theodp writes "To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
This bugs me about patents. This sounds like an exact copy of what they've done with maps for years. They add/remove/rename tiny roads in the middle of nowhere and if you distribute maps with those roads then they know you copied their stuff.
Everything is a damn patent these days. Yo dawg, I put a clock in your clock so I can sue you while you check the time.
It's an heretical thing when mapmakers do it, lying (even trivially) and corrupting their craft because of the threat of being copied. It should not be tolerated there nor should the practice claimed by this patent application be tolerated, not because the patent is bad but because the practice itself is an affront to all of us.
With the Internet, it is everyone's right to destroy the revenue model of any business they choose to target. You and I should equally be able to force any business into bankruptcy just by posting their creations online for everyone to download for free. With suitable bulletproof hosting, the original owner isn't going to be able to do anything about it.
It is all about making things free that didn't used to be. Devalues everything over time - creators get the message that they might as well make it free
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, all else being equal, more creative works are better than fewer. But the public benefits not only from having as many creative works made and published, but from having those works be in the public domain as soon as possible (if not immediately), and if we have copyrights at all then the copyrights should be as minimal as possible in terms of scope and duration.
For example, there's nothing special about the current amount of copyright. It's not the most we could have, or the least, it's just a point on the spectrum. I'm an artist, and I for one am not incentivized by the current amount of copyright to create my Moon art (where I perform massive amounts of construction on the Moon to make it more aesthetically appealing). I demand far more strong copyrights -- in fact, my incentive to create it ought to be that I get to be King of the World for the rest of my natural life.
Apparently, I don't get the massive expansion of copyright I want, since while encouraging me to create and publish my art is favored by public policy, I want too great a reward for it, and the public is ultimately better off without my art, than having it and the cost that it takes to get it.
The same principle is true now. There were plenty of books and records and tv shows and movies prior to 1978, which means that the old copyright law, which provided less protection than the current one, must've been sufficient. We have not had a huge increase in the number of works created and published since then which is attributable to copyright law (as opposed to improvements in technology, the state of the economy, etc.).
So it seems that for the last several decades, we have been paying too much in copyright in exchange for creative works. We should pay less. If some artists are unwilling to create, but not too many are unwilling, then fine. We'll be sorry to lose them, but we are better off without acceding to their demands.
Pirates can work together. Suppose you have ten pirates. They each download a copy of the book. They then compare their copies with each other - crosschecking them (after, of course, stripping the DRM). Nine of the ten books use "to be or not to be", and one uses "to exist or not to exist", and similarly for other words. They may then produce a more accurate copy of the book. So now, instead of pirate versions being technically superior (due to the lack of DRM), they're also more accurate! Well done, Amazon, you've patented a wonderful scheme to ensure people don't trust genuine products! Normally I am very anti-intellectual property. On this occasion, however, I do hope Amazon is granted it and enforces it. Perhaps it would some day prevent someone else doing the same.
Clever, but that's not what pirates are going to do.
Pirates are going to purchase books anonymously, by using prepaid credit cards, stolen credit cards, or hacked amazon accounts. It's the easiest way and it guarantees the pirate isn't associated personally with the distributed work.
I don't blame people for not reading the claims section, because it's necessarily an obtuse fusion of legalese and jargon.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this. Patents cover implementations, and not ideas. Some have argued that the line has been blurred with certain classes of patents, but it hasn't blurred so far that the concept in the slashdot summary is actually locked up as IP.
Frankly, I can't be bothered to look at the claims either. But the idea itself certainly lends itself to ideas that are patentable (whether they should be patentable or will be rendered retroactively invalid is another question). For instance, I'm curious how they identify which words should be replaced, and the system by which they choose a synonym that hopefully doesn't destroy rhyming patterns, metrical rhythm, puns, shades of meaning, and ambiguity in words with multiple meanings that don't completely intersect the candidate synonym's meaning.
Also, whatever they are they doing to prevent the trivial case of three copies being compared to recover the original. Maybe they have a bunch of sets of synonyms that are commonly replaced so you need more to get the original, but even then, do they arrange it in some way so that the source of the leaks can be traced down despite the alteration? Or maybe they just assume that book pirates are morons.
