Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Patents 'Maintaining Scarcity' of Goods
theodp writes "Back in Biblical times, creating abundance was considered innovative. That was then. Last Tuesday, GeekWire reports, the USPTO awarded Amazon.com a broad patent on reselling and lending 'used' digital goods for an invention that Amazon boasts can be used to 'maintain scarcity' of digital objects, including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else."
Artificial scarcity is designed to keep prices up and screw consumers.
Tell me again how this lovely free market reaches optimal solutions and we all pay less? Someone has just patented a way to make us pay more for no other reason that corporate profit seeking.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In the very near future, all startups will be squashed in the courts because of these silly, sweeping patents.
Does this cover the fact that my money is also scarce? Perhaps they should make my money mnore abundant so I am not infringing their patent :)
There is prior art for this, a website called the 9thxchange.com was doing this years ago.
So this one is directly and explicitly opposed to the reason for patents: making things unscarce. And the USPTO passed it why>
Excuse me? Since when does copyright, by definition a goverment monopoly, have anything to do with the free market?
I... I don't even want to know anymore.
I have an Amazon account and a Nexus with Kindle reader. They go together good. I buy the odd book here or there, between a few books of varying prices. A fair exchange for a fair price. This kind of stuff really annoys me though. It is as if they wanted to annoy people to go the root of firing up a browser and typing "latest best seller torrent" and side loading it.
I admit I have sideloaded a lot of stuff, but mainly stuff that is useful, but in PDF (i.e. tech docs).
Ultimately, a few people will put up with it, but when you are part of a group of "digitally intelligent" people, they will just rip and share their stuff, either through online or large removable media.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
when is someone gonna slap the USPTO chief around and make them aware of the market conditions they're creating?
Noble King Amazon did proceed to the beach, stood at the shore in his most regal boots, and commanded that the tide should recede before his digital majesty.
With predictable results.
The phrase “maintain scarcity” has the same feel as "monatize" to me - it indicates a world view where commerce is the be all and end all of existance.
"Maintaining scarcity" is in essence the exact reason our copyright laws on this planet are so messed up - the notion that something that is no longer commercially viable might still be of historical or cultural interest is heresy. In fact, availability of "assets" without requiring payment from users of those assets is an active attack on capitalism and our way of life, according to some people.
I know what kind of world I want to live in, and it isn't one where the goal is to "monatize" art, culture, history and literature to line our pockets. Maybe, just maybe, those things have a value that transends price tags - maybe intellectual stimulation, artistic enjoyment, and knowledge have their own intrinsic worth that doesn't rest soly on whether people have paid to acquire them.
Although I think this is a sleezy smelling move on Amazon's part, it's more properly seen as a reflection of our broader culture. What kind of world do we want to live in?
"Madame, this is the Post-Scarcity world of scarcity!"
science and useful arts.
USPTO, please read the Goddamn Constitution.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
... don't buy them. There are still enough non-digital alternatives to maintain a market. Yeah it takes up a little more space to have a physical object but you can give, sell or lend the thing to others when you're done with it.
Many patents are filed defensively since someone else could use the force of government to prevent Amazon from conducting free market business in the future by getting this patent.
The patent, copyright and entire IP systems is not a construct of the free market and we could be so much further advanced without these government interventions.
For my digital goods, I can find other ... marketplaces. Without DRM, reselling issues, artificial 'used' tags and more neverending crap. Guess what, they are cheaper too.
Psst - Dear merchants and content providers...
You will sell countless millions of your products at under a buck each. At >$10 each, a significant number of people will pirate it. And if you don't even offer it for sale (or play tricks to have a limited number of copies available), you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.
Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.
...Apple's been maintaining a false scarcity of their products for who knows how many years.
I'm surprised they didn't already have this patented.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This has to do more with the fact that physical objects wear out and digital objects don't. Publishers have complained that when a library lends a physical book, it can only do so for a limited number of times before it has to buy another copy because the first wore out. When libraries lend digital objects, they never have to buy another again. So publishers want a limit to the number of times that a digital object can be lent before requiring a repurchase. The same goes for CDs/DVDs.
