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Patents

CDDB Joins The Bad Patent Club 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-I-patent-a-searching-with-wildcards? dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Today I received a very ominous package from GraceNote, owners of CDDB. Already infamous for turning a wonderful open project into a quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses, the package from GraceNote contained one thing: copies of their patents, freshly awarded. "Don't even think about using FreeDB", the packaged seemed to silently imply, "because we own the patents, period." That patent? "Method and system for finding approximate matches in a database." Ouch. Thanks, USPTO." Scary: I use freedb constantly. I'd hate to lose it.
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CDDB Joins the Bad Patent Club More

CDDB Joins the Bad Patent Club

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  • CDDB was originally GPL right? And FreeDB still uses the original GPL code before CDDB changed their licence. The GPL states that if patents are granted they must be freely licenced. It would be interesting to see a court test this one out.

  • Once again: READ THE PATENT (Score:5)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:10PM (#570997)
    The idea is based of CDDB, but it's NOT the CDDB database directly. The patent describes actions that a browser can take in synch with musical content that is played from a CD player. So, for example, the streaming of music lyrics to a Java applet, the synching of a music video to the music from the CD, or actions in a chat room. Yes, the idea of retrieving the CDDB database entry for a file from this could be covered, but the claims don't appear to do this. (And as others pointed out, they really have no way to defend this aspect in court). The title is very poor, as the patent's more focused on how to time and synch with musical playback, as opposed to fuzzy searching.

  • Sure. (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:10PM (#570998)
    Ever heard of the EFF?

    Pro Bono?

    Better me than them; I don't have much to lose...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • And I thought that "but everyone else is stealing too" argument was a pretty weak one, usually used by young kinds?
  • freedb.org is currently located in Germany with a couple of mirrors.
  • CDDB does claim some sort of ownership for the contents of their database: "Any information obtained through CDDB may only be aggregated on the client machine, and must not be shared." I'm not quite sure on what grounds they do this (I've submitted several disc tracklists, and I never saw any mention of any agreement that might give them ownership of that information...
  • Apart from the prior art, those jokes hardly satisfy the non-obviousness criteria.

    Hey, I have an idea. Allow Slashdot readers to filter based on posters' "age". New users should, I think, be in read-only mode for the first few weeks but I wouldn't want to enforce that belief on others, so allow me to make the decision only for myself.
    --

  • US patent system (Score:4)

    by SimonK ( 7722 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @09:04AM (#571003)
    What you describe is certainly what the American patent system has come to, but it was not the intention. The patent office, until recently, researched the claims in a patent with considerable care and accuracy. In principle they still have duty to do so, and frequently reject the initial patent application with examples of possible prior art, usually from other patents. Whats changed is that patent exmaminers are now encouraged, by the way they are payed to pass everything, and the patent office has poor records of the existing prior art for many fields in which they are issuing patents, especially softwate and business models.

    I'd tend to agree that civil servants are not the appropriate people to determine obiousness or novelty, but, due to the great expense of challenging a patent, nor are the courts. The existing system allows patent holders to exploit their competitors for licensing fees as long as these remain below the expenditure needed to challenge the patent.

    If you're going to have a patent system, and especially if you're going to allow patents in so many fields, wouldn't the appropriate thing to do be to allow challenges by interested parties during the examination process, as most European patent offices do ?
  • If at first you don't succeed...
  • The patent is not for the idea of a database, its for the idea of identifying a cd based on a database accessed through a network by matching the cd's tracklengths to information in the database, and thus identifying the album.

    So, what is prior art? A database? A database searchable through the internet (like a search engine)? A database searchable through the internet full of song information and album information (which includes the track length - I'm sure there is some prior art for this, knowing musicophiles). Or does that data have to be used to identify a specific CD? What can you point to as prior art and say the CDDB's patent is just a logical outgrowth of x?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Why is this scary? (Score:4)

    by ShortSpecialBus ( 236232 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:11PM (#571007) Homepage
    See, the thing here, if you acutally follow the link for the patent, is that the slashdot story is slightly misleading as to the severity of this. Here is the patent summary...
    Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording.

    That has nothing to do with every other database on the planet...that would be ludicrous. This is actually something that they more or less "invented" and can patent it. As for the prior license stuff, I dont pretend to know squat about that. But have no fear that this patent is trying to stop all database searches or anything like that. That would just be obnoxious and overturned in two seconds...But then again I may just be talking out of my ass. I have a habit of that.
  • This patent doesn't actually read like its gonna hurt too much. I mean, I could be completely mistaken, and (oh god... about to use my first /.ism) IANAL (that hurt), but it seems straightforward enough.

    Here is the abstract:
    Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded.
    The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording.

    All this does is cover the use of the browser to run an embedded plugin which grabs information from a database to show data related to the cd (or music recording). The only way this would be really bad is if they tried to claim control over non-physical recordings as well. (mp3s vs cd's)

    In any case, unless your freedb access is done via a plugin in your browser, we seem to be ok.

  • Refused rocks (Score:4)

    by Cardhore ( 216574 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:12PM (#571009) Homepage Journal
    p.s. don't bother making (Funny +5) comments like "I'm going to patent breathing or whatever" We've heard it before.

    Don't worry -- I patented that.

  • Wait a minute.
    What about spelling checkers... they use approx matches to find mis-spellings. Doesn't that mean that the "no one has done it before" clause of patents is violated?
    Not to mention search engines that find things based on how relevent they are.


