Tag Archives: intellectual property

Blockbuster to Still Get New Releases, While Netflix and Redbox Have to Wait

Mar 24, 2010 by Matt | Posted in General No Comments

Back in January I mentioned that Warner Brothers was pushing Netflix and Redbox into deals where they would not receive new DVDs until 28 days after the release date. (WB being under the impression that making it more difficult to rent films will cause people to buy them instead…) I said that I disapproved of that sort of customer-corralling, and thought it to be a rather bad business practice.

Well, it seems it’s time for an update on that…

Blockbuster, the decaying brick-and-mortar movie rental behemoth, will still be getting their new releases as they come out. The deal inked with Warner Brothers doesn’t just give Blockbuster a competitive edge to prop-up their failing business with, but it may mean that Blockbuster will be the only rental service to have new releases on their launch date.

In its announcement, Warner reaffirmed its commitment to assuring that Blockbuster remains the “only multichannel provider that has every hot new movie on the day of its release.” Indeed, with the agreements it struck with more innovative and competitive movie rental services like Netflix and Redbox, Blockbuster really is the only mainstream way for people to get movies on release day without buying them.

Can you say antitrust?

Viacom Uploads Their Content to YouTube While Suing Them for it Being There

Mar 23, 2010 by Matt | Posted in General 2 Comments

For the last couple years, there has been an ongoing legal battle between YouTube and Viacom. Viacom has been protesting their content’s presence on YouTube, demanding that they do more to prevent clips from being uploaded, and referring to the site as a bastion of piracy.

The plot is thickening, as a recent blog posting from YouTube shows.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

It’s hard to tell whether this was an intentional plot against YouTube, or if this is a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing. The music industry, also, has had mishaps where the marketing arm distributed songs online as a promotion, only to have the legal department send DMCA notices to the sites hosting the music. It’s certainly possible that the hired marketing agencies were trying to artificially kickstart “viral marketing” campaigns with the “roughed up” video clips, and the legal teams were unaware. Either way, it’s bad.

U.S. Patent Office Awards Amazon 1-Click Patent

Mar 18, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Design No Comments

In 1997, Amazon filed for the infamous “1-Click Patent,” a “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network” using a single click.

Now, many companies other than Amazon use that exact same paradigm, some of them may have even been using it before Amazon. ITunes, for instance, stores your credit information so you can instantly buy songs with a single click, and a confirmation dialog, rather than wasting your time with a virtual “shopping cart.”

The U.S. Patent Office, in 2006, started an inquiry into the questionable nature of the filing. Unfortunately, that has ended. The patent has been confirmed, and is set to expire in 2017.

…the 1-Click patent, after Amazon’s amendments, is “a slightly narrower version but essentially the same version.” He added: “This case may be a public relations boon for supporters of patent reform that have been calling for an overhaul of the reexamination system.”

What does this mean for online business? The one-click model is fairly commonplace in online commerce, particularly with services selling entertainment media.

Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam [TechFlash]

Did Facebook Just Patent Twitter?

Mar 3, 2010 by Matt | Posted in General 6 Comments

Facebook was just granted a patent for something that should prove to be controversial. Patent #7,669,123, which was filed for in 2006, is for “A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment…” The abstract reads:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

It sounds to me like they just patented a fairly obvious mechanism that has been long used by sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, RSS readers, blogs, etc..

Am I the only one who isn’t okay with this sort of patent-trolling behavior? Why does the USPTO keep letting these kinds of application through? It’s bad enough that Amazon is still fighting to have their one-click buying patent approved, and now we have another stupid patent that is just too obvious. Facebook is by no means the first website to have a “news feed,” and the idea is hardly patent-worthy.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them? [TheNextWeb]