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Wired on Amazon.com Boycott
TGmentor wrote to let us know that Wired has an article about Richard Stallman's boycott of Amazon.com for its patent policies. The patent question is the recent victory that Amazon won over B&N for its 'one-click' shopping patent. Good work on the part of RMS [?] - we need to show companies that just because they can patent something, they don't need to.
As many people on slashdot seem to forget, software companies are companies first and producers of software second. It is regrettable that company such and such does not file a patent for everything patentable because this unwillingness endangers its survival as a company.
A company can, as another poster has suggested, merely publish and leave patents unfiled. This is all well and good, but not really feasible for a company not founded in the public interest. As much as I'd like more companies to be in the public interest, I know that they are and will continue to be a minuscule proportion.
For that matter, perhaps it's especially important for companies doing research (for example, the FSF) in the public interest to file patents - after all, lacking large bankrolls to pursue litigation, they have little to trade except their patent portfolio. Publishing without patenting does not diminish litigation or points of contention; it would merely make the lines shorter at the patent office. Litigitous companies would be no less litigitous; ones less so would remain less so.
A patent itself is in the public interest. Companies are induced to publicize their advanced work with the reward of monopoly for a period of time. This is entirely consonant with, if not wholly inclusive of, the goals of free software. What we should fight is companies which seek to keep their research secret and out of the hands of the public. Trade secrets unpublished or unpatented are the real alternative to patents, not the trade or academic press.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
which is why the boycott is the correct response. Amazon's attempt to enforce this patent shows how far things have gone towards patents being a form of anti-competetive corporate welfare - they are used not to protect R&D budgets against parasites (the original intent of patents) but to stake a claim in a developing market in order to prevent anyone else from competing. No open market system can tolerate this.
How this state of affairs can be in the interests of capitalism, the economy, software consumers, software programmers, web developers, the government, or the general public is beyond the ability of any rational being to explain or defend. The fact that most are either to ignorant or too amoral to care is no excuse.
Corporate bootlickers and other sycophants may disagree, but I urge all who believe in the freedom to innovate *not* to buy the big lie, and not to buy Amazon until it becomes their *fiduciary duty* to rectify the situation by taking proper initiatives.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Nope. You don't need to patent it. All you have to do is publish the technology somewhere. In the sciences there is even a journal of anonymous submissions so you don't have to disclose the company/author just for that purpose.
The patent MIGHT be good for cross-licensing, but that is about it.
AT&T held the patent on the Transitor and licensed it for free. Nobody sued, and Sony made millions off pocket radios. This is simply a slap on the Open Source community. A lot of Amazon is based Open Source.
Excellent clarification of what a fiduciary duty is.
;-)
Essentially, the company's managers are making the argument that the shareholders gave them money while trusting they would behave like good businessmen.
However, this argument is suspiciously convenient. Claiming an implied, trusting contract with the voiceless shareholders falls into the same catagory as protecting the children; it is merely a way to distract attention from one's own motives. This is made clear by the typical ease with which executives take actions in their own interest and against the shareholders.
Fiduciary duty is not a bad thing, it is good. It is just a legal label for the duty of an executive to make reasonable efforts instead of just collecting his pay; it is saying that shareholders may trust in a basic level of performance from the people running the company. It is not the concept of fiduciary duty that I attack. I see fiduciary duty as a reasonable and good restriction on the powers of corporations.
But certain exploitations of certain types of opportunities don't fall under fiduciary duty. It seems to me that by bantering the phrase around carelessly, we risk letting ourselves be the tools of a propaganda effort that wants to spread the idea that any potential money-making effort by a company is required, and those executives are excused from normal moral and legal obligations.
A similar effort promoted the phrase "intellectual property", starting this whole thing. We need to kill the idea that there is anything but real property, made of atoms. Patents are just what the law defines them to be -- a restriction on the whole people in order to subsidize the reasearch efforts of a few, in order to encourage the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
In a similar way governments encourage other economic activities by restricting the activities of everyone. An early example is when the King of England gave monopolies on trade with colonies to certain companies, so that the companies would have incentive to settle and develope those lands. More recently, utilities were granted monopolies because it was presummed developing the massive infrastructures necessary would not be worth it unless you had a very long period of no competition. Our (the US Federal) government has the right to hand out monopolies on products and processes in order to encourage people to think of more of them. By using the phrase "intellectual property", we subtly spread the notion that you can "own" the exclusive right to manufacture something, just as you can "own" land.
And now by careless use of the phrase "fiduciary responsibility" or "fiduciary duty" we are going to subtly insinuate that corporate executives have an obligation to take advantage of any weakness in society (such as the current weak patent office).
Unless we post vigorously and often whenever the creeping mis-application of the phrase appears
I'm not one to agree with most of Stallman's pronouncements. I'm a KDE-using, dual-booting, BSD-license-approving heathen.
But this. This. I had to do something, and not just stop shopping at Amazon for a while. No, I've stopped shoiping at Amazon altogether, and paved over my account to make sure I don't again without real effort.
I wrote to Amazon and asked them to deactivate my account permanently. After sending a list of recent purchases as identity verification, they've pulled the plug. And I've bought a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff there.. including gifts and personal and business purchases.