    They should declare this election a draw and give Clinton another term. :-)
  • Here's the </i> that i embarassingly left out of the post above.
  • First Claim:
    What is claimed is:
    1. At least one computer program stored on a computer-readable medium, embodying a method of searching for a match in a database of a plurality of records, where the records in the database include length information and number of segments for recordings corresponding to the records, comprising:
    calculating approximate length information for the records in the database and for a selected recording having a number of segments;
    and determining at least one approximately matching record in the database for the selected recording based on the number of segments and the approximate length information.

    Hmmm... a computer program stored on a computer-readable medium. Yup. Printouts of code don't work that well.

    A database of a plurality of records. Sure, that means more than one record, because one record does not a database make.

    Calculating length information for a record... I might be able to get this:

    select sum(a.track_length)
    from record_tracks a, records b
    where a.record_id = b.record_id
    and b.record_name = 'The Wall'
    and b.artist_name = 'Pink Floyd';

    So, if I'm working for a client that has timing information in a database with more than one record, and I need to calculate total times, I'm going to have to pay CDDB to write a basic SQL query? Fuggedahboutit!

    Eric

  • I can't tell exactly from the changelogs, but WorkMan [midwinter.com] appears to have had a cd database before xmcd [ibiblio.org]. First entry in the changelog of WorkMan was 12/24/1992; first entry in xmcd changelog was 11/08/1993. Interestingly, in the xmcd changelog for Version 1.1, 02/25/1994:

    - A wm2xmcd utility is now included in the xmcd distribution that converts WorkMan CD database files to xmcd format.

  • It's unfortunate that the term for "legal work for a good cause" sounds just like a term meaning perpetual copyright [8m.com]: Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?] [everything2.com], the act that extended the term of all subsisting and new copyrights by 20 years and set a precedent that every 20 years, 20 more years are added.
  • hrmm...a lot of it seems ripped off of mp3 playing scripts for mIRC, because those have been around for years, and have been able to synching stuff with others, chat room stuff, etc.

    -motardo
  • To qualify for a utility patent, an invention must be new, useful, and "nonobvious."

    I find this rather amusing. Does this mean that none of Microsoft's patents are valid? I suppose you could consider it useful - it gives some people hours of amusement - watching for that randomly appearing bluish screen...

    And nonobvious... Selling crap is a pretty obvious idea... And the phrase "prior art" comes to mind. But then again, I'll give them (Microsoft) credit - they have taken selling crap to a new extreme.

    And who says that Microsoft's stuff is new? A lot of the stuff in their code is at the very least "inspired" by pre-existing stuff.

    So what does all this mean? Perhaps it is now legal to freely distribute Microsoft software? No, that might help drag more people into using it!

  • You don't like it, don't live here. You should be so lucky you have the ability and to "Apply for US citizenship"! I can't think of any better government than the one established in the US. JT
  • Hmm... If you don't pay full attention, this almost sounds like a good thing. They patented

    Thus, a really strict (and surely incorrect) interpretation of this means that my local TV/radio stations have to pay royalties to them. Perhaps they just won't run ads anymore? ;-)

  • When reading a patent, the interesting part is the claims, not the summary or the sometimes dozens of pages and figures that precede the claims. Thus, ShortSpecialBus's conclusions, being based only on the summary, have little basis. To read the claims, look lower on the cited page and click on the link to show claims. That is where you will find the meat of this patent. bob wyman (Note: I hold four patents as sole inventor and have some experience in this matter.)
  • "Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording."

    They go on to talk about what they are really claiming to have invented, which is basically a way to simulate (via the internet) a group of people in a room with a stereo. And multimedia content. (Glorified karaoke.)

    Reading the "Summary of the Invention" section of the patent application, here's how I interpret it:
    1. Contolling a CD player remotely (there was a Winamp plugin that did this a few years ago.)
    2. Linking multimeida contet via internet
    3. Assigning a unique identifier to a musical track. (Windows' CD player did this. Was that after CDDB?)
    4. Adding background music to a chat room. (There are dozens of scripts for mIRC that do this. No doubt a few 10 year olds are now guilty of "stealing" their invention.)

    Not only am I not a lawyer, I have no idea how lawyers' minds work. When they talk about things like a web browser, IRC, and HTML documents, are they effectively restricting the scope of the patent, or are they just giving examples?
  • Let them try.

    I want to see them sue every library in existence.

    (I think we'll have some prior art here.)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Isn't CDDB GPL? (Score:3)

    by Shelrem ( 34273 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @09:32PM (#571022)
    To quote,

    "As I understand, the owner of a work can change the copyright/liscencing however he pleases. FreeDB can use all of its orginal code as long as the authors consent... This is why the FSF encourages people hand over ownership of programs to them..."

    Then you misunderstand. IANAL, but i know my licensing, and the way the GPL works is that if i produce something and then GPL it and distribute it, then later take the program, which i do have the intellectual property rights to, and make it closed-source, pay software, then it's my right to do that. HOWEVER, what i do not have a right to do is change the licence of all the previously distributed copies. Those are forever under the GPL and my be modified without my consent or aproval.

    AFAIK, the FSF does NOT ask that people turn over ownership of programs to them, as it would only be a hastle as far as i can see.

    I have to wonder if the original message was intentionally spreading FUD, or if it was just FUD from ignorance... I think i'll contemplate this over a game of Tetrinet.

    -benc

  • Re:Curious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, many of the unenlightened people around here know what an EULA is, for the uninformed its an End User Licence Agreement.
  • Is the "redundant" rating some sort of witty double-joke here? I was commenting on the very fact that my redundancy actually served to get my repeated comment moderated up. If you're paying attention, then THIS post should me moderated down for "OFFTOPIC."
  • but I have to commend whomever at the patent office searched their database to see if a similar patent existed.

