Profiting From A Vague Patent HOWTO 309
tunabomber writes "IEEE Spectrum has an in-depth article about the rise of Acacia Research Corporation and its plan for enforcing its patent on 'Digital Media Technology' (which seems to lay claim to any technology that transmits audio or video digitally for entertainment purposes). You may recall that there was a story on Slashdot over a year ago about Acacia's threats and subsequent lawsuits against some small adult entertainment companies regarding their violation of the patent. There was also an Ask Slashdot posted a while back by the owner of one of these companies who had received a letter from Acacia Research demanding that they pay licensing fees. Both Slashdot stories asked how long it would be until Acacia went after the big media companies. Well, they finally did last week. It appears that Acacia just had to get enough companies (Disney and Virgin Radio, among others) to pay licensing fees before they could afford a legal adventure against the big guys. DirectTV, Comcast, Echostar, and Charter Communications are some of the defendents. Let the fireworks begin!"
*Grabs popcorn* (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the sharks are rubbing their collective fins at the prospect, and ironing their armani suits no doubt.
Going after little guys first... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, in court, isn't it simple enough to find bias against people who "harm society" to make judgements not based on the rule of law?
-PM
Re:Profit! (Score:5, Insightful)
>2. Enforce vague patent
>3. ???
>4. Profit!!!
After all the articles we've read, there is clearly 1 superior way to profit. Everytime I've seen someone make one of these, this one applies. Same method. Everytime.
1. Become a lawyer
2. Profit
Talk about being in high demand? There will ALWAYS be some rich asshole who wants to sue another rich asshole.
What the patent system needs (Score:5, Insightful)
a) get through the special interest dominated congress and
b: Be effective at making huge companies afraid of the fine while at the same time not intimidating legitimate companies from applying for legitmate patents.
Scylla and Charybdis...
And yes, I do think there are legitimate software patents, for example if this company had developed it's own compression algorithm, and unique, and very specific, distribution method, then they probably deserve a patent for it, but if they just say they invented distributing entertainment digitally, then there is no basis for the patent and they should be punished accordingly.
Re:"some small adult entertainment companies" (Score:1, Insightful)
Get a friggin'life or FOAD as Broken Bones would have sung.
Re:Prove it. (Score:3, Insightful)
And what you think the Playboy lawyers didn't already look at this and say fuck it, cheaper to license than take it to trial?
What if everybody would do the same? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take for example IBM. They have patented everything related to object oriented operating systems [164.195.100.11] under their Taligent/San Francisco project.
They could sue Sun (J2EE) or Microsoft (.NET), and just anybody using things like Object-oriented window area display system, pat. no. 6,750,858, Object-oriented event notification system with listener registration of both interests and methods, pat. no. 6,424,354 or Distributed object networking service, pat. no. 6,223,217, just to name a few.
Crazy. We have to figure out a better patent system which stills protect intelectual property but also protects us from this nonsense.
Re:What the patent system needs (Score:4, Insightful)
A more effective deterrent to bogus patents would be for the USPTO to have to pay any damages and legal costs awarded by the courts for overturned patents.
As it stands, the USPTO has everything to gain and nothing to lose by rubber stamping everything it receives. If they had "some skin in the game" they would likely be more dilligent in their research.Re:What the patent system needs (Score:5, Insightful)
I fear to say I agree with you, to a point, al least. I think a specific technology, software or not involved, should be patentable, the problem is not with patenting thechnologies, but when ideas are patented.
For example, the mouse, if you patent the mouse, you are patenting one implementation of a device to interact with the computer in a graphical way. If you patent a way to push a button, it's not a technology, it's an idea. Same with an algorithm, the encryption idea should not be patentable, a given algorithm should.
The patent for broadcasting digital entertainment is an idea, and seems to be like patenting the use of water for thirst relieving.
With all that vague patents, why anyone has patented the operating system yet?
Re:Software patents for Open Source Only (Score:5, Insightful)
As you say, the source code goes unreleased and unpublished, so all you've got to go on is the vague description of how the "story sort of goes" to compare an potentially infringing story to.
Imagine if this was the standard for plaigarism (which is, admittedly, under copyright law, not patents, but that's mostly because you can't patent stories - if you could, believe me, plenty of people would). Madness.