They might do nothing for any of those cases, mind you. Once again, I can't be bothered to read these damned things. Which is part of why I don't submit articles about ones that I've decided I think are actually stupid.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this.
You're incorrectly assuming that a common shorthand for talking about those kinds of patents implies ignorance of the patent system.
To spell it out for you: the "way" they patented this is an obvious engineering solution to the actual problem they are trying to solve. If you gave the problem of "alter the text so that each customer gets a unique copy" to a CS undergraduate, this is the kind of engineering solution they'd co
Yes. And that is a variation of the classic canary trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap [wikipedia.org]): copies of classified documents that are not 100% identical. When the leaks surface, you can trace the original recipient of the compromised copy.
I like the thing with the maps because it is the kind of thing that makes the violator look like a complete idiot, and it's impossible to defend in court.
It seems to me that there's a pretty easy way to defeat this. Use the technology against itself.
If you ever want to distribute something, make your own minor spelling variations and substitute your own synonyms into the original, thus further altering the altered work. If someone sues you, just point out the fact that their copy "proving" you're guilty doesn't even match the copy of the work that was distributed.
You could use this idea for just about anything that is digitally watermarked. Don't want that MP3 traced? Introduce your own small, imperceptible variations into the waveform. Don't want your printer tracing you through microdots on your hardcopies? Write a driver that adds its own microdots, and lots of 'em. And so on...
I used to live in a false street. The official map for the San Francisco Muni had a tiny spur named Tulip Street, just off of Russ in SOMA. That was my bedroom.
Technically, the US spelling is correct, as that was the one selected by the person who discovered the element. The Royal Academy decided to change the spelling to fit in with their naming convention.
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Incorrect, with current methods you can identify both.
Depending on the number, and distribution of intentional errors, you can tweak such a system to indentify any number of mixed sources. For example if you insert 30 errors into each copy at unique points, and 3 copies are blended randomly, if will contain an average of 10 errors from each source, possibly enough to identify all 3 sources. With overlaping points, even if a best 2 out of 3 method is used to generate the copy, you can still find out which sources. Consider each point at which an error is inserted or not as a bit, and think of RAID, ECC, Parity, etc.
I believe that a particular large software company already uses this type of method on their source code distributions, to indentify leaks. I recall a presentation from someone working at that company on the local university learning channel where they described fingerprinting source code in this manner.
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
Quick! No one's said anything stupid yet! Let's construct a straw man so I have something to ridicule!
"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" Crockett exclaimed.
"Looks like pure uncut Pepsi(TM)," said Tubbs.
"The Microsoft(TM) doesn't fall far from the tree, does it, pal? Well... we got here in the nick of Newsweek(TM). Get immigration on the iPhone(TM) and tell them to revoke Carlos' work American Express(TM)."
"But Sonny Delite(TM), I don't know if we'll Heinz(TM) with Carlos before he gets to the border! Besides, he's already wanted for assault and Duracell(TM), let alone Rite Aid(TM) smuggling. Plus I think he's a Kelloggs(TM) killer."
"Oh, we'll catch him alright. You can take that to the Chase(TM)."
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
The potential for awesome failure is particularly high in childrens' books. For example, "Ding Penis Dell, Pussy's in the well" would just put a whole new slant on things.
This is just the Canary Trap [wikipedia.org], which is nothing new. It's in fact been around long before Tom Clancy gave it that name. Why do they get to patent it if it's demonstrably older than that?
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap [wikipedia.org] for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap [wikipedia.org] for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
But the classic Canary Trap requires someone to modify the document manually, which is hard to do on a large scale. Here it is being done automatically by an algorithm.
However, I am aware of published methods for this problem dating back to 2001 [trnmag.com] by Mikhail Atallah at Purdue. In fact Atallah received a patent for followup work [uspto.gov] in 2007, a year after the Amazon patent was filed.
Here are a few hundred papers [snipurl.com] on the subject, via Google Scholar. Some adjust whitespace, some modify images of the text, and some attempt fairly sophisticated syntactic analysis and restructuring of selected sentences.
I apologize that I haven't read the Amazon patent, or read the prior literature carefully, or gone to law school, so I can't comment on whether the patent seems valid or not.