    Raw stupidity like that is what keeps the rest of the world believing Americans are all like that.

    Cheers,

    leroy.
  • Assuming that this applies to FreeDB (which I don't think it does) I think that there is prior art. The patent was applied for in 1999, and I think FreeDB existed before that time.
  • Based on the abtsract:

    Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording.

    Wouldn't: downloading the complementary entertainment content prior to playing the CD or other device and using the local copy successfully circumvent this patent? The script stored on a remote computer would nolonger be syncronizing with the play of the musical recording.

  • I'm kind of alarmed to hear this news. I've been following a project headed by Robert Kaye [mailto] called Musicbrainz [musicbrainz.org]. Basically its planning on being the open standard for music metadata served on a distributed system for replacing the proprietary licensed CDDB. All data is entered in by the public, moderated by the public, and distributed under the Open Content License which means it will be forever free.

    They haven't quite made their official release, but hop on over and show some support. The original data comes from FreeDB.

    http://www.musicbrainz.org [musicbrainz.org]
    ------
    Jacob Everist
    wildmage@mad.scientist.com

  • Strange....approximate quering has been arround for quite a while in the database research community. If I recall correctly, Stanford and Wisconsin did research on approximate answers. Stanford is on approximate querying and Wisconsin paper did on approximate aggregation functions.

    The papers are called
    * Offering a Precision-Performance Tradeoff for Aggregation Quries over Replicated Data by Chris Olston and Jennifer Widom published in 1999
    * Online Aggregation by Hellerstein, Hass and Wang published in 1997

    And both papers refer to other older approximate querying process. So unless the patent is for something else, there are prior art for it (I couldn't figure out what they were saying in the patent - too much lawyer-speak)
  • Heck, there's already an ANSI standard for this. How can you patent a function performed by an industry standard?

    SELECT Product, Company
    FROM AllDatabasesEverMade
    WHERE Feature LIKE "*SQL*" OR Structure="Relational"
    ORDER BY DateProduced;

    ---
  • Notice what is patented: a means to index and retrieve information in the music CDs. They are not claiming that the content of the Database is solely theirs (they wouldn't do it with a patent, anyway) they are claiming that they thought out / bought out the idea of creating such a database and accessing through a computer network.
    The solution would be to find prior art that shows that to be untrue, but I don't know if anyone really came up with that idea before the (then free) CDDB folks.
    That is really a bad kind of patent (not unlike one-click and the like) but since the US Patent Office is accepting them and noone seems to have power to stop them, it will not be the last of those.
  • For instance:

    "Dot Com Development, Inc", "Method and apparatus for tracking client interaction with a network resource and creating client profiles and resource database".

    sounds like something familiar...

    I think the abstract of that patent is a real gem. 176 words in the sentence using only 58 different words. And it actuallly wants to say something. Cute.

  • like it or not, patents have evolved into a corporate weapon, under the current model, how can anyone fault cddb, or amazon for patenting anything they can.

    I can very easily fault any business for unethical business practices. There are a fair number of business apologists who say that a company cannot be faulted for legal though unethical practices. Why would that be so? Businesses are not magically above being held to a moral code by consumers.

  • ...but what is it about this "invention" that is NOT OBVIOUS to someone "skilled in the art"?
  • My mum thinks the rubbish I listen to isn't music. I'm sure she thinks the same about _your_ listening tastes too. So we're not covered by this.

    FP.
  • The prior art is the guy who can tell you what a classical album is by reading the groves. I saw him on telly once. He can look at the approximate length of the movements and their dynamics, and tell you what piece of music it's likely to be.

    FP.
  • Well, NOW you can't because you've posted to this forum and cannot spend moderator points here. Goofball.

  • Yes - make it 2 part
    1) insert CD, grab data, but _don't_ play CD
    2) play CD, display previously snarfed data
  • If you're not trying to file your own patent but are instead just trying to do something, then all that matters is the claims. The rest (the "teaching") is the price the inventor pays to educate the public about the claims. If you're doing something that's in the claims, then you have to worry about the patent. If you're doing something that's in the teaching but not covered in the claims, then the patent has no bearing. Someone else's might, of course.
  • The patent describes actions that a browser can take in synch with musical content that is played from a CD player. So, for example, the streaming of music lyrics to a Java applet, the synching of a music video to the music from the CD, or actions in a chat room

    No, that's not what is claimed at all. That's what it sounds like from the abstract, but you must read the claims [delphion.com] (scroll down page to see them) to get to the legally important bits. For instance, they claim:

    • A method of searching for a match in a database of a plurality of records, where the records in the database include length information and number of segments for recordings corresponding to the records
    • A method ... wherein said determining obtains a value indicative of a difference in length between corresponding segments of the selected recording and the at least one approximately matching record in the database
    This patent absolutely covers FreeDB's technology. Furthermore, I don't remember any prior art before CDDB was around. Finally, the concept is non-obvious, except with the benefit of hindsight (now that it exists, it seems obvious).

    I don't agree that this should be patentable, mind you (at least not for the length of time that software patents last), but I wouldn't count on it being thrown out of court.

  • It seems there is a veritable laundry list of IP laws and crummy patents that people hate. From the laws protecting CSS from reverse-engineering to Amazon's infamous "1-click" patents. It seems to me that these things all have a common thread. Is it that they curtail something "sacred" (free expression? innovation? free enterprise?), or that it permits something nasty (monopolies? expansion of corporate controll?)?