Surely patents are for the implementation - didn't you have to provide actual design blueprints etc. if you were patenting a new kind of engine? If you have to patent it on that levl - that is, patent a particular set of source files (where obvious derivatives etc. would still be liable), then software patents might almost work. Then again, you'd largely be duplicating existing copyright law, and what would be the point?
Jedidiah.
Re:What if everybody would do the same? (Score:1, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more, but HOW? Unless money is to be made, lawyers and politicians aren't interested, which is basically how we got to where we are. Ethics, morals, legality, "rightness" -- none have anything to do with it.
this is good! (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, let it burn! I feel the same way about this as I do vulnerable windows machines. The quicker it gets to a ridiculous level of unusability level the quicker it can be fixed with a REAL fix which is a total replacement system, because sure as snot they won't fix it until then, just keep applying patches that just make it worse, because they refuse to address the core issue, which is intangible thoughts shouldn't be patented in the first place. It was an INSANE precedent to let the first intangible anything get patented.
Re:Going after little guys first... (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of the children? What about the adolescents?! As an adolescent myself, I had a great interest in the porn industry, from a purely... "research-driven" point of view (grin).
I get fed up with the pr0n == evil crowd, especially in the conservative-religious parts of the U.S. (and its representatives in the U.S. court system). Yah, there's some evil exploitation there, agreed, it's a legal form of prostitution to have sex for money in front of a camera (which probably pisses them off to no end). But, for the most part that I've seen, there's also a lot of good clean artistic (jerkoff) photography.
Masterbation is not evil, it's safe sex, and I would think the religious crowd would be supporting it to some degree. After all, what practical solution would YOU offer an ultra-horney 16 year old boy or girl? (yes, normal girls get horney too, get over it). That's right, tell them to solve their problem, but do it alone, and leave the stuff that has adult consequences for when they're an adult.
Somehow I really doubt that this company (which i've never heard of) really invented the concept of online pr0n. When did playboy.com start? When did the first porn site go up? When was http invented? Talk to some of the guys back at U of Illinois who wrote the percursor to Apache (NCSI?). They were college students - they probably tried sending compressed (zipped) video or
Compressing video is vital to sending it over the net, and video is almost by definition, entertainment- so whoever sent the first video file and the first streaming video feed (I doubt they're the same organization/person) wins that prior art bid.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Small hole to drive a truck through (Score:5, Insightful)
Turns out one of the key objectives of this patent:
Seems to me that all current broadcasters I know of that are listed in the suit fail to meet this criteria of sending the signal in a fraction of real time, and hence, bye bye lawsuit. I wish they would, but I have to record only one show at a time, during the broadcast window, and cannot record anything else during that broadcast window, hence, I believe they fail to infringe upon this patent. of course, the obligatory: IANAL.Re:Suprised (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, it's been allowed to evolve in such a way that the whole system is now really only accessible to lawyers, not inventors or engineers.
If your friend was a lawyer - or had deep enough pockets to hire one - he'd have no problem getting a patent.
Re:Prove it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Patent (Score:3, Insightful)
"1. A transmission system for providing information to be transmitted to remote locations, the transmission system comprising:
library means for storing items containing information; identification encoding means for retrieving the information in the items from the library means and for assigning a unique identification code to the retrieved information;
conversion means, coupled to the identification encoding means, for placing the retrieved information into a predetermined format as formatted data;
ordering means, coupled to the conversion means, for placing the formatted data into a sequence of addressable data blocks;
compression means, coupled to the ordering means, for compressing the formatted and sequenced data blocks;
compressed data storing means, coupled to the data compression means, for storing as files the compressed, sequenced data blocks received from the data compression means with the unique identification code assigned by the identification encoding means; and
transmitter means, coupled to the compressed data storing means, for sending at least a portion of one of the files to one of the remote locations."
From this description, it sounds like web, ftp and gopher servers fall under the patent. However, I would think that, since the method that is described was first published in 1971 in RFC 114 [faqs.org], 21 years BEFORE the this patent was filed, this patent would be disqualified via the prior art argument.
As for the other patents, you can find their IP list here [acaciatechnologies.com] and the USPTO patent search engine here [uspto.gov]. Have fun.
Yet this is the nightmare being pushed on the EC (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to wonder if there is a politician in the world that has a functioning brain cell. Why in the world would the EC even consider following the broken disaster that is the US patent process?
I'm also expecting a push from the US to "simplify" world patents a few years after that by "consolidating" the patent databases. Of course then they can claim that the whole world is subject to this insanity, and try to extort revenue from global industry.