If Amazon (of the licensee of the patent) is not providing the content purchased, then they're either committing theft-by-substitution (not the same as bait-and-switch, in which the customer is actually sold an alternate product) or outright fraud by not delivering what was sold. A text product is not simply a collection of words, it's a specific selection of words in a particular order... and spelling counts, even in the case of Lord of the Rings where Tolkien creates whole languages.
First, I read about this in a Tom Clancy novel in the 80s. Sounds like prior art to me.
Second, if I buy a book, I expect the words in that book to be the ones the author (with the help of his editors) put there. If I buy "Tale of Two Cities" and they deliver something that starts with "It was the best of eras, it was the worst of eras," then I'm not getting what I paid for. Sounds like false advertising.
There is a difference between a right to sell the original works and a right to do whatever you want. Similar to how an author can sell right to publish to one person (even limiting it to certain regions of the world, as many books have different publishers in different areas of the world), right to make a movie to another, etc. The contract probably states if the publisher has the right to make certain modifications.
A synonym is not reflective of the intent of the author.
As Al Franken points out, 'friendly' is a synonym for 'intimate', so coulter obviously stated she was having a trist with franken when asked by a reporter!
Authors choose their diction carefully, at least good ones do, and that should not be tampered with.
Lesson learned: do not shop at amazon if you respect artistic integrity.
Canada and some other countries have "moral rights" which belong to the author.
Changing words without his permission could violate these rights.
In some countries these rights are inalienable and non-assignable. This means the author can't be ordered to waive them by the publisher or other copyright-holder.
And people complained about the King James version being altered. I can just picture it, 20 years from now, a group of tomorrows theologians are busy studying the Authorized Amazon Version of the Bible trying to deduce the 'real' meaning of the text/God.
If I was an author who had slaved a year over a book, and anyone but my editor (with my approval on each change) altered my precious words and distributed it as my work, I'd sue the pants off of them. It'd be like if someone was selling prints of my painting and changing a brush stroke. You just don't do that. Words are the author's paint.
First, there is already pre-existing examples of this practice. Indeed, Tom Clancy described this very technique in one of his novels and called it, "The Smoking Word Processor."
Second, as an author, I go through quite an effort to ensure that the spelling and grammar are correct throughout any work that I created. To have Amazon completely throw away my efforts and ruin my work would really anger me. This might encourage me to inhibit Amazon from selling any of my work.
We can set the copyright lawyers, representing the authors and publishers, against the patent lawyers representing Amazon. With any luck, they'll sue each other into the poor house and leave the rest of us alone!
Alternatively, we could establish a special court that handles these copyright vs patent cases. When all the lawyers arrive, wall the area up, cut the bridges and toss in a few spiked baseball bats to let 'em fight it out with. Maybe in New York...
Mapmakers have been adding fictitious towns for many years (as many have commented).
People who sell lists have been doing this for many years. (Who's Who, for example, adds a few fictitious people for this purpose, and I believe so do the Yellow Pages.)
People trying to catch spies have been doing this for many years. (I first heard about this during the Thatcher years in the UK, and it wasn't new then.)
Unless they have specific permission from the owner of the copyright work for any such modification. Any operation such as this would be an unauthorized derivative work and be in violation of the original copyright. The variations would be derivative works, not works in their own rights. Their creation would have to be authorized by the owner of the original copyright material.
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies...; (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; (3) to distribute copies...of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending....
If this becomes widespread, here's how it'll go: first, pirate groups will only have to pay for/obtain a couple extra copies, and come up with an automated reconstruction system that will compare the copies and perform error correction. Then the publishers will start obfuscating things more and more, and the pirate groups will develop more and more advanced algorithms. Eventually, the publishers will be publishing near-100% noise, with their heads too far up their asses to realize it, the only people buying copies will be the dedicated pirate groups, who will afford it by charging for their services, and before you know it, "content miners" will just be another step in the chain. The establishment is just last generation's rebels, am I right?
You underestimate how evil a watermarking algorithm can be. Rather raising the number of words changed, amazon can simply make sure one set of an official copy's edits are unique, but another set overlaps exactly with group A of other accounts, another set overlaps with group B, another overlaps with group C... such that a naive copier will still be caught, and collaborators will never be able to be completely certain they removed every watermark.