    In either case, can the current law be interpretted better so as to assuage these conserns, or is there something wrong with current law? It seems to me that the basic principles for gaining a patent on something are pretty restrictive. If I were a judge, I would be very dubious as to the validity of patents on software at all. In the strictest reading of the law, it would seem to me that software (and data in general) cannot be patented because it is merely information, and doesn't "do" anything. This would put it firmly in the arena of copyright law. If I were conviced that software is patentable, I would only allow process patents for software, which are the hardest to get.

    I know this is somewhat of a side issue, but personally, I would never, under any circumstances, grant or uphold a patent on a gene. The very idea seems absurd to me - it would be like an astronomer patenting a particularly interesting globular cluster because they found it first. I might allow patents on drugs that utilize particular genes, but the gene itself is part of nature. I would require that a gene be written from scratch or be sustantially and directly modified inorder to be patentable.

    What is the "right" way of looking at IP law? I mean this in both the ethical and the legal sense. It seems to me that the government is not granting patents in accordance to the letter and spirit of the law. Nonetheless, it seems comfortable in the way it grants them. Why is the government muddying the waters?

    The knee-jerk response is that what big money wants, big money gets. But there has always been pressure from big money to grant and enforce spurrious patents. Today, though, it seems that nearly every modestly clever idea is being rubber-stamped by the patent office. It seems to me that this shift in standards coencides with a similar slip in rigorous interpretation of the first amendment. What happened? Or am I just paranoid?

    --

    --

  • In the early 1990's there was a company called Frox that made a really expensive CD Player/VCR/etc, kind of like a Replay TV/TIVO/MPG Jukebox/etc. all rolled into one. I believe it used a hash of the CD track times to identify the CDs.

    Might that be prior art for this patent?
  • So can I patent a 'Method and system for kinda doing something with somekind of computing hardware which results in some sort of output'?


    ------------------------

  • Even if they could hold it up, it's too specific to be any good.

    First, the describe using a browser to access the network and then a plugin for that browser being used to download complementary content. I think you could make a strong case for a CD player not being a browser, but instead a database client or application. And if it includes the CDDB like feature as a base part of the feature set instead of a plugin...

    Then, a "script" is downloaded from the remote computer and syncronizes the delivery of the complementary content with the playback.

    Except that in the case of a CDDB like system, all you have to download is an XML (or whatever) data stream (basically the content itself) and there is no "script" at all! It's the application itself that is responsible for syncronizing the content with the playback. In case you DID actually want to have some dynmaic control pver presentation stored on the server, you could simply have a Java class file (not a script, but a small application) that's downloaded and then controls synchronization.

    I don't see who this patent would affect apart from the music industry wanting to do some synchronized web/music stuff in future CD"s.
  • As we know, patents are the ultimate definition of what is is. That copyright, etc. are used as large clubs by those with the $$. As the recent sillyness in Florida has demonstrated, deep pockets can keep courts buys for a long long time. Unless you are willing as a company to go mano a mano with the other folks funding, its hard to enforce rights you may have. Unfortunate, but that is reality.
  • Second, the actual database itself is composed of submissions. Unless, I explicitly disclaim ownership of the submitted data, how can cddb claim to own it?

    Hate to break it to you, but YOU don't own jack shit, the record companies do!

  • Re:Curious (Score:5)

    by David Hume ( 200499 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:43PM (#571048) Homepage

    Couple of problems. Since the original developers licensed the program that had cddb code in it under a fairly free license, doesn't that mean, that they can't later revert it?
    I'm not sure what you are saying here. I think you may be confusing copyright and patent law. Or you may be raising a very interesting question regarding the operaton of the doctrines of waiver, estoppel, and/or an implied in fact or implied in law patent license.

    Assume you invent something. The invention is embodied in software. First, you have a copyright on the writing -- i.e., the code. You then -- as and only as a matter of copyright law -- grant a license to others to copy and modify the code. It could be the GPL, BDS license, whatever.

    Further assume that -- perhaps unknown to everyone -- you apply for a patent on your invention. The patent is awarded. Does the fact that -- again as and only as a matter of copyright law -- you licnesed others to copy and modify your code effect the validity of your patent? No.

    However, the fact you licensed others to copy and use your code may effect the enforceability of your patent -- at least against your copright licensees. A court may say that you have waived any right to obtain damages against such copyright licensee. A court may find you are estopped from obtaining any damges from them for past use. (I would certainly hope, and expect so.) Whether it would prevent you from obtaining injuctive relief regarding future use is an interesting question. A court may find that you have waived such relief, are estopped from seeking such relief, and/or that you granted an implied in law or implied in fact patent license when you granted the copyright license. Again, an interesting issue.

    Second, the actual database itself is composed of submissions. Unless, I explicitly disclaim ownership of the submitted data, how can cddb claim to own it? As far as I know, you need to explicitly give away rights.
    They don't claim to own the information. They don't claim to have a copyright on the information. They don't, as far as I know, even claim to have a copyright on any particular database. They are claiming a patent on a method of operating, utilizing or making a database. Again, it is important not to confuse patent law with copyrhight law.

  • How does that patent you linked have anything to do with freedb (or cddb's current services, for that matter)?
  • If the CDDB people cause trouble for the free system, perhaps track and album info could be transfered to a distributed database, perhaps running on gnutella.

    It wouldn't be as reliable at first, but eventually it would fill up as people added their own entries.

