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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."
science and useful arts.
USPTO, please read the Goddamn Constitution.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Any form of private property is a government enforced monopoly
The owner of the property has exclusive rights to it backup up by government
Private property is the core of "free enterprise"
The birth of industrial capitalism was formed by the "privatization" of traditional agricultural commons, impoverishing the peasant class and creating a cheap workforce for the factories of free enterprise.
The privatization of innovation eliminates the intellectual commons in a similar way
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
False.
The 'free market' is not a real entity, its a social construct, and it can only exist where property rights are defined and defended - by government force. ALL property, patents or land, is created in this way. Its called enclosure (or inclosure, as it was spelt when this first happened to land in England.
What is going on here is entirely consisted with the 'free' market (quotes because I refuse to pass on the propagandistic notion that markets have anything to do with freedom) - it is in fact what has been going on since the very dawn of capitalism. You secure exclusive access to something by force (generally via a government, which markets cannot exist without) and then you sell it back to the people you have denied it to.
You're making the mistake that a lot of modern Capitalist political/economic rubbish relies on: assuming that the words used to describe economic organization (in this case, "owned by"), have a universal and absolute meaning identical with their present usage.
Yes, land just about everywhere has historically been "owned" by someone. But "ownership" is a particular bundle of de jure and de facto practices that changes with time and place --- for large segments of history, land being "owned" by some lord/king was not at all exclusive with use as "commons." Only later was the definition and practical exercise of "ownership" shifted towards our contemporary notion of "private property." But I suppose paying historical attention to the actual conditions of production "on the ground," instead of tossing around terms like "ownership" as though they were handed down immutable from God, would be too "Marxist" for you.