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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
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
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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?
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.
That thing looks better all the time.
Amazon, free tip: words matter. Especially in books.
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!!
Sounds much more like Amazon infringing on copyright by selling an item subtly changed from a prior copyrighted work.
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.
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.
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.
... the word "aluminum". Some use the US spelling, the other use the correct spelling.
FTFY
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!
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?
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.
Incorrect, with current methods you can identify both.
Depending on the number, and distribution of intentional errors, you can tweak such a system to indentify any number of mixed sources. For example if you insert 30 errors into each copy at unique points, and 3 copies are blended randomly, if will contain an average of 10 errors from each source, possibly enough to identify all 3 sources. With overlaping points, even if a best 2 out of 3 method is used to generate the copy, you can still find out which sources. Consider each point at which an error is inserted or not as a bit, and think of RAID, ECC, Parity, etc.
I believe that a particular large software company already uses this type of method on their source code distributions, to indentify leaks. I recall a presentation from someone working at that company on the local university learning channel where they described fingerprinting source code in this manner.
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...