The U.S. a land of takers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And here are even more reasons to stop shopping at Amazon.
A quote from Matt Yglesias: "Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers."
Terminator was far too optimistic in portraying our future as the War Against the Machines, a nice and clean them-versus-us scenario in which the machines would be non-human. The enemy would be easy to identify.
The reality is likely to be rather more ugly and messy. It'll be a War Against the Corporations, and unfortunately they are us. It will be man against man, those who care about their fellow humans versus those who perceive their only duty is to be a cog in their corporate machine, and society be damned.
It's all a bit bleak, and every day seems to carry us closer to that nightmare instead of towards a post-scarcity civilized future.
Thank you Amazon. Not.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Like most of the Slashdot crowd, it's always black and white with you. Over $10 or under a buck? A rational debate would include a reasonable price for the effort put into say writing a book, maybe it's $5. Maybe $3? I don't advocate Amazon & co making a lot of money, but writing a novel or a reference book isn't free. Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.
you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.
Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers. Yet you guaranteed everyone would pirate their content? And yes, lets remember that in the end, you barely hurt Amazon, while taking money out of authors pockets at the same time... Yes yes, everyone on Slashdot mails their favourite band/authors/developers $20 to make them feel better about themselves...
Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.
Starve in the gutter? Too bad most people aren't malcontents / sociopaths like yourself. This might actually work. Until then, seek help for the anger issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Diamond_monopoly ;>)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC#Economics
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So if Amazon somehow "won" a patent "maintaining scarcity" of goods, doesn't that mean they can go ahead and sue DeBeers and OPEC for what they've been doing for more than 50 years so far?
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Artificial scarcity is what can keep prices up for oil with OPEC and for diamonds for DeBeers, along with the faux-brouhaha about so called "blood diamonds" being made up so as to fool those guillible buyers of compressed carbon into not buying it from non-DeBeers-approved channels. Why if you don't buy it from approved DeBeers vendors, you're buyng "Blood Diamonds" and leading to the killing of human beings; they even got hollywood morons to make a movie about the topic to seriously delude the public.
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And OPEC has been a cartel devoted to controlling the oil output of their nations so as to keep the price of oil buoyed up as necessary. No need to just make prices jump up immedately at any wacky political instability and then drop down never or oh-so-slowly; no need to have made-up pretend refinery fires like they do here in California to justify the rate increases. It's all about keeping the prices as high as the market will bear.
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So it's not as if Amazon has really developed anything new. Why does the patent office keep dropping the ball on the obviousness of things? "Screwing people over with artificial scarcity on the internet or in the fucking cloud" is not really different from "screwing people over with artificial scarcity IRL" as OPEC and DeBeers and other cartels do. There's no reason that doing X on the internet needs patent protection when X has been done IRL for ages, eh?
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autoreply for responses to fucking cloud instead of to the actual topic of this post: Why yes, it is indeed cloud #9 that is the fucking cloud.
If IP holders are getting profit off artificially scarce goods, are they performing additional work to create copies? Scarcity should apply to both sides, not just the consumer. The virtual goods should also be "scarce" to the one profiting off them.
Think about it, if I mow my neighbors lawn, do I get to collect profit off it for 70+ years? What about the nice waitress at the diner down the street, does she get 70+ years of tips for one night of work?
People shouldn't get something for nothing, and this doesn't just apply to consumers. Why should IP holders be able to retire and live off profits of a finite amount of work if no one else that produces a physical good or service is able to?
If you can force your artificial goods to be scarce then we should be able to force them to be scarce to the IP holder as well. Otherwise you just create another welfare class.
For this amazing achievement, Amazon should be awarded the price.
In the off chance the summary isn't actually sensationalizing this (rare, but possible for this one), then seriously- why would you patent that? Encouraging such a business method in the first place is certainly quite questionable, but then actually going for a patent? It's ballsy but certainly not something that's about to enrich the world for the betterment of all peoples. I don't think moving to Canada will even be enough anymore. I think I need to just move to Mars. Maybe hang out with the rovers. At least Curiosity is honest, hard-working, and trying to achieve something constructive.
