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Ramblings

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Oct 13th 2005 9:54am





Searching For Free Samples For Paid Content? Patented!

from the *sigh* dept

One of the bigger questions in dealing with online search is how to deal with content that's behind a subscription wall. Earlier this year, Yahoo tried to address that somewhat by cutting deals with various paid content sites to let people see those results in their search results. Of course, you couldn't actually click through and read them unless you had an account with the specific source you were looking at, but it was at least a start. Now there's a new search engine that's trying to go a step further. It's working with subscription content providers to make some of their content searchable, with the idea that readers would be able to view some of the results for free. It's not entirely clear how they'll do this, but it may involve only letting you view a single result for free. In other cases, publications may limit the total number of "free views." Of course, thanks to the wonderful world of business model patents, the company claims it's patented this "business model." Once again, this hardly seems like something that should be patentable. It's likely that plenty of others have thought of it in the past, but decided it just wasn't worth doing. Why not let the idea compete in the marketplace, rather than holding patent protection over it?

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    irritating, granted....

    identicon
    Ben McNelly, Oct 13th, 2005 @ 11:33am

    Ok, as nice as it is to be able to pay to read these wonderfull articals, I would think I would be frustrated to follow a link in my search and find I have to PAY to se it?From personal experiance with going to forums and clicking on a link someone thought was going to share an interesting artical, and then everyone is irritated because you have to suscribe to it.
    - Hopefully they put a nice big green dollar sign icon by the "pay to read this!" articles...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: irritating, granted....

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Oct 13th, 2005 @ 1:04pm

    ok...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: irritating, granted....

    identicon
    Ben McNelly, Oct 13th, 2005 @ 1:25pm

    I mean, As much as I like Mike, I don’t think I would probably pay to read his articles. I am sure these services have their place, but in my opinion the internet should be a place to have access to information. And I wouldn’t have mentioned anything but its irritating they have to come out with a patent for it. It’s not about searching for relevant articles about the things people are interested in; it’s about marketing for paid services. Say, that gives me an idea, I need to go file a patent for a porn search and work out a deal with the sites to let searchers view part of the content so they will want to subscribe! Brilliant!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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