IP: Publisher speaks out against Amazon patents

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 18:08:16 -0800
>From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim@oreilly.com>
>Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
>To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
>
>
>I've been pushing Amazon privately on the patent issue since January,
>but after not getting much traction, I went public with the following
>statement, which includes my formerly private email to Jeff Bezos, and
>some associated commentary, as well as an open letter to Amazon that I'm
>asking people to sign:
>
>http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/amazon_patent.html
>
>Obviously, I thought a lot about this before taking a public stance,
>since Amazon is now one of our largest customers, but in the end, I
>believe that if I didn't speak up, and let myself be intimidated by
>Amazon's market power, then other less technically savvy publishers
>would also be silent.  As Edmund Burke said, "All that is required for
>evil to triumph is that good men do nothing."  I don't want to say by
>that quotation that Amazon is evil, but they are certainly misguided and
>short-sighted, and we are all equally short-sighted if we stand by and
>do nothing.  Trivial and overly broad software patents are a great
>danger to the entire future of the Internet.
>
>I'd like to urge anyone with an interest in the subject to sign on to
>the petition referenced from this page, and I'd particularly like to
>urge any publishers who do substantial business with Amazon to speak up
>as I have.  They need to hear from all of us that what they are doing
>doesn't just hurt their competitors, it hurts their customers and their
>suppliers as well.
>
>--
>Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
>101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
>+1 707-829-0515, FAX +1 707-829-0104
>tim@oreilly.com, http://www.oreilly.com