Can't we just forget patenting crap like this, and work more on investing in improving the world? I mean having three swimming pools made of platinum is probably nice and all, but doesn't it feel better to cure cancer or reduce pollution or teach farmers new sustainable farming strategies for more effective food production?
Sigh.
CDs and DVDs wear out at a library, trust me. People don't seem to care what they do with them. I'm not sure if they are throwing them into a pit of gravel or something, but you see a lot more scratches on physical media that has been rented/borrowed. If its digital, do they loose it if the device that it was on was lost or destroyed? Or do they just make an illegal copy?
I was "" this close to setting up an account to buy used CDs from them; now never. Everything Amazon is is a luxury,
i.e., you don't need it to sustain life. I pride myself on not being a iWeenie (new meme for 2013) - complain about things
then go buy some iApple product built by young girls in a labor camp (confirmed by presidential candidate Mitt Romey).
BTW, isn't one of USPTO's responsibilities to not grant patents on ideas, but rather grant patents on
inventions (yes, there is a difference -- think about it).
More Republican Bush-ism's people have to deal with. Very sad.
CAPTCHA = normally (yeah, like that's going to happen)
DeBeers, and any trading card manufacturer knows this quite well. ( also OPEC as someone else pointed out )
Once again, Webcomic rants are the precursors of life itself: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2834
Does the IP holder have to perform extra work to create another copy of a digital object? When a physical object wears out, the business has to perform more work to create an additional object if they want to sell it to the consumer. Artificial scarcity should apply both ways.
Artificial scarcity is not new and the patent office is beyond broken IMO.
...by getting exclusive rights to create artificial scarcity. Like if iTunes or Google Play tries to implement it Amazon will sue the shit out of them?
Sounds great to me!
They don't really care about bringing on a resource-rich society.
They really want to sell resources to secondary investors who would pretty much use their asteroid mining company as a boost to get out further in to space.
And since they'd be the only handful around, they'd be used by so many companies. They'd be like a town whore at that rate.
In the case of them, they have a completely legit reason to do so. Overall it would allow them to amass a huge amount of resources which could be used for massive engineering projects instead of being used to trickle the human race up at a steady rate, a catapult for society if you will.
Will it happen? Who knows, but I have some hope that it would at least be their goals for the long-term. But it could easily end up being Oil Industry 2.0.
Amazon have no excuse here. Neither does EA, or Apple and others. (I remember EA saying a digital product was out of stock once, my blood boiled even though I knew it likely meant "our servers are crap because we cheaped out on them, PLEASE DON'T HATE US WE LOVE YOUR MONEY", which still annoyed me anyway.
Artificial scarcity of digital products is retarded. They are virtually infinite in comparison to a physical product on physical media. The amount of energy and effort it takes to move around bits is stupidly less than it is to cart off thousands of discs in a truck to a ship / plane and move them around the world, or similar goods.
Even the 3D model of a rubber+plastic chair would be considerably less than an actual chair, since the model would basically be a vector that would be converted to voxel points to be printed out.
Many companies are taking up 3D printing quite happily as well, might I add. But some are trying to kill it off since it is a "threat to their model", is it HELL, YOU take up 3D printing and become a reseller of 3D printed goods for those who cannot take advantage of 3D printers due to the expense.
Industrial scale 3D printing can save considerable money over most fabrication systems (some, absolutely not, a good example is you are not 3D printing a standard car any time soon)
They are pretty expensive initially, and require a bit more maintenance, but a decent printer would save considerable money in the long run, and if built right, might even be considerably faster. (we won't be printing any Blurays with the pits already written to since those resolutions are tiny, and molecular 3D printing is extremely lacking in that regard, we are only just beginning to get a grip of moving things at those scales effectively)
It saddens me that they do this. I actually respected Amazon quite a bit as a company, more so than most companies, for some of the things they have done.
But this puts a bit of a dent in said respect.
Don't stop the future. It will only hurt you in the end. It might take years, but it will catch up to you.
It has to do with enclosure and rent seeking.
1. Take something that is abundant and/or common, and fence it off so people can't get to it.
2. Sell access back to it to the people you closed off from it.
3. Profit
This is the very method by which capitalism was founded - and it continues to this day.
