Newest Patent Threat to MPEG-4 365
Sachin Garg writes "After the notorious JPEG patent which has made many big and small names pay
huge amounts to Forgent (total more than $105 million), PCMag reports that
AT&T claims to
have a patent covering core MPEG-4 technology and has warned Apple and
others of Patent Infringement. Pentax and Nero have already paid them."
Pay Me Instead (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Nero paid because they don't want to be shut down. AT&T could easily hold up a small company in court for years, bleeding their profits dry. I guess someone just did the math and figured it would be cheaper to pay off the patent mafia.
Good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
MPEG-4 was introduced over 7 years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't there something fishy about this?
Or is suing 'late in the game' now the norm for patent lawyers?
~sigh~ (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, that's the whole point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sue early: people say 'Ah, well we'll just use some other video codec, then.'
Sue late: people say 'Shit, we've committed our whole business to this technology. Better pay up.'
There's more profit to be had this way, which is why it's done like this. What, you expected some ethical or technical reason?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ffmpeg? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah the lovely patent society (Score:4, Insightful)
Now it's lovely that we are moving on from even that, and can earn money by letting others do the hard work and implementation while we can sit at the patent office all day and submit vague, obtuse applications (that read like and are about as specific as Nostradamus predictions, he predicted Hister you know!) to gain a monopoly on "methods", "software", etcetera all in the name of "innovation" (because without patent, there wouldn't be any you know. Civilization started when Romulus and Remus instituted the first patent office.....)
A great time to be an American. It's also nice we are exporting this type of mentality to the rest of the world too.
How long have they been sitting on this? (Score:2, Insightful)
(Yes, I know this is /. and software/algorithm patents are eeeevil to their core. Bad USPTO! Bad! But allowing the system as it currently exists, aren't there safeguards against stuff like this?)
Re:Is it any wonder innovation is slowing? (Score:5, Insightful)
ummm... did you miss everything that has happened in biology and DNA lately? Electronics has just moved into the incremental consumer phase, instead of being a strict labratory science. Things like DNA sequencing, stem cells, cloning, nano-technology, and genetic engineering are where the real advancements are.
Re:Pay Me Instead (Score:5, Insightful)
Bell labs was a patent factory, they invested billions a year on research. Bell labs is an example of how the system is meant to work. Spend a non trivial amount on research, get a limited term monopoly in the invention in return.
There are many other patent holders getting royalties from MPEG4, why not AT&T if they have a valid claim?
I am not opposed to software patents in general, just the junk ones, which means at least 98%. The real problem is that the USPTO does not follow the rules it is supposed to. See my blog essay [blogspot.com].
One of the problems with the current patent system is that there are so many junk patents being circulated by the trolls that the claims of genuine inventors are devalued.
Re:XVID? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hurting innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
However, if we accept that we live in a money driven society and that profit isn't necessarily a bad thing then yes profits have helped many, many products come to market. For instance it is not difficult to argue that the invention of Nylon by the DuPont Company created profits that allowed for increased R&D spending that ultimately turned out Teflon and Kevlar, among other things.
The catch is that we can't run the control experiment so the standard anti-patent comeback to this is that some other player would have developed them anyway. Personally, I think that an anti-patent stance reduces to an anti-business stance, but hey whatever floats your (commie pinko
All that said the USPTO is incompetent and patents like "one-click shopping" and the JPEG and this nonsense are abuses of the system that shouldn't be allowed. A patent should, in my mind, cover things that are actually unique and non-obvious, and a working implementation of the patented device should have to be presented. Oh, and there should be some kind of common property catch where if something you patented has become widely popular and profitable and you haven't acted you can't try to cash in after the fact.
It won't drown (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:XVID? (Score:2, Insightful)
This probably wouldn't help in the slightest. Any freeware implementation of a standard has to adhere to a certain level of compatibility, which necessarily includes stuff covered by patents because the standard designers need to hold onto the ability to sue people over it later, regardless of how they reimplement it.
