My Book “Patent and Copy Clashes Amongst Mainstreet USA Participants”
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we try to receive funds from someone’s original content!
Without entire dismissal of past precedence, it is the present conditions that present visible methods and means to witness a so-called “chilling effect” on creativity in exchange for rights to claim ownership to relatively intangible effects, such as a song or movie or even a book.
Let’s say I decide to sit down with pencil and paper with the intent on composing something I believe to be that of total and complete originality. I believe I am about to the paper a word combination never before seen quite this way, (despite critics calling foul for common plot line, perhaps) with intent on securing the right to claim such composition to be solely owned by me and no one else…because remember…I composed a collection of words combined in a way never before seen quite this way.
Further, I also don’t need a set of laws to tell me the paper in front of me with the pencil scribbles that I now own what I composed. It came through my movement of the pencil on the paper, it came out through patience when there was lack of movements and urgency when the movement was available. There was no content in front of me to duplicate and eventually, ta da! Voila! 6 months later, a book pops out and I decide to title it “Patent and Copy Clashes Amongst Mainstreet USA Participants,” believing the title is also of a fairly original nature.
It used to be that legal precedent was relatively straight-forward to demonstrate, inasmuch as the distribution resources available back in the 1900’s was entirely absent of the existing networking juice available for such a task and the potential for duplicate content to be created entirely absent of influence from either creator.
Subsequently, the uniqueness of a collection of content certainly plays a role in drawing any conclusion towards crediting a composer and yet it is with the boundaries drawn around collections of content and then tagging them with labels such as calling something a “song” compared to “lyrics,” let alone what constitutes a “book” relative to any other derivative provided by technology….
With audible riff gripings still abound (Vanilla Ice vs. Queen comes to mind, but that also might make me appear ancient rather than “youthful”!), it is in the gripings of those who claim to have been issued patents on a variety of patterns that provides a wind farm only able to generate icy airings not always reflected in court documents that can influence even the most confident of authors in terms of providing “original” materials.
For example, Webster’s Dictionary holds the copyright to its collection of words. The organization has staff that is responsible for compiling a collection that lives up to the branding expectations of the public with intent on converting the compilation into food, shelter and clothing for those responsible for the conversion. But what of the patent community that continues to strive for more micro controls over content, such as receiving patents associated with the process of associating data fields, regardless of whether or not the data fields were health-care driven or even customer contact driven?
So let’s say I was hired by a company to streamline “administrative processes” in the organization. As part of the strategy to achieve such effects, I participant in a group effort to identify data fields needing to be established and the relationships we believed would be needed to accomplish the task and turn our notes over to the IT department. The IT department designs a database based on our criteria using licensed database design software and launches it over the network. With a tweak here and there, the design fulfills the administrative needs of the organization and that should be that…
But patent laws provide room and ability to bring about intellectual challenge towards both patent laws and copyright laws in terms of what is designed to legally protect who while who is trying to protect what may sound complex within my sentence structure, but just imagine what happens when a patented authoring algorithm produces content not of actual ownership of the owner of the algorithm…
the results of a search are produced by a patented equation and yet the results display both copyrighted and public domain content in possibly a unique collection.
Does the searcher then own the copyrights to the results of their search, since it was their terms used to conduct the search to begin with? The algorithm itself possesses a significant level of safe harbor provisions built into existing laws, but what of the receiver of the signals from the searches using said algorithm? If they tinker with the results in any manner, wouldn’t that breach certain provisions of safe harbor, depending on what they tinkered with and what they used to do the tinkering…assuming there is profit lines built into the sustaining of the search? Would there be any way to discern the difference between internal tinkering designed to intentionally deceive and the external efforts to tinker with how their content is displayed from within said conduit?
It is the moment of conversion from paper and pencil into the digital that so profoundly pushes at every sense and sensibility possible – these existing levels of scoring means and methods for such a document is far more layered than implementing a Scan-Tron sheet scoring system, existing mandatory mental health screening software that allows for only yes or no questions (the only place for such blanket and systematic silencing and censoring should be permitted in a courtroom and under the watchful eye of a judge) a book editor doing their job,
Whereas the lawsuit between The Estate of Joe Brown and a roster of individuals alleged to have subverted copyright protections might offer a glimpse behind the types of fill-in-the-blank formulas to mount a copyright infringement lawsuit, it is in reviewing the multiple efforts between a health-care-related algorithm patent owner and two monster providers. The first challenge was against a software provider and the second challenge was against a search engine provider.
In having no other awareness of the circumstances surrounding the patent holder, my general awareness of the operational roles these two major providers hold in terms of virtual reality has always held major curiosity as to who can “own” what, how they can “own” it, with my quotation marks intended to loosen up the notion that anyone can “own” their own words – at least to the extent of participating in the monetization of said words. Remember the book I wrote with pencil and paper? Monetizing it used to mean assigning a dollar value to the collection and then engaging in the sales process.
So if this health-care patent owner can position themselves to claim violation of a version of the word association games being both copyrighted and patented by many, including the two major providers, would I somehow owe them a fee if I had the ability to possibly visualize the process they hold a patent on…or perhaps worse yet, accused of some form of sabotage, theft, etc. because I ended up revealing the core formula to the patent (i.e. the data field hierarchy and subsequent associations and scoring methods).
