos]

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.

Don't shop amazon if you like artistic integrity!

[plasmacutter]

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.

It's not about the patent, it's about the lying

[localroger]

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.

Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying

[Techmeology]

Pirates can work together. Suppose you have ten pirates. They each download a copy of the book. They then compare their copies with each other - crosschecking them (after, of course, stripping the DRM). Nine of the ten books use "to be or not to be", and one uses "to exist or not to exist", and similarly for other words. They may then produce a more accurate copy of the book. So now, instead of pirate versions being technically superior (due to the lack of DRM), they're also more accurate! Well done, Amazon, you've patented a wonderful scheme to ensure people don't trust genuine products! Normally I am very anti-intellectual property. On this occasion, however, I do hope Amazon is granted it and enforces it. Perhaps it would some day prevent someone else doing the same.

Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying

[dintlu]

Clever, but that's not what pirates are going to do.

Pirates are going to purchase books anonymously, by using prepaid credit cards, stolen credit cards, or hacked amazon accounts. It's the easiest way and it guarantees the pirate isn't associated personally with the distributed work.

Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying

[cpt kangarooski]

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, all else being equal, more creative works are better than fewer. But the public benefits not only from having as many creative works made and published, but from having those works be in the public domain as soon as possible (if not immediately), and if we have copyrights at all then the copyrights should be as minimal as possible in terms of scope and duration.

For example, there's nothing special about the current amount of copyright. It's not the most we could have, or the least, it's just a point on the spectrum. I'm an artist, and I for one am not incentivized by the current amount of copyright to create my Moon art (where I perform massive amounts of construction on the Moon to make it more aesthetically appealing). I demand far more strong copyrights -- in fact, my incentive to create it ought to be that I get to be King of the World for the rest of my natural life.

Apparently, I don't get the massive expansion of copyright I want, since while encouraging me to create and publish my art is favored by public policy, I want too great a reward for it, and the public is ultimately better off without my art, than having it and the cost that it takes to get it.

The same principle is true now. There were plenty of books and records and tv shows and movies prior to 1978, which means that the old copyright law, which provided less protection than the current one, must've been sufficient. We have not had a huge increase in the number of works created and published since then which is attributable to copyright law (as opposed to improvements in technology, the state of the economy, etc.).

So it seems that for the last several decades, we have been paying too much in copyright in exchange for creative works. We should pay less. If some artists are unwilling to create, but not too many are unwilling, then fine. We'll be sorry to lose them, but we are better off without acceding to their demands.

Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying

[instance]

Quick, file a patent on "System and method for correcting multiple variants in content" before someone else does.

The Authorized Amazon Version of The Bible

[Tynin]

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.

Re:Prior Art

[MichaelSmith]

Makes me wonder if the good grades were solely due to his work, and not the apparently close relationship with the lecturers.

If I was an author . . .

[Tanman]

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.

Re:Prior art

[saiha]

With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.

Not a Wise Practice

[Frightened_Turtle]

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.

How did this get through

[mbone]

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 ?

The logical progression

[Impeesa]

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?

Re:The logical progression

[Anonymous Coward]

You underestimate how evil a watermarking algorithm can be. Rather raising the number of words changed, amazon can simply make sure one set of an official copy's edits are unique, but another set overlaps exactly with group A of other accounts, another set overlaps with group B, another overlaps with group C... such that a naive copier will still be caught, and collaborators will never be able to be completely certain they removed every watermark.

Then amazon builds sets of potential pirates for each book they find in the wild that was only partly dewatermarked. (In other words, the set of accounts who shared only those remaining word edits in common). This alone will catch a few, but it's not the true strength of the approach. The true strengths are that 1) pirates have to spend more money on copies, discouraging copying 2) the MORE pirates collaborate on a book, the SMALLER the set of potential pirates is if any watermarks were missed.

Then amazon compares the potential pirate sets to each other, looking for associations between groups of users. Pirates would be huge outliers in the results. The number of potential-pirate lists your account is in is important, as is the ratio of total books you purchased vs total potential-pirate lists you're in. If three people each had 100 purchases in common AND were in the same potential-pirate lists for all of them, then they've been busted.

The greatest benefit of this approach is that while amazon can't catch *everyone*, they'd catch prolific ones, and since the punishment goes up with the number of violations, they end up with some high profile cases that do a better job of discouraging potential pirates.

The downside, of course, is that we normal people get mauled books whether we buy them digitally or download dewatermarked copies.

Re:Exactly

[totally bogus dude]

But now it's on a computer and on the internet (!!!). They should be able to get at least two patents on it, maybe three.