Then amazon builds sets of potential pirates for each book th
Patentable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything is a damn patent these days. Yo dawg, I put a clock in your clock so I can sue you while you check the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Everything is a damn patent these days. Yo dawg, I put a clock in your clock so I can sue you while you check the time.
Don't worry, I've found prior art [wikipedia.org] on placing a ____ in a ____. We'll have that patent invalidated in no time!
It's not about the patent, it's about the lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
With the Internet, it is everyone's right to destroy the revenue model of any business they choose to target. You and I should equally be able to force any business into bankruptcy just by posting their creations online for everyone to download for free. With suitable bulletproof hosting, the original owner isn't going to be able to do anything about it.
It is all about making things free that didn't used to be. Devalues everything over time - creators get the message that they might as well make it free
Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, all else being equal, more creative works are better than fewer. But the public benefits not only from having as many creative works made and published, but from having those works be in the public domain as soon as possible (if not immediately), and if we have copyrights at all then the copyrights should be as minimal as possible in terms of scope and duration.
For example, there's nothing special about the current amount of copyright. It's not the most we could have, or the least, it's just a point on the spectrum. I'm an artist, and I for one am not incentivized by the current amount of copyright to create my Moon art (where I perform massive amounts of construction on the Moon to make it more aesthetically appealing). I demand far more strong copyrights -- in fact, my incentive to create it ought to be that I get to be King of the World for the rest of my natural life.
Apparently, I don't get the massive expansion of copyright I want, since while encouraging me to create and publish my art is favored by public policy, I want too great a reward for it, and the public is ultimately better off without my art, than having it and the cost that it takes to get it.
The same principle is true now. There were plenty of books and records and tv shows and movies prior to 1978, which means that the old copyright law, which provided less protection than the current one, must've been sufficient. We have not had a huge increase in the number of works created and published since then which is attributable to copyright law (as opposed to improvements in technology, the state of the economy, etc.).
So it seems that for the last several decades, we have been paying too much in copyright in exchange for creative works. We should pay less. If some artists are unwilling to create, but not too many are unwilling, then fine. We'll be sorry to lose them, but we are better off without acceding to their demands.
Parent
Re:It's not about the patent, it's about the lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Clever, but that's not what pirates are going to do.
Pirates are going to purchase books anonymously, by using prepaid credit cards, stolen credit cards, or hacked amazon accounts. It's the easiest way and it guarantees the pirate isn't associated personally with the distributed work.
Re:Patentable? (Score:5, Funny)
Aww come on. This is the smuckin fartest invention ever!
Parent
Re:Patentable? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't blame people for not reading the claims section, because it's necessarily an obtuse fusion of legalese and jargon.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this. Patents cover implementations, and not ideas. Some have argued that the line has been blurred with certain classes of patents, but it hasn't blurred so far that the concept in the slashdot summary is actually locked up as IP.
Frankly, I can't be bothered to look at the claims either. But the idea itself certainly lends itself to ideas that are patentable (whether they should be patentable or will be rendered retroactively invalid is another question). For instance, I'm curious how they identify which words should be replaced, and the system by which they choose a synonym that hopefully doesn't destroy rhyming patterns, metrical rhythm, puns, shades of meaning, and ambiguity in words with multiple meanings that don't completely intersect the candidate synonym's meaning.
Also, whatever they are they doing to prevent the trivial case of three copies being compared to recover the original. Maybe they have a bunch of sets of synonyms that are commonly replaced so you need more to get the original, but even then, do they arrange it in some way so that the source of the leaks can be traced down despite the alteration? Or maybe they just assume that book pirates are morons.
They might do nothing for any of those cases, mind you. Once again, I can't be bothered to read these damned things. Which is part of why I don't submit articles about ones that I've decided I think are actually stupid.
Parent
hair splitting (Score:3, Interesting)
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this.
You're incorrectly assuming that a common shorthand for talking about those kinds of patents implies ignorance of the patent system.