At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions. You'd have about a whole dozen profitable writers under your plan. Or maybe you want them to "go on tour" like you demand out of musicians?
Markdj is talking about digital downloads from the library. Libraries have to buy individual 'copies' of each digital title that are laden with DRM so they can only be checked out to one patron at a time and 'expire' after a certain number of checkouts so the library has to buy a new 'copy'. It is pretty ridiculous.
How to end piracy:
Create great content
Make that content super easy to buy
Release the content worldwide on the same day
Give it a fair price
Make sure it works on any device
People still need time to read a book (or listen to music), which limits the number of people that will read the book even if the ownership can be transferred indefinitely. However, we have effectively perpetual copyright at the moment and it just wouldn't be fair to the starving writers' grand-grand-grandchildren if the market for the book would eventually dry up because there are a sufficient number of copies sold such that every person who wants to read it can get a second hand copy.
of digital objects, including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else.
How bout MMORPG gold / credits / ISK / character skins / avatar bling / WTF?
Don't online games already have this all patented 89 billion ways already? And if not isn't this entire industry sector a pretty obvious prior art?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Once George Carlin commented that to him, "bipartisan" meant "larger than usual deception". A keyword for me is "broad" just before "patent". I have trouble thinking of any invention worthy of that since, say, the transistor.
Publishers have also complained about libraries lending books.
The patent office needs to adopt a simple fact: doing something digitally that has been done physically before (like lending purchased objects just like a used book and music store, or having a digital "shopping cart" like, you know, a shopping cart) is "obvious". Someone will eventually get around to implementing it, so it is not novel and should not be patentable. At best maybe the site should get design patent coverage, or some very specific encryption algorithms should be protected in some way if in fact they are proprietary, but the idea of patenting an entire store concept should be ridiculous.
Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.
If the authors made more as a percent, a lot more people (including myself) would feel willing to pay more for their work. When the lion's share goes to an obsolete publishing and distribution industry that has zero relevance to digital works? No thanks, but can you direct me to the author's online tip jar?
Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers.
Because they offer albums and episodes under the magical $10 price point. Since you obviously didn't read it, TFA involves Amazon trying to enforce artificial scarcity (specifically on the resale market, which the producers would vastly prefer to obliterate entirely by using licensing terms to illegally deprive us of our right of first sale) on a digital market for the purpose of driving prices up.
Starve in the gutter? Too bad most people aren't malcontents / sociopaths like yourself.
Fortunately, they do, however, grasp the concept of hyperbole.
Specific dollar values (and sociopathic tendencies) aside, most people would rather pay what they consider a "fair" price for what they want. But if they can't get what they want for what they consider a fair price, the internet has demonstrated that people feel little hesitation about setting their own terms for obtaining non-physical goods.
At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions.
Ever seen people buy from a used bookstore, where they can get physical books for a buck or two? They walk out of those places with crates full of books.
Yes, at a buck a book, writers will need to sell more. But they will sell more, as people load their Kindles with cheaply purchased books rather than a dump of Project Gutenberg and one or two best sellers.
Of course, the real issue here involves the continuing use of obsolete middle-men. A self (or minimally-managed) published ebook only needs to sell a few tens of thousands of copies at a buck each for the author to make a living. When you have authors taking the same crappy terms that traditionally included not only editing and marketing, but most importantly, access to a printing and distribution network - Do we really wonder why someone can sell 50k copies of a $20 book and still need to take a day job to pay their bills?
You'd have about a whole dozen profitable writers under your plan.
For every Tom Clancy or JK Rowling, you have a thousand "serious" writers who already can't make a living on the $200/year royalty checks they get.
Actually, the commons was a well-established principle and was pretty standard across much of the world. Certainly it figured large in America's Anglo-Saxon history.
Passages from H.G. Wells' _Outline of History_ (which was pretty much the research notes for his science fiction novels)
``This was the moral atmosphere of the time, and those Lords and gentlemen who grabbed the people's commons assumed possession of the mines under their lands and crushed down the Yeoman farmers and peasants to the status of pauper laborers, had no idea that they were living anything but highly meritorious lives.''
