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Amazon Patents 'Maintaining Scarcity' of Goods

Posted by Unknown on from the moldy-bits dept.

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."

5 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And of course ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wut? When does copyright, by definition a government issued monopoly, have anything to do with the free market?

  2. Patents are by definition not the free market by hawks5999 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Patents are a monopoly issued by government. They are the antithesis of the free market. This government intervention in the free market leads to ridiculous patents like this.

    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.

  3. Sure, give us ANOTHER reason to prefer piracy... by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:And of course ... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just "vote with your wallet".

    Sounds like rich people get more of a vote than poor people.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  5. The corporations are our enemy by Morgaine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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