
Textual watermarking from Amazon : United States Patent: 7610382 - wgj
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,610,382.PN.&OS=PN/7,610,382&RS=PN/7,610,382
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rajat
Oh, I can imagine how the author is going to love this. Look at the phrase
"... may not significantly alter the meaning of the excerpt ...".

Tell the author that all the time spent on finding the exact turn of phrase
was wasted; don't bother with a thesaurus to find which word you want, because
Amazon can just replace it to anything that approximately matches.

To be or not to have presence, that is the controversy.

Yuck!

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jrockway
Actually, this sounds exactly like copyright infringement.

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philk
As someone who likes actually buying and owning things, I'm getting sick of
legitimately purchased content being worse than the pirated alternative.

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jrockway
Like all measures against piracy, this one doesn't work.

Step 1: Go to the grocery store and buy a $20 prepaid debit card with cash.

Step 2: Via Tor, buy the e-book from Amazon.

Step 3: Upload to Bittorrent.

Step 4: There is no step 4. The book is pirated forever.

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tectonic
Don't they ask for a SSN when you activate those cards these days?

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mahmud
Not in Asia they don't.

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joeyo
This would be disastrous for scholarship. While I don't know anybody using the
Kindle right now to conduct research, it's not too hard to imagine that this
could become commonplace in the future. I already use Amazon's Look Inside
feature when I need to refer to a section of a book. But if they were to
implement this patent, then I can't rely on any quotes from a source as being
accurate.

Imagine now that you have cited some text that Amazon silently munged and
included it in your own book, which is now, of course, offered for sale via
Amazon. The original text could now be doubly harmed!

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wgj
I first saw this on slashdot:

[http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2236235/Amazon-
Patent...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2236235/Amazon-Patents-
Changing-Authors-Words?from=rss)

To me it looks like there would be ways to circumvent it. It also looks more
effective the larger the body of content, so aimed at large scraping projects.
Might not be conclusive on a single article.

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mahmud
I might have prior art on this, circa 2002; the original code didn't survive
but I have an online posting detailing it.

An ebook water-marking script in Perl which edited the book meta-data (index,
contents, preface, indentation, position of page numbers, fonts sizes,
colophon and other stuff to generate unique "on demand" copies of texts that
could identify the buyer.

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ananthrk
mind sharing a link to the said online post?

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mahmud
It's in a private community that I was active in.

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anamax
The claims read a lot like a system described in a Tom Clancy novel published
in the late 80s.

That system was used to discover the source of leaked classified materials. It
generated unique versions for each recipient by substituting equivalent text.

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devicenull
I'd suspect they are looking into this for their reviews. There are many, many
websites that screenscrape the amazon reviews, and try to make you think they
were from that site instead.

