Amazon has been sued by Cendant for violation of its patent for “System and Method for Providing Recommendation of Goods or Services Based on Recorded Purchasing History”. Cendant claims Amazon’s “recommendations” feature infringes its patent because it tells customers who are interested in an item what other products were purchased by customers who bought the same item. Ridiculous.
Poor Amazon–yeah, the same one that sued Barnes and Noble for infringement of its ridiculous one-click patent. I really weep for them.
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These suits, and the software patents they are based upon, need to start being thrown out on their faces.
Unfortunately, every time there is a win or even a settlement, the supposed legitimacy of software patents is reinforced.
At the same time, the more empirical evidence showing the absurdity of these software patents is noted, the further along the idea that all patents and all copyrights are equally, generally, similarly absurd. Ideas, the use and employment of them, will necessarily be *socialist*, owned by all and owned by no one. Perhaps it will be the basis of the Great Compromise between Socialists and Libertarians, as expounded by the elucidation of the deductive knowledge of economics.
rtr, no. My labor, which I own, include my thinking and my inventing. I object to patents, but I do not object to ownership. A patent on “opening a window” is absurd, because I can open a window in my living room without ever having studied the method in the patent.
Software patents are outrageous because they, in fact, prevent me from letting air into a room because someone, somewhere, took out a patent on doing so.
I don’t object to ownership either. Only property is ownable, which includes person and landed materials. How can a person own an idea if it can be thought simultaneously in multiple heads? Two people cannot exclusively own the same space at the same time in the material dimension. This square acre is mine and not yours or yours and not mine. That is why property exists in the material dimension only and not in the realm of ideas.
rtr-
quite right! patents and copyright represent some of the most blatent government-business partnership pandering today (along with side-door expansion of copyright through legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) e.g. region-coded dvd). these are government granted monopolies, which create artificial transaction costs.
knowledge really has no natural scarcity and along with a relatively small transaction cost really has no viable purpose as property except to distort price via government regulation. if you had a star trek replicator and could duplicate any resource at will with a minimum of effort, its scarcity and thus exclusive ownership would be dubious.
the usefulness of competition and ownership really only applies to scarce resources for efficient management purposes. nobody yet owns the air we breathe. as you say, owned by all and owned by no one.
-z
Yall should read some of Kinsizzle’s articles on the subject of IP.
Dell is being sued by a company that claims to have a patent on web sites conducting e-commerce globally with multiple languages, taxes, tariffs, duties, shipping, and handling costs:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=52200234
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