Amazon Patents 'Maintaining Scarcity' of Goods 240
theodp writes "Back in Biblical times, creating abundance was considered innovative. That was then. Last Tuesday, GeekWire reports, the USPTO awarded Amazon.com a broad patent on reselling and lending 'used' digital goods for an invention that Amazon boasts can be used to 'maintain scarcity' of digital objects, including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else."
To promote the progress of (Score:5, Interesting)
science and useful arts.
USPTO, please read the Goddamn Constitution.
Physical objects wear out, digital objects don't (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And of course ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Any form of private property is a government enforced monopoly
The owner of the property has exclusive rights to it backup up by government
Private property is the core of "free enterprise"
The birth of industrial capitalism was formed by the "privatization" of traditional agricultural commons, impoverishing the peasant class and creating a cheap workforce for the factories of free enterprise.
The privatization of innovation eliminates the intellectual commons in a similar way
Re:Patents are by definition not the free market (Score:4, Interesting)
False.
The 'free market' is not a real entity, its a social construct, and it can only exist where property rights are defined and defended - by government force. ALL property, patents or land, is created in this way. Its called enclosure (or inclosure, as it was spelt when this first happened to land in England.
What is going on here is entirely consisted with the 'free' market (quotes because I refuse to pass on the propagandistic notion that markets have anything to do with freedom) - it is in fact what has been going on since the very dawn of capitalism. You secure exclusive access to something by force (generally via a government, which markets cannot exist without) and then you sell it back to the people you have denied it to.
Re:And of course ... (Score:2, Interesting)
On the contrary ... I've read Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and all the usual stuff and drank the Kool Aid for most of a decade ... and I've come to decide it's a bad fiction. I know a lot about what makes a free market, I just don't think it works or is something we'd want.
See, that's where I have decided the goal of a free market is bullshit, and laissez-faire capitalism is a stupid idea.
See, without someone enforcing rules on companies, they would dump toxic chemicals into streams, put melamine in baby formula, use substandard materials in construction, sell you 'medicine' which is actually lethal (or nothing at all), and generally act like the miscreants they'd like to be. Because they would be motivated only by profit, and what they can get away with.
A purely free market is an absolutely dangerous thing, and the belief that this notional (and fictional) market would find optimal solutions is complete and utter horseshit. Do you really think when that company was putting melamine into baby formula the 'market' would have found a solution and that people would be free to choose not to buy toxic baby formula? The only solution to prevent companies from generally screwing everybody else over is to impose regulations and laws on them.
If the sole function of government is to enforce property law and contracts for the wealthy, and mostly allow the corporations to do as they please up to some arbitrary point -- well then the rest of the society eventually says "fuck it, this isn't working for us at all" and decide they don't like being serfs any more.
Capitalism will never go away, because people will always own 'stuff' (which is essentially what capitalism means) -- but you really can't in the long run have some fantasy 'free' market where it's the sole job of government to protect the property and freedom of that market. You need to balance the needs of everybody else against that, and you need to make damned sure they're not fucking things up.
People advocate for getting rid of environmental laws, banking laws, product safety laws, and all of the other frameworks which would keep us from devolving into either anarcho-capitalism or an oligarchy. But those people have their own almost religiously irrational belief that this would somehow make it so we all live in a better place with awesome outcomes -- for instance, Trickle Down Economics tells us cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations claims this solves everything, when that doesn't actually work.
Sorry, but a world in which governments didn't regulate safety and the like would rapidly devolve into some really bad outcomes. And your notional market is going to do a piss poor job of fixing that.
Re:And of course ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're making the mistake that a lot of modern Capitalist political/economic rubbish relies on: assuming that the words used to describe economic organization (in this case, "owned by"), have a universal and absolute meaning identical with their present usage.
Yes, land just about everywhere has historically been "owned" by someone. But "ownership" is a particular bundle of de jure and de facto practices that changes with time and place --- for large segments of history, land being "owned" by some lord/king was not at all exclusive with use as "commons." Only later was the definition and practical exercise of "ownership" shifted towards our contemporary notion of "private property." But I suppose paying historical attention to the actual conditions of production "on the ground," instead of tossing around terms like "ownership" as though they were handed down immutable from God, would be too "Marxist" for you.