It's not surprising the EC politicians don't see that endgame. Like most politicians, they don't look beyond buying enough votes for the next election.
The Country of Opportunities? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you see how far did they come? The Country of Opportunities became The Country of Unopportunities. Nothing can be done without infringing a patent. It's not possible even to use a Double Click(tm) without using a patented idea.
The patent law is becoming a drawback to the development of new technologies. Companies now have to worry about research and development, in order to avoid lawsuits in the near future, and to spend even more to make a new product avaiable.
This is a major problem to US economy. It reduces the chances of small companies being sucessful, and big companies begins as small companies.
The consequences are simple. New high-tech players will grow in other countries, like China, India and Brazil, while companies in US will remain the same. The market that could be developed inside US will be developed around the world.
It's not such a bad thing for worldwide wealth distribuition, but also isn't a good thing for US economy.
And the history books will document... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are reading this from any part of the world aside from the United States, you already know this history. Hell, you're living it. That's why you hate us. That's why you either shake your head in disbelief or merely point your finger and chuckle. You see the black muck that is the personification of the stereotypical American. From outside the bubble, man, that is one ugly sight.
No one can argue that it is sickening how members of a rich society are able to chuck their conscience and morality out the window and shamelessly take advantage of a hampered and flawed system. All this without a hint of concern on how their actions may be affecting the lives of millions of unwitting countrymen. But, what is often overlooked is the long term detrement these actions have on the American economy.
Based on this kind of crap, who in their right mind would ever consider basing a business, of any type or any size, in the United States anymore? Even the stallwarts of the ecomony are picking up and moving. Offshoring is a big a problem as most folks think it is, regardless of what the "industry insiders" have to say about it.
If asshole "business executives" and their brigades of lawyers are further allowed to get away with this type of behaviour, who is going to be left? Folks in the service industries, that's it. And they'll be catering to people from other countries who stopped by for a visit to see all the carnage. And where do you think these idiots who are causing all the problems will be? Not here, that's for damn sure. They'll be at their beach house on some remote island far, far away from the garbage they left on the curb.
This isn't about being conservative or liberal, black or white, rich or poor to us normal folks. This is about a few talentless nasty bottom feeders ruining the most powerful economy in modern history.
Well, gee, thanks. Maybe I can have a slice of apple pie with the dung heap you're feeding us. That should make it all better.
Re:Typical strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
How long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Profit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, this was illustrated quite nicely... (Score:5, Insightful)
That day is coming, the medical profession really has no alternative. Most of them have no problem with the real part of the damages if they screw up, but the awarding of punitives that are often 100x the real, or more, by a court system that thinks medicine should be absolutely infallible, all neatly defined etc etc, is the real shame of our american justice system.
Medicine, and its diagnosis and delivery are still more art, prior experience and instinct than hard fact, a situation thats slowly changeing with the ever less instrusive methods of seeing whats wrong inside the body coming online, but those methods generally cost money, lots of it. And they have to be paid for. If you are outputting 75% of the gross income in malpractice insurance, thats just that much less to spend on keeping uptodate, so its a self-defeating spiral.
If refusing service to a lawyer saves the potential of having the rates raised by another $100k next year, thats $100k that could be used as a downpayment on a cat scanner or similar gear. It makes perfect sense to me.
Cheers, Gene
Yes, they were. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. The final human-readable form of the characters was a 6x9 array of dots (bits) that formed a glyph on the paper. Those 54 bits were compressed into an 8-bit byte for transmission by recognizing that most combinations of those 54 bits did not result in recognizable English letters, arabic numerals, or punctuation marks.
Re:this is good! (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with waiting for the situation to get absurd (IMHO, it already has) is that yes, maybe the big companies will come to their senses...but it might be after a world of hurt has fallen on small innovators such as open source developers. As you say:
Eventually, doing anything even remotely fun, interesting, or productive will be so expensive that the system will crash and burn under it's own bloat.
Just as Disney proved by appeasing these nitwits, it will be much easier (for a while) for large companies to just pay the IP sharks off. What if that state of affairs lasts for ten, twenty years, with FOSS projects as well as any new small software business dropping right and left? I don't want to be forced to get a rich patron with 500 lawyers on call just in order to develop a small app.
