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Wired on Amazon.com Boycott
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Dec 20, 1999 10:41 AM
from the righteous-fury dept.
from the righteous-fury dept.
TGmentor wrote to let us know that Wired has an article about Richard Stallman's boycott of Amazon.com for its patent policies. The patent question is the recent victory that Amazon won over B&N for its 'one-click' shopping patent. Good work on the part of RMS [?] - we need to show companies that just because they can patent something, they don't need to.
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Wired on Amazon.com Boycott
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Re:Patents as a strong defense (Score:3)
A company can, as another poster has suggested, merely publish and leave patents unfiled. This is all well and good, but not really feasible for a company not founded in the public interest. As much as I'd like more companies to be in the public interest, I know that they are and will continue to be a minuscule proportion.
For that matter, perhaps it's especially important for companies doing research (for example, the FSF) in the public interest to file patents - after all, lacking large bankrolls to pursue litigation, they have little to trade except their patent portfolio. Publishing without patenting does not diminish litigation or points of contention; it would merely make the lines shorter at the patent office. Litigitous companies would be no less litigitous; ones less so would remain less so.
A patent itself is in the public interest. Companies are induced to publicize their advanced work with the reward of monopoly for a period of time. This is entirely consonant with, if not wholly inclusive of, the goals of free software. What we should fight is companies which seek to keep their research secret and out of the hands of the public. Trade secrets unpublished or unpatented are the real alternative to patents, not the trade or academic press.
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And we have a duty to protect freedom (Score:3)
which is why the boycott is the correct response. Amazon's attempt to enforce this patent shows how far things have gone towards patents being a form of anti-competetive corporate welfare - they are used not to protect R&D budgets against parasites (the original intent of patents) but to stake a claim in a developing market in order to prevent anyone else from competing. No open market system can tolerate this.
How this state of affairs can be in the interests of capitalism, the economy, software consumers, software programmers, web developers, the government, or the general public is beyond the ability of any rational being to explain or defend. The fact that most are either to ignorant or too amoral to care is no excuse.
Corporate bootlickers and other sycophants may disagree, but I urge all who believe in the freedom to innovate *not* to buy the big lie, and not to buy Amazon until it becomes their *fiduciary duty* to rectify the situation by taking proper initiatives.
Re:On the contrary... (Score:3)
The patent MIGHT be good for cross-licensing, but that is about it.
AT&T held the patent on the Transitor (Score:3)
Re:Amazon had a duty to patent (Score:3)
Essentially, the company's managers are making the argument that the shareholders gave them money while trusting they would behave like good businessmen.
However, this argument is suspiciously convenient. Claiming an implied, trusting contract with the voiceless shareholders falls into the same catagory as protecting the children; it is merely a way to distract attention from one's own motives. This is made clear by the typical ease with which executives take actions in their own interest and against the shareholders.
Fiduciary duty is not a bad thing, it is good. It is just a legal label for the duty of an executive to make reasonable efforts instead of just collecting his pay; it is saying that shareholders may trust in a basic level of performance from the people running the company. It is not the concept of fiduciary duty that I attack. I see fiduciary duty as a reasonable and good restriction on the powers of corporations.
But certain exploitations of certain types of opportunities don't fall under fiduciary duty. It seems to me that by bantering the phrase around carelessly, we risk letting ourselves be the tools of a propaganda effort that wants to spread the idea that any potential money-making effort by a company is required, and those executives are excused from normal moral and legal obligations.
A similar effort promoted the phrase "intellectual property", starting this whole thing. We need to kill the idea that there is anything but real property, made of atoms. Patents are just what the law defines them to be -- a restriction on the whole people in order to subsidize the reasearch efforts of a few, in order to encourage the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
In a similar way governments encourage other economic activities by restricting the activities of everyone. An early example is when the King of England gave monopolies on trade with colonies to certain companies, so that the companies would have incentive to settle and develope those lands. More recently, utilities were granted monopolies because it was presummed developing the massive infrastructures necessary would not be worth it unless you had a very long period of no competition. Our (the US Federal) government has the right to hand out monopolies on products and processes in order to encourage people to think of more of them. By using the phrase "intellectual property", we subtly spread the notion that you can "own" the exclusive right to manufacture something, just as you can "own" land.
And now by careless use of the phrase "fiduciary responsibility" or "fiduciary duty" we are going to subtly insinuate that corporate executives have an obligation to take advantage of any weakness in society (such as the current weak patent office).
Unless we post vigorously and often whenever the creeping mis-application of the phrase appears
I had Amazon wipe my account. (Score:3)
But this. This. I had to do something, and not just stop shopping at Amazon for a while. No, I've stopped shoiping at Amazon altogether, and paved over my account to make sure I don't again without real effort.
I wrote to Amazon and asked them to deactivate my account permanently. After sending a list of recent purchases as identity verification, they've pulled the plug. And I've bought a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff there.. including gifts and personal and business purchases.
Boycott, my ass. Burn your account. Ditto for Priceline, eBay and eToys. Tell them to do the right thing and set up a strawman case and file briefs with the Supreme Court in favor of knocking down these frivolous "everything old is patentable again on the web" patents.
Amazon had a duty to patent (Score:5)
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Book Reviews on Slashdot (Score:3)
Authors can't post those comments (Score:3)
RMS says that authors of books should post a comment regarding boycotting Amazon.com. Certainly, if my comment didn't make it past their censors, the authors' comments wouldn't either!
Re:Book Reviews on Slashdot (Score:5)
A boycott helps Amazon (Score:3)
However, since losing _LESS_ money goes against the official internet business plan, the stock price will probably plummet.
What to do, what to do . . .