    Seems this kind of solution is going to be more and more common as open projects seek to slip beyond the reach of litigious patent holders look for a way of making money out of the completely obvious and unoriginal...
  • What's more approximate than one of these so-called Internet Dating Services? Hell, go back even further, to strengthen the argument: the generic "computer dating service". That's prior art on a "method for finding approximate matches in a computer database". All they could argue on the patent is the specifics of implementation - the very detailed specifics. Oh.. and given the performance of *some* database systems we've all heard of, *any* query on a database exposed by that query engine could be considered "approximate". Can that count as prior art?
  • I don't believe we need to go so far as making patents, copyrights and trade secret protections completely go away, but rather weaken them substancially, especially when the recipient of such is a company. 21 year long patents in an industry that is only roughly 30 years old doesn't make sense, and it's high time that the government and patent offices recognise that. Software patents in general will do nothing more than stiffle competition and innovation for years to come, and unless politicians stop just glaring at the dollars big business wants to wave at them, it's unlikely to change.

    Personally, I'm just waiting to see when Disney decides that 95 years for copyright protection isn't enough since Mickey Mouse will be close to entering the public domain yet again.

  • Well, it looks like it is time to move to a different country. Most other western nations that I can think of (Most of Europe, Canada, Austrailia, New Zeland, ect..) don't have these stupid patent offices/laws, nor do they have the DMCA, UCITA, of (back when it was relevant) crypto export laws. Perhaps southern california is not the best place to conduct high-tech buisness after all. :)
  • It should be interesting to see the cddb people go after microsoft with this patent. The new windows media player 7 will rip/encode music for you and pulls cd track listings off of an online database, but not from cddb (or freedb for that matter).

  • The FSF likes people to assign copyrights to them,

    a) to guarantee that it will stay free, and
    b) so that responsibility for policing infringements then falls into the hands of the FSF (and it's panel of experts and lawyers). This sort of thing helps fight off GPL violations, where the original author may not have the time or resources to do it for him/herself.
  • That was a really good laugh at the end of a bad day. Witty and subtle (in a manner of speaking, anyway.) Thanks, plunge.
  • FWIW, I meant patents, not copyright law. Call it a mental typo.

    /ZL
  • The Windows CD player, at least as of 1996, also had similar functionality. I entered a large number of CD title/track lists, and then lost them when I got a new office machine and forgot to copy that file.

  • Re:Bah, this is why all IP should go away. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tide still has competitors and hasn't destroyed its industry, so clearly invalid and abusive patents on chemical formulae are being held in check in some way that isn't working for algorithms and protocols. Possibly because soap predates patent law, so the most fundamental ideas are clearly not novel--this wouldn't be such a problem if we'd spent a few more decades working out the basics of computer science and networks before letting carpetbaggers start fencing off all the frontiers.
  • In most civilized countries, you can't patent something one it's been published, even if you're the one who published it. I'm not sure if this is true for the US now (it wasn't back when RSA was patented, but that was a while ago...).

    Anyway, releasing GPLed code is "publishing" something, for all intents and purposes. So if the US does have a provision against patenting things that have already been published, then the patent should be invalid for that reason.

    ObIANAL: IANAL
  • If only your rosy view of things were correct. Alas, it ain't.

    Fact is, now that they got the patent, assuming it stands up in court, there's no end to the suits CDDB can bring (and win). Federal judges are mostly good ol' boys who don't know the first thing bout them 'new-fangled computer contraptions'. You get a tech-related case in their court, it comes down to who has the fanciest lawyers. Assuming the lawyers are of equal stature, your typical judge will side with the large corporation.

    So, basically, what I'm saying is that with this patent, CDDB can shut down FreeDB on a whim.

    Disheartening, indeed, but true.

    I am,

  • Doesn't this mean that RIAA should be suing them for keeping a database of illegally copied data from their CDs?

  • Re:Why is this scary? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Insert favorite music CD. Press play. Patented software downloads lyrics, synchronizes on-screen display to playing of CD.

    Obvious.

    Insert favorite music CD. Press play. Patented software downloads video, synchronizes on-screen display to playing of CD.

    Obvious.

    Insert favorite music CD. Press play. Patented software downloads lyrics and video, synchronizes on-screen display to playing of CD.

    Obvious.

    Repeat as necessary.
  • Second, the actual database itself is composed of submissions. Unless, I explicitly disclaim ownership of the submitted data, how can cddb claim to own it? As far as I know, you need to explicitly give away rights, they cannot be taken. Also, none of the CDDB programs have any sort of EULA about this?

    nope, sorry. Regardless of whether or not cddb can claim to own the accumulated data (and I think they could probably get away with that), the patent is on a process or a technique. They might hold a copyright on the data, but they hold a patent on what they do with the data. Now, I agree that what they're patenting (essentially, a way to provide content based on what CD you're listening to) is pretty shaky, but that has nothing to do with the CDDB data.

    BTW, back before CDDB was "CDDB.com", it was under a "free-to-use but restricted" license. IIRC, the fellow who came up with it got "implicit consent" from you when you submitted the data. Just because they're giving something away doesn't mean they can't patent it, either.


    ~wog

  • It's that thing in the installer that you never read but just click "agree".
  • Second, the actual database itself is composed of submissions. Unless, I explicitly disclaim ownership of the submitted data, how can cddb claim to own it? As far as I know, you need to explicitly give away rights, they cannot be taken.


