Google Patents Country-Specific Content Blocking 106
theodp writes "Today Google was awarded US Patent No. 7,664,751 for its invention of Variable User Interface Based on Document Access Privileges, which the search giant explains can be used to restrict what Internet content people can see 'based on geographical location information of the user and based on access rights possessed for the document.' From the patent: 'For example, readers from the United States may be given "partial" access to the document while readers in Canada may be given "full" access to the document. This may be because the content provider has been granted full rights in the document from the publisher for Canadian readers but has not been granted rights in the United States, so the content provider may choose to only enable fair use display for readers in the United States.' Oh well, at least Google is 'no longer willing to continue censoring [their] results on Google.cn.'"
No mechanism proposed (Score:3, Interesting)
The patent makes no sense, because it includes no description of a mechanism for achieving the stated objective. You should be able to get a patent on a particular method of doing something, but since when can you patent all possible methods of doing something? Especially when there aren't any. We have been doing this at work for over a decade, using IP address information from whois servers. It isn't very accurate, but it works well enough for us.
Daniel Feenberg
Time to rearchitect the net (Score:2, Interesting)
To protect the free flow of information which is at the core of a free society and an efficient and stable economy, location information must be eliminated from the network protocol.
Re:Not Censorship (Score:3, Interesting)
technical maybe. But meaningless? I don't think so.
I don't think you could call it censorship if e.g. your company denies the janitors access to payroll documents.
Re:No mechanism proposed (Score:3, Interesting)
The patent makes no sense, because it includes no description of a mechanism for achieving the stated objective. You should be able to get a patent on a particular method of doing something, but since when can you patent all possible methods of doing something? Especially when there aren't any. We have been doing this at work for over a decade, using IP address information from whois servers. It isn't very accurate, but it works well enough for us.
No, it's got a pretty decent description, sufficient that one of ordinary skill in the art of computer programming could implement it, without undue experimentation. What, you want code?
How is this different? (Score:5, Interesting)