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.

Comments

Amazon had a duty to patent

[Jay Maynard]

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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Re:Amazon had a duty to patent

[RGRistroph]

Simply because you can make money for your shareholders doesn't give you a duty to do so. If Amazon had the oportunity to steal and get away with it, and the company did not, the shareholders have no claim. If Amazon has the oportunity to abuse the legal system or patent system for profit, that opportunity doesn't translate into a duty to do so.

The fiduciary duty is limited to those reasonable business activities which a normal person would expect to be part of the business.

Perhaps someone can post a link to one of the online legal dictionaries on this term ?

There are other problems with invoking the fiduciary responsibilty argument. One of them is that many companies so obviously ignore their shareholder obligations when convenient -- look at some of the huge bonuses given to CEOs of failing companies, or some of the more famous merger deals. In general, I would say that courts believe that fiduciary responsibility will be protected in most cases by the market -- people will sell the stock. It has to be a greivous case, with secret dealings and maybe a non-publicly traded company, before judges will hand down an award.

Lastly, I'd like to remind everyone of the Archer-Daniels-Midland case -- someone could argue that those executives had a fiduciary duty to conspire with the Japanese to fix prices, but they went to jail for that, not for failing shareholder obligation.

Hopefully, Amazon will get slapped with a court settlement (judges can be vicious if they sense a big corporation is abusing the system to the detriment of the court system's reputation and power -- let's hope Amazon has to pay court costs and punitive damages), or burned by the boycott, and we'll teach those shareholders to ask their directors to avoid these tactics.

The problem with this boycott, is that Amazon is one of these internet dot-coms that don't seem to need any revenue. The way to really hurt them is to convience all your day-trading friends to short them.

Re:Book Reviews on Slashdot

[Hemos]

Some of the old stuff is still to Amazon, because it's difficult to change 300+ reviews. But we're going to be working with fatbrain.com. B&N is just as bad, in their own special way.

Doomed.

[Signal 11]

This boycott is doomed to failure. There are several reasons for this: One, too big of a target - it's a rule of thumb in protesting that you pick something big enough to matter and small enough to win (emphasis mine). Amazon pumps out thousands of books each day. Do we honestly believe 150k slashdotters will have a noticable impact? We might contribute 1k books... total... for christmas. Also, did you tell your parents/friends not to shop at Amazon? Will you return the book if you get it for xmas? Strike one.

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.

Patents as a strong defense

[twit]

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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We plantation owners have a duty to own slaves

[for(;;);]

What you abolitionists don't understand is that we Southern plantation owners have a legal, enforceable duty to our families and estates to protect our plantations from exploitation by wage-greedy workers. Furthermore, that same duty compels us to maximize the output and value of our estates. Like it or not, in today's business and legal climate, my fellow plantation owners and I must not only keep negro slaves, but also fight to protect that right, lest the entire economy of the South collapse and we be held liable.

--J. Random Plantation Owner, 1855