To spell it out for you: the "way" they patented this is an obvious engineering solution to the actual problem they are trying to solve. If you gave the problem of "alter the text so that each customer gets a unique copy" to a CS undergraduate, this is the kind of engineering solution they'd co
Re:Patentable? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Simple solution! (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that there's a pretty easy way to defeat this. Use the technology against itself.
If you ever want to distribute something, make your own minor spelling variations and substitute your own synonyms into the original, thus further altering the altered work. If someone sues you, just point out the fact that their copy "proving" you're guilty doesn't even match the copy of the work that was distributed.
You could use this idea for just about anything that is digitally watermarked. Don't want that MP3 traced? Introduce your own small, imperceptible variations into the waveform. Don't want your printer tracing you through microdots on your hardcopies? Write a driver that adds its own microdots, and lots of 'em. And so on...
Parent
Re:Patentable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Patentable? (Score:4, Funny)
The word you wanted was edition, or are you infringing on amazon's patent?
Parent
Re:Prior art (Score:4, Informative)
... the word "aluminum". Some use the US spelling, the other use the correct spelling.
FTFY
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Prior art (Score:4, Insightful)
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Parent
Re:Prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Incorrect, with current methods you can identify both.
Depending on the number, and distribution of intentional errors, you can tweak such a system to indentify any number of mixed sources. For example if you insert 30 errors into each copy at unique points, and 3 copies are blended randomly, if will contain an average of 10 errors from each source, possibly enough to identify all 3 sources. With overlaping points, even if a best 2 out of 3 method is used to generate the copy, you can still find out which sources. Consider each point at which an error is inserted or not as a bit, and think of RAID, ECC, Parity, etc.
I believe that a particular large software company already uses this type of method on their source code distributions, to indentify leaks. I recall a presentation from someone working at that company on the local university learning channel where they described fingerprinting source code in this manner.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But now it's on a computer and on the internet (!!!). They should be able to get at least two patents on it, maybe three.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Quick! Someone say it's only defensive! (Score:2)
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
Quick! No one's said anything stupid yet! Let's construct a straw man so I have something to ridicule!
Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
If this doesn't happen, I will eat my hat/del/ ACME Brand Prestige Fedora TM.
Re:Advertising (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists point out problems. Engineers use them to kill people overseas.
Parent
Re:Advertising (Score:5, Funny)
Coming soon...
"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" Crockett exclaimed.
"Looks like pure uncut Pepsi(TM)," said Tubbs.
"The Microsoft(TM) doesn't fall far from the tree, does it, pal? Well... we got here in the nick of Newsweek(TM). Get immigration on the iPhone(TM) and tell them to revoke Carlos' work American Express(TM)."
"But Sonny Delite(TM), I don't know if we'll Heinz(TM) with Carlos before he gets to the border! Besides, he's already wanted for assault and Duracell(TM), let alone Rite Aid(TM) smuggling. Plus I think he's a Kelloggs(TM) killer."
"Oh, we'll catch him alright. You can take that to the Chase(TM)."
Parent
Re:Advertising (Score:4, Funny)
Change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Pepsi".
The potential for awesome failure is particularly high in childrens' books. For example, "Ding Penis Dell, Pussy's in the well" would just put a whole new slant on things.
Parent
canary trap (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.'
Sabotaging your product out of fear someone might violate your copyrights. Where have we seen that [wikipedia.org] before?
If it wasn't obvious infringement prior to the changes, what's the big deal?
Canary trap (Score:5, Informative)
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap [wikipedia.org] for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
Re:Canary trap (Score:5, Informative)
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap [wikipedia.org] for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
But the classic Canary Trap requires someone to modify the document manually, which is hard to do on a large scale. Here it is being done automatically by an algorithm.
However, I am aware of published methods for this problem dating back to 2001 [trnmag.com] by Mikhail Atallah at Purdue. In fact Atallah received a patent for followup work [uspto.gov] in 2007, a year after the Amazon patent was filed.
Here are a few hundred papers [snipurl.com] on the subject, via Google Scholar. Some adjust whitespace, some modify images of the text, and some attempt fairly sophisticated syntactic analysis and restructuring of selected sentences.
I apologize that I haven't read the Amazon patent, or read the prior literature carefully, or gone to law school, so I can't comment on whether the patent seems valid or not.
