Amazon Patents Showing You Your Own Books
from the well,-thank-goodness-for-that dept
theodp writes "Thanks to a patent the USPTO granted to Amazon Tuesday for a Method and system for access to electronic images of text based on user ownership of corresponding physical text (aka Amazon Upgrade), showing you images of pages from a book you've purchased may someday trigger a patent infringement lawsuit."Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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OMG...
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But only if...
It's all ridiculous, but let's not pull a straw man fallacy, here.
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dibs
a.k.a. language. Then someone else can add 'on the net', and 'in writing' and we can team up and corner the market.
Seriously though, how do we go about changing this patent system? Can we start a petition, do we protest, should i write nasty letters to the people in office, or is there even a better, more functional (i use that term loosely as our current system hardly qualifies as adequate) system out there?
Sadly, i think the only hope any of us would really have would be to win the powerball, hire a lobbying firm, and make some serious campaign contributions. And even then, it would be locked up in committee for years.
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Re: dibs
1) Train the bureaucrats who review the patent apps.
2) Give the PTO enough funds to do it right.
3) Streamline the review and appeals process.
4) Make it resemble reality so patent-parking scams no longer are profitable.
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mp3.com
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Eureka!
The system should obviously also have special bonuses built in for obvious submissions
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Solution
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Patent Wit
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Re: Patent Wit
My way of saying "please sir he started it sir" ;0)
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Sure sounds like it. However, there *is* a difference. While it was mp3.com's business model, this is Amazon's *method* for putting this into practice and a potential business model. If Amazon were to get permission from publishers, there might not be any issues. iirc, the music industry wasn't interested in giving mp3.com permission (and I wonder if they're now wishing they'd have worked with them on that).
I agree that this might be a straw man issue. I've not read the patent, but suspect it's specific in how they plan to do it. However, if the patent is well-written, it'll cover a lot of options.
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070208-8798.html
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Re:
Mike has found plenty of sites which copy/paste techdirt, but he ignores it because they get less traffic than he does.
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Amazon patent
I own a lot of books that I'd love to be able to do a full-text search on. To do such a search, I would have to have scanned all my books. But Amazon has already done that for many of the books I own (in fact, I've bought a few books from them because I knew from the "search inside" that those books contained material I needed).
So, since they already give me (limited) access to the insides of books before I buy them, why not give me full access to the insides of books I already own? Naturally, they would need some sort of proof that I own the book.
Seems sensible enough to me.
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