The tricky part is in the fact that just like Shakespeare covered the 8 basic conflicts in his compositions, there are only so many ways and means to structure data fields – regardless of their levels of interaction – and the suggestion that these two major providers somehow took on an associative design originally intended – and sold – only for the health care community to use is intriguing to say the least. Add to this another lawsuit winding its way between two of the major search engine providers, and these types of inadvertent clashes between patents and copyrights is what provides the speed of the wind farm I mentioned earlier and how it relates to this particular blog effort.
I am of belief that all content posted here represent a collection of copyrightable materials. It is of unique compilation caused and created by my own efforts and acting as a list provider, the derivatives contained herewithin have a unique feature that provides similar copyright authority as those who publish their own lists within a stock market setting, or even a dictionary.
With that stated, I also believe that said content is not of closed copyright protections and that should any of the content contained herewithin, including all content in its individual line item formation be reflected amongst either/both the copyright and/or patent databases is of inadvertent measure and a part of the natural process of evaluating, adjusting, etc. as sometimes referenced as “search engine optimization” or even “reputation management.” Any presence of these phrases as displayed through any search performed upon any site other that the Eliza Lee Coffee Installments is also of inadvertent measure and is simply reflective of existence of the exotic strings derivatives marketplace as perceived by any/all participants in such a notion.
Now all of this may make for great original content, even for the fictitious book I said I was writing as part of my example earlier in this entry. Also knowing at least one blogging service that offers up the connection to go ahead and convert the content on this blog into a manufacturable product, let alone all of the other online services offering a place to sell a book already in virtual format…
All of these patents in place to move my copyrighted material for profitability purposes and I’ll never see a cent cross my balance sheet…unless I perform a whole slew of conversion processes and procedures I don’t necessarily know how to perform even if I wanted to…and that any funds converted by my hosting service as a direct result of this collection (i.e. click traffic, etc.) falls well within Fair Use boundaries that make sense (they aren’t necessarily going to make millions from my content, but if they can make a few bucks, it covers their storage costs for my data, which is clearly prescribed under Fair and Reasonable Recompensation Rates and Ratios for Fair Use Publication and Distribution).
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we try to receive funds from someone’s original content! And even though “Patent and Copy Clashes Amongst Mainstreet USA Participants” as a book may be fictitious, it fits perfectly as a subject header for this particular clue to the content in this blog.
There’s paperwork on file laying claim to ownership of words.
There’s paperwork on file laying claim to ownership of pictures.
There’s paperwork on file laying claim to ownership of sounds.
There’s paperwork on file laying claim to ownership of the stars above.
So if it turns out there is life on one of these “now-owned” stars, is the registered owner responsible for defending one and all against harm? What about the rights of the life found on the star? Can the ownership papers be cancelled? Can the papers be bought and sold? Traded?
Whoever knows if a rose knows its own scent can certainly try to make sense of the other senses that keep deriving dollars and cents to the provider of the scent of a rose, but what of the bottled scents that compete with the original rose being the source of such a sensation?
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we try to receive funds from someone’s original content, especially when the originator is somehow written out of the benefits loops derived from such a composition being originated by the originator to begin with.
In summary, what’s the point of trying to come up with something original when the value of such a composition is almost guaranteed to be immediately “leaked” in some manner…let alone when such a composition is plugged into one of the many patented automations designed specifically to generated semantically “correct” content for an article directory…or a blog.
That’s the chill factor here. The amount of calculated effort needed to ensure even a modicum of measure of benefit for the originator is no longer about two song riffs being written almost identical while separated by every barrier imaginable, including that of geography makes it a circumstance in which weeks of work might translate into mere pennies…if anything…for the creator…while others begin the acclimation and valuation process associated with any original contribution.
With automated versus manual content generation being parallel to a copyright vs. patent content generation battle, automation still holds the greatest weight in terms of volume potential in terms of quantity of data and can create the greatest short-term losses and gains in terms of the overall keyword counts driving valuation systems of all scales and sizes.
So unless content holds some form of popularity factor that can elevate it past basic hierarchies as to how words are applied by the contributors into the various indexes, many exotic string derivative market niches stay underplayed or entirely ignored. In fact, there are symptoms within the speed of distribution of the Liza Moon script that suggests intimate awareness of this very marketplace, but this is not unique to the script and is more of an expected feature of how these scripts travel the scope and distance they manage to travel.
In the end, prioritizing which niches to participate within is a scientific art these various patents are useful to apply, such as with a variety of projection methods. But how much true loss of “value” is happening in terms of economics is directly tied into how this particular exotic string derivatives marketplace performs, underneath the more outward marketplaces such as the purchase of a domain name, purchasing ad space, etc. that eventually translates into organizations with names more familiar to the public than the company that took on the two major players I mentioned above.
That’s why it’s important to stay aware of the inner workings of these types of ranking trade-offs. Just because most people won’t read the results on page 101 of a search engine results roster doesn’t mean that these positions have no relevance or value and frequently quality content happens to be lingering amongst the larger, automated data sources that trend to take up the Top 100 or so slots. If people don’t actively dig past the larger data sources so that other sources appear, the Top 100 becomes a stagnant game fought between only those who possess the largest, fanciest, most expensive equipment and personnel…with a spike every now and again from usually predictable sources, with legends being built on (supposedly) unpredictable events, including the Flash Crash.
Perhaps some day there will be a thicker book on the topic of Patent and Copy Clashes Amongst Mainstreet USA Participants, but in the meantime it will simply remain my hope that these Eliza Lee Coffee Installments provide fair use insight into a very specific market niche in which the current competitions continue to climb upward and fall downward at dizzying speeds…
Eliza Lee Coffee Installments 