Doomed. (Score:4)
The second problem is that amazon is a high publicity "can-do-no-wrong" media darling. A boycott will be taken in a negative light... and while it will generate lots of publicity, it will hurt the credibility of the GNU project if/when the boycott fails. Strike two.
The last problem is simply one of practicality - geeks are not a political bunch. Infact, many pride themselves on avoiding politics. And to quote another well-known member of the community, trying to get this to work would be like "trying to herd cats". What's worse - many geeks already believe (perhaps rightly so) that the USPO is a complete joke and that simply ignoring patents like these would be easier. Eventually somebody else will correct this broken system now, right? Strike three.
RMS, et al (Score:3)
Depending on how you interpret what was written (the article did NOT say he invented the Linux kernel), that statement is as true or as false as you choose to think of it.
As for Amazon, this is proof that software patents are neither desirable nor useful. In a way, it's kind-of sad that Amazon didn't patent a whole load more. Why? Because this is clearly a case of politicians, corporations and the general public perceiving it as "not bad enough", "not their problem" and "only affecting others".
IMHO, software patents will remain until some company makes it so odious for so many people that it's no longer possible to pass it off as an irrelevent foible.
Sad as it is, people in general don't give a damn until something affects them directly, and personally. Some remote super-giant company that can afford to pay the bill isn't going to earn any sympathy with anyone.
This Boycott is all wrong. (Score:3)
I agree completely that Amazon.Com's attempt to enforce this b*s* patent on (essentially) electronic commerce is nonsense. And I agree that we need to take action. I suggest that a boycott might not be the right answer.
Consider this: Amazon.com has yet to turn a profit. In fact, Amazon.com probably loses money on every book they sell. If the goal of a boycott is to harm the business economically in order to adjust their behavior, then the logical course of action would be to buy lots and lots of books from Amazon, all at once, and bankrupt the company. I therefore propose that we set up a "Boycott Amazon" website and set that website up as a partner of Amazon.com.
This reverse-boycott has other benefits to it. For one, we would increase the workload on Amazon's shipping infrastructure, potentially slowing other, less costly orders, from ever shipping. For another, if people buy books from the "Boycott Amazon" website (with the little link to Amazon), then each purchase will only hurt Amazon's pocket more by reducing the revenue of each sale by 5%. These proceeds can then go (for example) to the Free Software Foundation.
Comments?
The Kulturwehrmacht [onelist.com]
Patents as a strong defense (Score:4)
A point made by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) in his Autodesk File [fourmilab.ch] (North American mirror [fourmilab.to]) is that software companies are regrettably low on patents when compared to industrial or hardware companies of similar size. These patents are used defensively, in a cross-licensing scheme, if a violation is made.
Consider this example: company A uses technology possibly patented by company B. Company B sues. The lawyers will work out a deal where company B is licensed technologies of equal value from company A's patent portfolio - it may go all the way to a full exchange of licenses for all marketable technologies from both companies. Intel and Digital did this relatively recently.
The problem is that if company A doesn't have a strong or viable patent portfolio, it cannot protect itself against patent infringement suits. It may be required to actually shell out cash to settle a suit, which is against the interest of the shareholders (and may lead to the sacking of the management, besides).
While Bezos may be the largest single shareholder, he isn't the only one, and his share will decrease over time. Not to mention that he probably has no desire to lose his shirt in the short term, either.
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We plantation owners have a duty to own slaves (Score:5)
--J. Random Plantation Owner, 1855
Re:Amazon had a duty to patent (Score:5)
The fiduciary duty is limited to those reasonable business activities which a normal person would expect to be part of the business.
Perhaps someone can post a link to one of the online legal dictionaries on this term ?
There are other problems with invoking the fiduciary responsibilty argument. One of them is that many companies so obviously ignore their shareholder obligations when convenient -- look at some of the huge bonuses given to CEOs of failing companies, or some of the more famous merger deals. In general, I would say that courts believe that fiduciary responsibility will be protected in most cases by the market -- people will sell the stock. It has to be a greivous case, with secret dealings and maybe a non-publicly traded company, before judges will hand down an award.
Lastly, I'd like to remind everyone of the Archer-Daniels-Midland case -- someone could argue that those executives had a fiduciary duty to conspire with the Japanese to fix prices, but they went to jail for that, not for failing shareholder obligation.
Hopefully, Amazon will get slapped with a court settlement (judges can be vicious if they sense a big corporation is abusing the system to the detriment of the court system's reputation and power -- let's hope Amazon has to pay court costs and punitive damages), or burned by the boycott, and we'll teach those shareholders to ask their directors to avoid these tactics.
The problem with this boycott, is that Amazon is one of these internet dot-coms that don't seem to need any revenue. The way to really hurt them is to convience all your day-trading friends to short them.
Re:Boycotts are generally useless anyway... (Score:3)
To be effective, the boycott must be visible to others -- not just you and the company, not just you the company and the company's other customers -- but to the press and the public at large. There needs to be a ribbon you can put on your web site saying "We support the Amazon Boycott".
Re:Amazon had a duty to patent (Score:3)
The Latin root for the word "fiduciary" (fidere, I think) means "to trust". It has nothing to do with money, although it's often used in the context of "trusting" someone to respect the monetary interests of the trusting party.
ADM had NO fiduciary responsibilty to its stockholders to fix prices with the Japanese. On the contrary, ADM blatantly VIOLATED its fiduciary responsibility by acting illegally!
On the other hand, Amazon's action was not only legal, but the proper course of action. while I wouldn't go so far as to say companies are *obligated* to pursue patents, it's also clear that neglecting or intentionally declining to file a patent applicaiton on an innovation that materially affects entry barriers in a company's marketplace could open the company up to "legal problems".
A fiduciary responsibility is a *trust* responsibility NOT a *monetary* responsibility!