    Hmmmm... not to play devil's advocate here, but the information you keyed in technically belongs to the artist and/or recording company that produced the CD. Perhaps you don't really own that information after all *grin*.
  • Can I mod down posts by people who obviously didn't bother to read the linked patent and made braindead assumptions under the 'troll' category? They're just asking for 'learn how to use your web browser, you fucking imbeciles' reply, IMNSHO. =)

  • Re:"Method and system for finding approximate ... (Score:4)

    by woggo ( 11781 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:29PM (#571072) Journal

    Sorry, that's ridiculous. How can you raise ire about a patent title when the abstract describes what's actually in the patent? There is nothing in the actual patent text which has anything to do with SQL LIKE queries, which is what RDBMS vendors would be "in an uproar about." You didn't read the patent, you rushed to post something that you thought was pithy, and now you're trying to defend your uninformed posting with an unbelievably spurious argument. I didn't have to "read into" anything; I merely "read" what you posted.

    The title and abstract describe what you perceive to be "two utterly different things" because you are coming after this from a semi-technical perspective. To the patent lawyers, "approximate match" may mean "related match" (i.e. a music video of a given CD, as described in the abstract), or any number of other things which do not necessarily coincide with what "approximate database match" means to you.

    Language exists to provide a conduit for sharing ideas between people who have a shared world of discourse. The patent was written for patent lawyers (who have their own world of discourse unrelated to yours), not for you. That's why you seem to think that the patent title and abstract are describing different things.


    ~wog


  • If I read that right (could happen), it's talking about the technique of identifying an audio CD by matching the list of track lengths, which a) is necessary because (I guess) the audio CD format doesn't contain any other identifying metadata, and b) is nearly-enough unique across albums to provide a pretty good fingerprint of the album. Is that a fair translation? If so, then regarding:

    I can't recall anyone using this method on CDs/DVDs before CDDB.

    What about Apple's audio CD player software, which I believe came pre-loaded on my first Power Mac (a 6100/60 purchased in 1995)? That program has a window visually resembling a CD player's control panel, and beneath that, a CD title field and a list of track title fields. Initially, those fields say "Audio CD 1" and "Track 1", "Track 2", etc., but they are editable, allowing you to type in the information from the CD case. The application stores this information in a database, so that when you next insert that same CD, after having ejected it, done something else, etc., it recognizes it and displays the information as you had typed it. I don't know for sure, but I have always assumed that it did it by associating the user-defined information with some unique information -- probably the track lengths -- from the CD.

    If I'm right that that's how they do it, then it would appear to constitute prior art, no? As far as I can tell, the only new things about CDDB are doing it over the internet and combining entries from many users, so they don't each have to enter the information by hand the first time.

    Also, even if Apple didn't use exactly the same method to identify the CDs, I can honestly claim that it was the first solution that occurred to me when I first thought about it. That it, when I first noticed that the progrm had that feature, my thoughts went something like: "Hey, it remembers what I typed for this CD before! I wonder how it managed that. I know the CD itself doesn't contain the information, or why would I have had to type it the first time? It must have saved what I typed and associated it with some unique identifying information that is on the CD. It's probably keyed on the vector of track lengths -- that's not guaranteed to be unique, but an exact duplicate seems pretty unlikely. Clever." If it occurs immediately to a first-year CS student, which I was at the time, doesn't that qualify the technique as "obvious"?


    David Gould

  • Some reading might help.... (Score:3)

    by pbkg ( 24307 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @12:21AM (#571079)
    Just reading through some of the comments here made laugh and laugh and laugh. Why? Everyone seems to jumping up and down about something that they haven't read properly, or only skimmed the abstract. This is just how over reactionary some /. readers are.

    So lets give this some context. Firstly, the patent is for operating over HTTP or protocols to supplant or improve HTTP (section 1 of the aforementioned patent), so for all those that suggested prior art in the form of local copies, or it preventing local copies, ba-baam. Wrong answer.

    As for relational databases and fuzzy matching. Wrong again.

    The patent covers ways to identify unique identifiers for CDs based on the lengths of the tracks on the cds, and method for retrieving information from a network (preferably the web), based on this information. Another section of the patent is to distribute music to all users of an IRC chatroom at the same time.

    So, the prior art that we are instead looking for is firstly, where there is a database containing the tracks, length, and so on, which can be identified by a unique identifier based on the time of the recordings. The last part, the unique identifiers based on the time would be the hardest part. But perhaps a music company somewhere around the world had already implemented something like this on an internal network, or a radio station with a huge cd library.... The second part of the prior art one would be wanting is something related to chat rooms, and trying to send this music to everyone at the same time. Something I know nothing about so I will leave it to someone else to think about this.
  • So our ingenious patent law allows somebody to invent something, and then impose arbitrary new licenses on those to which it had previously licensed the unpatented technology, with the one provision that it may not exact previous "damages".

    So, then, basically a company can license technology to people it doesn't particularly like, or those it wants to control, then wait a while, while those people produce major products, then WHAM, obtain a patent, and now those people are under your control? Seems like by licensing something, you've *already* given away some rights under contract, and you shouldn't be able to just arbitrarily force others under a new license because you've now patented something that you've licensed to them.
  • What is claimed is:

    1. At least one computer program stored on a computer-readable medium, embodying a method of searching for a match in a database of a plurality of records, where the records in the database include length information and number of segments for recordings corresponding to the records, comprising:

    • calculating approximate length information for the records in the database and for a selected recording having a number of segments; and
    • determining at least one approximately matching record in the database for the selected recording based on the number of segments and the approximate length information.

