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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."

12 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. And of course ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    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. 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
    3. Re:And of course ... by TarPitt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    4. Re:And of course ... by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 5, Informative

      Which planet's history did you study? Because it sure as hell wasn't this one's. With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'. Farm land throughout the ancient and medieval world was always owned by somebody, whether it was quasi-state aristocracy, wealthy oligarchs, or more modest private farmers (the lattermost being rather rare actually before the modern capitalist world you disparage). Frequently land was awarded to soldiers (*privately* not collectively) after campaigns, Rome was famous for doing this, though it was by no means the only civilization to exercise the practice. Of course the next time those soldiers were deployed, they frequently came home to find their land had been 'reassigned' which underscores the dangers of the state. (Jefferson rightly said that any state powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.)

      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 really need to study history in depth and realize how oppressed humanity was before the development of capitalism created a middle class society to counterbalance previous aristocratic/oligarchic power structures. Power structures that recreate themselves whenever an anti-capitalist ideology seizes control of society, since redistribution of wealth by force crucifies the middle class and puts the bulk of society under the boot of a politically empowered few.

      All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.

      --
      I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
    5. Re:And of course ... by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. To promote the progress of by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    science and useful arts.

    USPTO, please read the Goddamn Constitution.

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Physical objects wear out, digital objects don't by markdj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. 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
    1. Re:The corporations are our enemy by ph0rk · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      Uh, yeah. Did you actually see Terminator?

      --
      semantics are everything!