``Came the vague humanitarianism and dreamy vanity of the Tsar Alexander, came teh shaken Hapsburgs of Austria, the resentful Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the aristocratic traditions of Britain, still badly frightened by the revolution and its conscience all awry with stolen commons and sweated factory children.''
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This isn't about libraries lending out devices with digital items on them. What's being talked about is the system where a patron goes to the library web site, logs in using their library card number, and downloads the digital files they "check out". It is then marked as checked out in the system - despite the fact that if it weren't, other patrons could download the same file just the same. The downloaded file has DRM that causes it to stop opening after the check out period (there are several ways around this, even without stripping the DRM, but I digress). At the same time (the end of the check out period) the digital item is marked as available in the library's system, and another patron is allowed to download it. Publishers are enforcing not only this limited number of people that can "check out" the digital copies at once, but the number of people that can check it out before the library must purchase a new licence. It's completely artificial scarcity.
For libraries that do lend out devices, the digital files are still separate from the devices (so you'd be checking out the same way as above, just putting it on the library's device instead of your own), so even if the device is lost, the library still has rights to the files and can lend them out again once the loser's checkout period ends. The devices do have scarcity; they get worn out, as do any physical object, and then the library must replace them - but the digital files can (physically) be copied an infinite amount of times without deteriorating.
With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'. ...
I could give you a whole lecture on feudalism and how the ages of exploration and enlightenment laid the political theoretical foundations for the sea change in civic life enabled by the industrial revolution.
You better not, because you're not qualified to do so.
"Originally in medieval England the common was an integral part of the manor, and was thus legally part of the estate in land owned by the lord of the manor, but over which certain classes of manorial tenants and others held certain rights. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons#English_commons
Of course! All new technologies must be handicapped to make sure that the sellers of old technology can continue to make money. All digital photos should come with auto-deletion code to make sure that the makers of photo paper continue to stay in business. And a guy with a sledgehammer should show up every five years at your door to make sure you don't just keep using your artificial knee replacement forever.
The local library has a digital book lending service. It has to buy a certain number of lendings from the publisher, which is (supposedly) equivalent to the average number of times a book can be lent out before it falls apart.
The library tries to negotiate as many lendings as possible, but in the end, they are not unhappy with this situation because the authors still get paid. A situation in which a digital item can be lent an infinite number of times is one in which content creators (not just mediators like publishers) can't make a living.
I've said many times that companies that make it difficult to get their stuff legitimately as a defense against piracy are instead inviting piracy, and I don't feel for them one bit. But if someone makes digital distribution easy and digital lending easy and at the end of the day, I have to pay $1 for each, say, ten times I lend a book or movie out, then I'm all for that (assuming the author/creator/etc. get their cut).
In the late 90s, Circuit City tried to push an "innovative" new kind of DVD player that played regular DVDs and special DIVX (Digital Video Express) discs (more discussion of the format here), that were basically DVDs you bought for $4 that could only be watched for 48 hours after the initial viewing. After that, you would have to pay for the privilege of additional viewings. The player had a modem and would phone home to the service for authorization to allow you to watch the disc you bought.
Yes, it was about the service lending to you, and this is about you passing goods to others, but either way it's still planned obsolescence. We (as consumers) were smart enough to quickly defeat it then. If anything, it made people realize that those magical shiny new DVDs were not expensive to produce (at the time some retailers were regularly selling individual movies for $30-$50). Are we smart enough to defeat this?
Like most of the Slashdot crowd, it's always black and white with you. Over $10 or under a buck? A rational debate would include a reasonable price for the effort put into say writing a book, maybe it's $5. Maybe $3?
I appreciate the attempt to indroucing perspective to the numberred crowd, but you misunderstand the situation. He's demonstrating how close the extremes of the demand curve are. Since digital products have abundant supply, a supply curve is meaningless, only the demand curve matters. At $1, pla expects that anyone with even a passing interest in a book will toss a buck at it to get a pdf. At $10, pla has plenty of anecdotal evidence that people will either consider it overpriced, or go to a used book store to buy a slightly worn paperback for $5.