    Hmmm, 'number of elements', 'length of element', 'find match'... So a CDDB lookup - obligatory guff about 'a computer program stored on a computer' aside - is really similar to what you do when you stand in front of a locked door, with a bunch of keys in your hands:

    • select a key of a certain size (length) and a certain number of bumps (elements)
    • insert key into lock, try to turn it. If the approximate length and the length of the individual bumps matches with the inverse of the length of the bumps inside the lock, it opens, otherwise repeat...

    So, next time I come home in the dark of night and stand there fumbling with that keyring, I'll make sure no lawyer is watching me or I'll have to pay GraceNote? Or is the addition of that 'a computer program stored on a computer' condition really all the innovation needed to get a valid patent?

  • We might as well just accept the lame patent office, I was looking at some of the various implementations of tilting trikes at delphion a few days ago and was intriqued by the gallery of obscure patents. One of them... here [delphion.com] is particularly bad. It appears someone has a patent on pointing a laser pointer at the floor and making a cat chase it!
    I'm all for protecting intellectual property (no flames please) but geez! how do you sell that! It's isn't intellectual property anymore than using a spatula to flip pancakes is!

  • Clearly you didn't read the patent, or even the abstract. Here's the abstract:
    Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording.

    It really amazes me that /. readers never seem to realize that patents, even technical ones are written for and approved by lawyers, not for technical people. That's why patent titles never seem to make sense, folks. (HHOS)


    ~wog

  • Where does the GPL state this. I just took a look and I didn't find anything of the sort. If this was written into the GPL, it would be unenforcable, because the owners of the copyright are not bound by any licensing agreement. Hence, they're still free to patent things.
  • They must already have their own database, which they search, right? I'm sure they have had one for a long time. They may have even used it to see if this patent already exists!

  • IANAL, but I just talked to the corporate patent lawyer. Get your own lawyer for legal adivce.

    In the US you have one year from the time an invention is first published to file for a patent. In every other country you must file before publication. I'm unclear if by filing after publication you no longer have rights to the patent in other countries.

    If you get a patent in the US, every other country will honor the date of filing for a patent when you go to file in their country, meaning that if someone in Germany violates a US patent you can file for a German patent, and then once it is granted sue the German company. If nobody in Germany violates your patent you don't need to file for one there. NOTE that not all countries honor patents.

  • Curious (Score:5)

    by Outlyer ( 1767 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @05:59PM (#571099) Homepage
    Couple of problems. Since the original developers licensed the program that had cddb code in it under a fairly free license, doesn't that mean, that they can't later revert it?
    Second, the actual database itself is composed of submissions. Unless, I explicitly disclaim ownership of the submitted data, how can cddb claim to own it? As far as I know, you need to explicitly give away rights, they cannot be taken. Also, none of the CDDB programs have any sort of EULA about this?
    I don't claim to be a lawyer (sorry, IANAL sounds weird) but this doesn't seem like it holds a lot of water.

    p.s. don't bother making (Funny +5) comments like "I'm going to patent breathing or whatever" We've heard it before.

  • Donate to EFF (Score:5)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:00PM (#571101) Journal
    This insanity has got to stop, and it falls on us geeks to do something [eff.org].

    Your average citizen doesn't realize how software patents affect them (and will affect them). All they see is higher prices and less innovation, but they don't know why.

    Write to your elected representatives, to industry leaders, and to news organizations. We need to make people aware of how patents are stifling innovation instead of rewarding it. If you're too lazy to do any of that, please please please at least join EFF [eff.org]. They even have student rates.

  • Solution (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:00PM (#571105)
    Put the sites outside of the United States and Japan. In any other country that does not accept Software Patents.

    There-fore use the Power of the NET.

    Canada or Mexico sound like good starting points. Else only the people in Software Patent Free Countries are free to use it.

    Anonymous Coward

  • The problem is that someone is going to have to go through the legal fees of proving that there is prior art inorder to show that this patent is ludicrous.

  • Oh, let me count the ways...

    What was the first database system? db? How about all those relational databases? I know of a few for the Atari ST that existed back in 1987.

    Then count the near-databases. Excel's a virtual database because of how it stores cells (it doesn't do a bulk sheet, it allowicates one at a time.) Most any database with a search function would qualify. Oh, and don't forget the first file system!!! What was that, back in the 1970's?

    This patent died the day it was born.



    --
    WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
    $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

  • The way to do something in Europe is to respond to the European Commission's consultation [eu.int] on software patents. Hurry!

  • Re:Why is this scary? (Score:3)

    by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:09PM (#571115) Journal
    Read the damn patent.

    Don't just read the abstract. CDDB claims 19 components comprise its patent, none of which extend on CDDB.

    The USPTO has Full text available at this location [164.195.100.11].

    Basicly the patent claims a centralised database, accessible over phone lines, of information pertaining to audio recordings, accessible through the generation of a unique key based on the lengths of tracks on that recording medium. While the patent article explains in great detail how this could be synchronized with a web browser or IRC client, the claims describe a far more generic patent that could concievably conflict with FreeDB.

  • I noticed that Ti Kan's name is on the patent. Kan wrote xmcd, the GPLed Motif/Lesstif based CD player. CDDB grew out of the xmcd database.

    The patent is on a system that matches CD tracks inexactly. (Inexact matches are nothing new, but the inexact match of a cd's timing record may be novel). The proponents of CDDB claim that this sytem (called CDDB2) enables them to aggregate multiple pressings of the same album, even if the new pressings are slightly different.