I see your point, but this absurd-patent craze reminds me of the Soviet Union's experiment with communism. Yeah, it fizzled out after a while when the system became unusable, but there are a whole lot of East Europeans who wish it had fizzled out in 1917.
Re:I doubt it's as bad as it sounds... (Score:4, Insightful)
Note however that the EPO is not an EU body, it lives completely outside the EU (there are countries who signed the EPC and which thus recognise the EPO, but which are not in the EU).
It's a bit more complex than that. First of all, when you go to the EPO and get a European patent, you can designate in which countries it should be valid. Since the EPO happily grants software patents, you can get software patents in all EU countries, regardless of the national patent office's practice.However, when you want to enforce a patent, you have to do so before a national court in the country where you want to enforce it. When you look at this, only in the UK software patents have been successfully enforced in the general case. In The Netherlands for example, no-one has ever even tried to enforce a software patent. In Germany, software patents have been generally unenforceable until now.
Given that all EU countries signed the EPC, there actually is already a European-wide agreement on what is patentable and what not: see article 52 of the EPC [european-p...office.org]. An EU directive cannot change anything to the EPC or the EPO however, since that these fall outside the EU. It can change things to the laws of the member states however, which means they can influence the enforceability of patents (as these have to be contested in front of national courts).As you may have seen, article 52 EPC excludes computer programs, mathematical methods and business methods from being an invention (and thus from patentability). The catch is article 52(3), which states that those exclusions only pertain to the subject matter "as such". What this used to mean, is that you could never get a patent on something where the only contribution lied in one of those things (maths etc), but that otoh an patentable invention which also contains a computer program, does not suddenly become unpatentable
Since the EPO wanted to start granting software patents (their advisory board consists of corporate lawyers from IBM, Nokia etc, and they make money per granted patent), they changed that interpretation: now they say that this exlclusion means that e.g. computer programs not as such are patentable. Now what is a computer program not as such? A computer program executed by a computer, and to make it absolutely clear those are patentable, they call those "computer-implemented inventions" nowadays.
Re:Patent enforcement (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that seems about right. Patents are simply broken. Their intention was to promote innovation, yet I cannot think of an example recently (past 50-75 years) where innovation happens as a result of patenting something. If anything, it actually hinders innovation.
The infamous laser patent went on for almost 20 years. I don't know of the benefits Gould got by winning the patent, but lasers have become ubiquitous. Look at how many things we use every day that have lasers in them. Bar code scanners, CD players/burners, fiber optics, laser pointers, etc etc. How much innovation would have come from lasers if there were some large tax on the technology?
Also, it seems as though the stupid patents are also the most profitable. Like the "one click" thingy, or Symbol's patent on a "bar code reader with a trigger". Yes, the next time you are at a store and you see a barcode reader with a trigger, odds are its a Symbol product. If not, the "technology" is licensed from Symbol. I used to work with hand held barcode scanners, and I've only used one that was not a Symbol. I don't see too much innovation in the "one click" or "triggered barcode scanners".
Another problem with patents, is that they do nothing to the "little guy" who patents something. First, the little guy probably has no means to mass produce the patented item, so what the hell is he innovating? Thinking of something and doing something are two different things. Also, if the little guy has a patent on something, it is up to them to defend it. This costs big bucks and takes considerable amount of time, two things a little guy does not have to spare. I laugh at those comercials where the people say "If I had a patent I'd be rich!" I doubt it. Most "self made" rich people are those that start their own business, bust their ass, and make it work (independant of patents).
Re:Profit! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think I can even see the topic from here anymore, but what the Hell,
How often they leave things to immigrant nurses
I used to go out with a eastern european nurse. She was very intelligent and very compasionate. There is nothing wrong with foreign medical practitioners. The point that is RARELY considered however, is what effect it has on the country of origin that is unable to compete with the USA and UK and finds it's qualified medical staff leaving en masse.
Great for 'us,' very bad for them.
Now to bring this back on-topic: This is a really stupid patent.
Burn Baby Burn (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew that there would be a use for all the Y2K food I have tucked away in the bunker.
Burn Baby Burn......
I got my tin foil hat on, and Ashcroft still has the threat level at orange.
Burn Baby Burn......
My patent for devices using multiple electron energy levels is going to be granted.
Burn Baby Burn......
Acacia taking lessons from Al Capone--Gee that's a real nice business you got there. It would really be too bad if something were to happen to it.
Burn Baby Burn......