For decades we were told that book printing is expensive and that hardcover are even more expensive to print, then a non-printing format comes along and we are faced with (all too often) higher prices than hardcover. Now publishers say that the printing is actually inconsequential, it's all the editting that they have to do that drives up the cost. Both cannot be true, and even if the current claim is true, it was preceeded by falsehood and pulishers are now known liars. This tends to kill any sympathy that wasn't already killed when you learn about how publishers treat authors. Some authors have started selling digitally without a middleman involved, it works for some, but is a different scenario than writing for a publisher and some who could get by with the old system have no name recognition to sell directly.
Would they, I mean I can buy 30 books I might read at 1$ a book, but I won't buy one book I might read at 30$ hardcover.
Harccover->Paperback->Ebooks->BargainBin.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Since DVDs and CDs are digital goods and you have been able to lend, rent and purchased used ones for years, how can this now be patented? The only difference is that this covers digital goods that aren't on physical media, but then software, another digital good, has been distributed electronically for decades if you include mainframes. There was even a big case with Revelon, where a developer "removed" software from their mainframe because they failed to pay -- all done digitally. So, can somebody explain how any of what Amazon was just awarded a patent for is not covered by prior art?
Disney's "vault" for movies (particularly VHS) in the 80's/90's. Two years, then off the market for 10.
meh
Congratulations, you've just handed all land over to whoever has the physical power to conquer it.
How is not that way now? Why do nations keep standing armies? Because if you don't have the physical power to keep it, then someone with the physical power to conquer it, will. Civilization depends on someone with the biggest stick enforcing the rules.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How is this not just meaning no redundancy for the "same" digital object. Rather than host 1000 copies of the same file, Amazon minimizes redundancy and every cloud user who hosts the same file has access to the same block(s) of data.
Single merchandiser (Amazon) == market control. Don't sell digital goods on Amazon and don't buy or make DRM. Amazon Google and Apple lose their power to unilaterally make up law and Reality when we stop giving them that power.
No, actually, we handed the government a monopoly on slavery and indentured servitude. The 13th amendment:
Considering the overwhelming nature of the web of law as it stands today... it's pretty easy to find yourself involuntarily making license plates, etc., for a corporation.
Related stat: At this point in time, about 3 million US citizens are jailed (about 1% of the population.) Furthermore, some prisons are moving to private ownership, so they essentially inherit the forced labor value of the prisoners.
The devil's in the details, as per usual.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Huh. I thought the livestock were the ones doing the grazing. Of course, if the cattlemen's heads are down there cropping grass, I probably wouldn't have noticed them, so there you go. Slashdot: Where you can learn something new!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All over Montana, for one, particularly out on the eastern high plains.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the US, in most cases, your land can be taken by the courts for any number of reasons. It can be taken if the government wants to build a road, or, in many states, if a corporation has a plan for your land that will earn more taxes than you are presently coughing up for the same parcel, or parcel plus its neighbors. So while you might think of the government as "backing" your property ownership, there are also many situations where the government is adversarial in that regard.
Well, the tradeoff for this apparent peace of mind, at least here in the USA, has been creating a situation where you can't defend your land from the remaining entities that want it. And, if your neighbor has enough money, that includes them, too, in any state that hasn't enacted specific types of laws controlling eminent domain, since SCOTUS took a pants-poopingly stupid position on the matter (in Kelo v. City of New London.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ok. WTF. I've been seeing that phrase for years now, and I *still* can't quite figure it out.
Where can I get this free beer? Because apparently, for some reason, my area doesn't have a source. I've looked and looked, and beer, even really lousy beer, just isn't available for free. Not even if you make it at home... you still have to come up with the ingredients. And bottles.
Would someone take a moment to explain this strange turn of phrase to an old dude?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There is a conditional access setting in content streamed on Cable Networks that says:
1) Copy allowed.
2) No copy allowed.
3) Copy allowed once.
Which is similar to their OMT threshold.
Anyway, Today I just decided not to buy any more digital books. Its not worth.
i was just gonna skip this story until you highlighted that part
The USA has been fascist for a while, but this is one way to patent fascism.
Corporate America and profit making > Average Joe
Um, no. The idea of a digital shopping cart is obvious, but the implementation is very different. Since a patent is supposed to cover implementations rather than general ideas (in theory, anyway), a shopping cart implementation is potentially patentable.