    Is this capability substantially different from the algorithms in FreeDB enabled players? More to the point, is it substantially different from the original xmcd code-- which was released under the GPL.

    Gracenote, the company that controls the CDDB patent has already used the CDDB algorithm to authenticate owners of David Bowies "Bowie at the Beeb" album. Owners of that album were able toa ccess an extra track (Ziggy Stardust remix). To what extent does this conflict with similar "authentication" algorims used by my.mp3.com?

  • Re:Donate to EFF (Score:4)

    by THB ( 61664 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @08:09PM (#571122)
    The average slashdot reader does not understand how patent applications work. Perhaps they look into http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/i ndex.html to see how the system works. While may software patents, perhaps including this one, are bad, not all of them are.

    The patent office is not in a position to judge right or wrong, all they can do is assure that patents are filled corrently, and that everything checks out. The court is responsible for making decisions on who is right. This is in the American system for a reason, you wouldn't want the FBI to be able to sentence criminals.

    The best thing that could be done would be to shorten the terms for which software patants are valid. This would allow for protection of design, without hurting innovation.

    Join the EFF is you want, but please look further into the issue than slashdot.

    And moderators, just because you don't agree, doesn't mean that you should moderate this down.

  • stop whining and do something about it. (Score:5)

    by ZeroLogic ( 11697 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:02PM (#571124)
    like it or not, patents have evolved into a corporate weapon, under the current model, how can anyone fault cddb, or amazon for patenting anything they can.

    If you are sick of this model, then why not send your congressmen a letter (a *real* letter, one you wrote on paper!). Until the laws regarding copyright are changed, we are just going to see more of these patents rewarded.
  • They have a tool, called WEST. According to the Washington Post, it's so unreliable I have to call it the Wildly Explosive Search Tool. (Did a comic on it too.)



    --
    WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
    $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

  • Re:Why is this scary? (Score:4)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:06PM (#571128)
    Let them try.

    Could you pay the legal fees to stop them?

    TWW

  • Here are the patents in question (Score:5)

    by ttyRazor ( 20815 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:06PM (#571129)
    Haven't seen links posted yet, so here they are

    http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05987525__
    http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06154773__
    http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06061680__

  • Ok, definitely they get more specific in the details later. But I don't think that patenting CDDB was their only goal -- the abstract is what is the key -- they want a way to synch SOME info from a remote site while a CD is playing -- this in itself is not a 'bad' patent.

    Again, most patent lawyers know that the rule of thumb is that if you only want a bathtub full of water, you try to patent the whole ocean, as the excess will be trimmed, leaving you with the bathtub and maybe some more. If you only go for the bathtub, you may only be left with a glassful. In this case, they are probably aiming for the synched content, and if they can maintain the patent on CDDB like functions, then they're happier. Of course, I doubt that CDDB will stand.

    And while there's no obvious fair use, because of the number of years that CDDB was free and non-profit (I know I was using it for at least 5 or 6 years ago, and a patent application doesn't take that long), the info about it is sufficiently public domain that they cannot win that claim alone.

  • 1998 statements by cddb authors (Score:3)

    by doogieh ( 37062 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @05:52AM (#571134) Homepage

    The following are excerpts of a cddb howto from an early 1998 document by the authors of cddb, found at http://mp3.musichall.cz/download/source/informatio n/cddb.howto [musichall.cz]. Its neat what you can find with google. It seems to raise license issues.

    The CDDB data format and the CDDB servers are designed to be open, and are now used by many other client application software requiring CD information. The list of CDDB-capable applications is growing rapidly and a current list of these applications is available via the CDDB web site: http://www.cddb.com/

    The xmcd package and the CDDB server software are both released as free software under the GNU General Public License, and we would like to foster the concept of free software. Moreover, the public CDDB servers all run on sites that have graciously volunteered their disk space, computing and network resources, not to mention occasional maintenance and support chores, all for free.

    Given this, we provide full assistance to freeware authors who desire to incorporate the use of CDDB into their software. In addition, shareware programs are also supported, because it is our understanding that shareware authors, like freeware authors, usually develop their software because they enjoy doing so, and they rarely make significant enough money from their shareware programs. Users of CDDB-capable freeware and shareware applicationa may use the public CDDB servers for free.

    Commercial uses of CDDB data and/or servers are subject to negotiations with the CDDB Project. Write to us at cddb-support@moonsoft.com for information.

    The xmcd and CDDB server software are both released to the public with full source code. You may inspect the source to see how it works. but please be aware that the source code to both of these packages are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The full text of the GNU GPL is in the COPYING file in each of these packages.

  • Re:Refused rocks (Score:5)

    by plunge ( 27239 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @08:26PM (#571141)
    Yeah, well I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."

  • Vague, but sounds enforcable (Score:5)

    by gbnewby ( 74175 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:08PM (#571146) Homepage
    Yes, the USPTO is clueless. But it sounds like the patent (filed July 1999, granted May 2000) applies to a wide variety of applications that link metadata to content on the Internet.

    The patent description is actually more specific than some of the drivel the USPTO has granted (like one-click shopping). It clearly applies to multimedia content (e.g., music), and linking "complementary entertainment content" (e.g., most anything including ads, metadata, external links, etc.).

    Yes, boys and girls: they've applied for international patents as well under the EU and WIPO. So, don't plan on getting relief from moving offshore. Although a naive (aka reasonable) point of view would think it's more expensive to pursue non-US infringers by US patent owners, in fact WIPO makes it (a) cheap; (b) biased; and (c) fast.

    • Greg
  • has that ever happened before?

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