Boycott, my ass. Burn your account. Ditto for Priceline, eBay and eToys. Tell them to do the right thing and set up a strawman case and file briefs with the Supreme Court in favor of knocking down these frivolous "everything old is patentable again on the web" patents.
Once again, I have to bring up the concept of fiduciary duty. Not only does Amazon have a legal, enforceable duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets from misappropriation, they also have that same duty to maximize their value. Like it or not, in today's business and legal climate, Amazon had to not only patent a patentable invention, but also enforce its patent legally, or else their shareholders could have held the company and its directors personally liable for not doing so.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Just a short question, when the next book review article comes along, is there going to still be the link to amazon.com to buy the book? Or is it going to be canged to a link to buy it from BN.com?
Amazon.com censors some comments which are posted. For example, one book Amazon.com was selling was priced at $34 despite the fact that the list price is $24.95. I've tried twice to post a comment to tell people to try Fatbrain.com instead since Amazon.com's price was above the list price. My comments have never appeared.
RMS says that authors of books should post a comment regarding boycotting Amazon.com. Certainly, if my comment didn't make it past their censors, the authors' comments wouldn't either!
Since they _LOSE_ money on each sale, not buying from them _HELPS_ Amazon.
However, since losing _LESS_ money goes against the official internet business plan, the stock price will probably plummet.
What to do, what to do . . .
The second problem is that amazon is a high publicity "can-do-no-wrong" media darling. A boycott will be taken in a negative light... and while it will generate lots of publicity, it will hurt the credibility of the GNU project if/when the boycott fails. Strike two.
The last problem is simply one of practicality - geeks are not a political bunch. Infact, many pride themselves on avoiding politics. And to quote another well-known member of the community, trying to get this to work would be like "trying to herd cats". What's worse - many geeks already believe (perhaps rightly so) that the USPO is a complete joke and that simply ignoring patents like these would be easier. Eventually somebody else will correct this broken system now, right? Strike three.
Depending on how you interpret what was written (the article did NOT say he invented the Linux kernel), that statement is as true or as false as you choose to think of it.
As for Amazon, this is proof that software patents are neither desirable nor useful. In a way, it's kind-of sad that Amazon didn't patent a whole load more. Why? Because this is clearly a case of politicians, corporations and the general public perceiving it as "not bad enough", "not their problem" and "only affecting others".
IMHO, software patents will remain until some company makes it so odious for so many people that it's no longer possible to pass it off as an irrelevent foible.
Sad as it is, people in general don't give a damn until something affects them directly, and personally. Some remote super-giant company that can afford to pay the bill isn't going to earn any sympathy with anyone.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I agree completely that Amazon.Com's attempt to enforce this b*s* patent on (essentially) electronic commerce is nonsense. And I agree that we need to take action. I suggest that a boycott might not be the right answer.
Consider this: Amazon.com has yet to turn a profit. In fact, Amazon.com probably loses money on every book they sell. If the goal of a boycott is to harm the business economically in order to adjust their behavior, then the logical course of action would be to buy lots and lots of books from Amazon, all at once, and bankrupt the company. I therefore propose that we set up a "Boycott Amazon" website and set that website up as a partner of Amazon.com.
This reverse-boycott has other benefits to it. For one, we would increase the workload on Amazon's shipping infrastructure, potentially slowing other, less costly orders, from ever shipping. For another, if people buy books from the "Boycott Amazon" website (with the little link to Amazon), then each purchase will only hurt Amazon's pocket more by reducing the revenue of each sale by 5%. These proceeds can then go (for example) to the Free Software Foundation.
Comments?
The Kulturwehrmacht
Finding God in a Dog
I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements. Otherwise, you may be deemed to have surrendered or otherwise nullified it. That doesn't mean that they couldn't have licensed it to Barnes and Noble for a token sum, of course, but I fail to see why they'd want to.
A point made by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) in his Autodesk File (North American mirror) is that software companies are regrettably low on patents when compared to industrial or hardware companies of similar size. These patents are used defensively, in a cross-licensing scheme, if a violation is made.
Consider this example: company A uses technology possibly patented by company B. Company B sues. The lawyers will work out a deal where company B is licensed technologies of equal value from company A's patent portfolio - it may go all the way to a full exchange of licenses for all marketable technologies from both companies. Intel and Digital did this relatively recently.
The problem is that if company A doesn't have a strong or viable patent portfolio, it cannot protect itself against patent infringement suits. It may be required to actually shell out cash to settle a suit, which is against the interest of the shareholders (and may lead to the sacking of the management, besides).
While Bezos may be the largest single shareholder, he isn't the only one, and his share will decrease over time. Not to mention that he probably has no desire to lose his shirt in the short term, either.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
--J. Random Plantation Owner, 1855
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Well, if its broad enough, it can succeed, if only because the officers of the corporation get sick of picking up the paper and hearing somebody call them a pack of baby-killers (e.g. the Nestle boycott).
To be effective, the boycott must be visible to others -- not just you and the company, not just you the company and the company's other customers -- but to the press and the public at large. There needs to be a ribbon you can put on your web site saying "We support the Amazon Boycott".
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