Nor are things not patentable if somebody's going to do it sometime. Lots of things are inevitable, but the first to do it gets the patent.
And, yes, patenting an entire store concept isn't what patents are supposed to be about. That is a problem with the current patent system.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Come on Amazon, how can a Free ebook be "Out of stock, many which are even "Out of Copyright":?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Since you obviously didn't read it, TFA involves Amazon trying to enforce artificial scarcity (specifically on the resale market, which the producers would vastly prefer to obliterate entirely by using licensing terms to illegally deprive us of our right of first sale) on a digital market for the purpose of driving prices up.
Nowhere in the GeekWire article does it say the purpose is to drive the prices up. Since the current market does not allow resale of digital goods at all, the likely effect of this would be to drive prices *DOWN* rather than up. What they are likely trying to avoid is a situation where the good is sold once and then given away (however illegally) thereafter.
The basic problem with resale of digital goods is that the naive method results in the original buyer keeping the good as well as selling it. They want resellers to have to give up the good, maintaining scarcity and keeping the price from falling to zero.
but it might not last long, and maybe Amazon is aware of the possible short life.
They are trying to capture all of the economic profits which come from having zero marginal cost on (re)distribution. This is the same problem facing MP3 websites and computer game publishers.
In principle, only one copy of a PDF (or a MP3 or a game) needs to be created for everyone in the world to enjoy 100% of its benefits. It just needs to be perfectly transferred 6 billion times. The good itself, having been perfectly transferred, is always as good as new.
Sufficiently concerned consumers should make a complaint to the market regulator.
There is no community or military benefit to helping a corporation sell less for more. It is not a reasonable argument and never will be.
Is that a euphemism for a copy? One of the great advances of the digital revolution was the ability to quickly share something numerous times. In the information age information is free. The fact that there is no cost associated with the copy above the overhead of the system should illustrate this point. To attempt to recapture the 20th century "waiting in line" experience is foolish at best. If you pretend that your digital goods are rare your customers will go elsewhere to obtain what they seek.
I completely agree, but I think that was my point (and I reply largely because I took umbrage with the "Um, no" while really I think we agree)... design patents are very narrow in scope intentionally, and I'm arguing that software patents should be similarly narrow to specifically avoid the problems with the current patent system about which we're both talking.
I used the shopping cart example because of recent news that such a patent has been awarded, and upon reading the patent it does not appear to be a specific implementation at all; rather a very generic implementation that highly parallels an existing physical concept (a shopping cart). It's not that specific implementations shouldn't be patentable (although I may argue that copyright instead of patents should apply in most cases, when the differences are more aesthetic rather than functional, but thus my comparison to design patents), I'm just trying to find a reasonable testable limit to what should qualify.
As you say, patenting the entire store is not what patents are about. I think patenting shopping carts is simliar (unless they have a "novel" feature). Things that work well in the physical world are quickly gaining internet-based analogues.
You're also right about of inevitability, of course, but I think there's a difference between inevitable, and obvious or novel. Lending digital objects (case in point) is an interesting example. A narrow patent on a particular combination of encryption and centrally controlled tracking and limiting methods on how many times something could be shared probably could be patentable, and makes sense. But in this case, the patent has grown to include practically any conceivable implementation, which seems wrong. The limiting factor I suggested was whether there is a physical analog or not. There IS a physical analog for lending, so no matter how long it takes for the first person to build and market code for that should, IMHO, remain unpatentable. I'm not aware of a physical analog for lending something only a specific number of times, so I'm OK with that (although I'd be glad to be corrected).
Definitely an interesting conversation; I think we agree on the salient points.
Interesting post. Ideas for supporting alternatives from my: http://artificialscarcity.com/
There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
[And as has been pointed out to me since, there probably always a fifth economy based around "theft" or "conquest".]
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.
Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions -- including humanism -- about moving beyond materialistic values.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income. [One tax funding that basic income can be to tax patents and copyrights annually based on a self-assessed buyout value that would put them immediately into the public domain.]
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Steve Yegge sure was spot on