Parent
You know the patent system is dead when... (Score:2)
Theft or Fraud? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Amazon (of the licensee of the patent) is not providing the content purchased, then they're either committing theft-by-substitution (not the same as bait-and-switch, in which the customer is actually sold an alternate product) or outright fraud by not delivering what was sold. A text product is not simply a collection of words, it's a specific selection of words in a particular order ... and spelling counts, even in the case of Lord of the Rings where Tolkien creates whole languages.
Can fraud actually
Plausible deniability? (Score:3, Funny)
I love watermarks that can be defeated with a spellchecker and a thesaurus!
Huh, so the nook won't be able to corrupt books? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon, free tip: words matter. Especially in books.
Sounds Dodgy at Best (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds Dodgy at Best (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
There is a difference between a right to sell the original works and a right to do whatever you want. Similar to how an author can sell right to publish to one person (even limiting it to certain regions of the world, as many books have different publishers in different areas of the world), right to make a movie to another, etc. The contract probably states if the publisher has the right to make certain modifications.
Don't shop amazon if you like artistic integrity! (Score:5, Insightful)
A synonym is not reflective of the intent of the author.
As Al Franken points out, 'friendly' is a synonym for 'intimate', so coulter obviously stated she was having a trist with franken when asked by a reporter!
Authors choose their diction carefully, at least good ones do, and that should not be tampered with.
Lesson learned: do not shop at amazon if you respect artistic integrity.
Moral rights (Score:4, Informative)
Canada and some other countries have "moral rights" which belong to the author.
Changing words without his permission could violate these rights.
In some countries these rights are inalienable and non-assignable. This means the author can't be ordered to waive them by the publisher or other copyright-holder.
The Authorized Amazon Version of The Bible (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was an author . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was an author who had slaved a year over a book, and anyone but my editor (with my approval on each change) altered my precious words and distributed it as my work, I'd sue the pants off of them. It'd be like if someone was selling prints of my painting and changing a brush stroke. You just don't do that. Words are the author's paint.
Not a Wise Practice (Score:5, Insightful)
First, there is already pre-existing examples of this practice. Indeed, Tom Clancy described this very technique in one of his novels and called it, "The Smoking Word Processor."
Second, as an author, I go through quite an effort to ensure that the spelling and grammar are correct throughout any work that I created. To have Amazon completely throw away my efforts and ruin my work would really anger me. This might encourage me to inhibit Amazon from selling any of my work.
BRILLIANT! (Score:3, Funny)
We can set the copyright lawyers, representing the authors and publishers, against the patent lawyers representing Amazon. With any luck, they'll sue each other into the poor house and leave the rest of us alone!
Alternatively, we could establish a special court that handles these copyright vs patent cases. When all the lawyers arrive, wall the area up, cut the bridges and toss in a few spiked baseball bats to let 'em fight it out with. Maybe in New York...
How did this get through (Score:4, Insightful)
Mapmakers have been adding fictitious towns for many years (as many have commented).
People who sell lists have been doing this for many years. (Who's Who, for example, adds a few fictitious people for this purpose, and I believe so do the Yellow Pages.)
People trying to catch spies have been doing this for many years. (I first heard about this during the Thatcher years in the UK, and it wasn't new then.)
So, how, exactly is this new and non-obvious ?
Uhm copyright violation through derivative work (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless they have specific permission from the owner of the copyright work for any such modification. Any operation such as this would be an unauthorized derivative work and be in violation of the original copyright. The variations would be derivative works, not works in their own rights. Their creation would have to be authorized by the owner of the original copyright material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work [wikipedia.org]
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies...; (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; (3) to distribute copies...of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending....
The logical progression (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You underestimate how evil a watermarking algorithm can be. Rather raising the number of words changed, amazon can simply make sure one set of an official copy's edits are unique, but another set overlaps exactly with group A of other accounts, another set overlaps with group B, another overlaps with group C... such that a naive copier will still be caught, and collaborators will never be able to be completely certain they removed every watermark.
Then amazon builds sets of potential pirates for each book th
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but did everybody get a slightly different version of the assignment?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Makes me wonder if the good grades were solely due to his work, and not the apparently close relationship with the lecturers.