Even a "patent-free" standard is very likely to fall under accidental patent restrictions. And when (not if) it's found that it does, you can't just license a percentage of 0 profit, either; the patent holder will want to recover lost profit, and if that doesn't come out of the price that users pay, it will come out of the developers' wallets.
slashdotters write your congress person AND senato (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it any wonder innovation is slowing? (Score:3, Insightful)
But overall, I agree with you. The suits have thoroughly bought into, and convinced judges and politicians (including the US Supreme Court) of, the fundamentally wrong idea that money is the driving force behind scientific and technological progress. The simple fact is that the kind of person who is capable of creating something genuinely new is also usually -- not always, but usually -- also the kind of person who wants to see that "something" widely available much, much more than he wants to get rich off it. Scientists and engineers don't, as a rule, expect to get rich; if that were their primary motivation, they wouldn't be scientists or engineers. This is something the suits will never, ever understand
A bit late in the game, isn't it (Score:3, Insightful)
If a company with any patent rights had asserted its right in the first place, then maybe they would be in the right here, but to allow a technology to grow for a number of years and then assert your claim to large amounts of money is immoral and should be illegal.
What if a company like Apple submits and then counter-sue the company for deliberately allowing a free lunch then asserting it's patent, causing financial and legal pain to Apple et. Al.
It's like a bar giving out water to customers and then trying to back-charge for it when they're halfway through the evening, under threat of kicking them out of the bar otherwise.
What's the time limit? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the thing that stinks is that they sit there, knowing full well that they hold the patent, and let the tech go into wide-spread use before informing anyone that they hold the patent.
With trademarks, the rule is enforce it or lose it. Too bad the same doesn't apply to patents...
Re:Let it drown (Score:3, Insightful)
When there's more money to be had in patent-mongering than in R&D, nobody is going to bother to do R&D. And I don't care how much of a FOSS zealot you are, there aren't any free projects that approach the scale of the big commercial research projects. You aren't going to go on Sourceforge and start a project to develop the next silicon wafer technology. Development takes a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of expensive equipment, and to be honest, sometimes just requires putting a lot of smart people in a room together for a while. That kind of stuff is funded by corporations -- in the semiconductor and technology sector, in the pharamaceutical sector, and probably in lots of other places. That's not to say that 'lone wolves' don't do important bits of invention, but innovation -- fitting those bits together along with existing technologies -- is not something that's easy (or frankly, always fun; which is why they pay people do it) to break up and work on in a distributed-collaborative environment.
Governments aren't going to pick up the ball here either. Nor, I think, would we want them to -- anyone who's been paying attention shouldn't have been surprised about the recent "revelations" that research at NASA gets politicized. Can you imagine the right mess we'd be in, if some Senate committee handed out all the awards to do drug research in this country? (No doubt we'd have Viagra that would make your penis eight feet long...)
Unless you want technological development to come to a grinding, screeching halt, you want private corporations to want to develop new stuff. What we need to get rid of are these parasitic non-developers (to be fair, I'm not sure where AT&T fits into all of this) who are destroying the incentive to innovate and develop by companies that actually do useful work. They are the really dangerous ones, and if you look at the companies who do useful stuff (IBM, for instance) and generally play nice with others, they have some of the most realistic proposals for patent reform.
In short, when I hear people on Slashdot writing stuff like "fuck the system" and "down with patents," it reminds me of a suburban teenager driving their mom's minivan, while wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt. It may score you points with your buddies, but I really doubt that you want what you're advocating, if you saw where it would leave you.
Re:How long have they been sitting on this? (Score:3, Insightful)
If a company knows it has a case - against anyone at all - and doesn't pursue it within a reasonable timescale, then that should be a defence for anyone and everyone else.
(My 2p)
Justin.
Re:the worst part is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I do not believe there is an enforcement provision in the Patent system - although yes there is on trademarks - if you let people use them, you are seen as having allowed them to fall into public domain.
IINAL but I think that what should be patentable is:
- * Physical objects or individual components: a new type of car transmision or even just the shift mechanism.
- * Specific processes: you make asprin by doing steps 1-58 in this exact order - protects drug patents etc.
What should NOT be patentable:As for this whole wait-until-it's-a-standard-then-sue ploy, I say if you don't enforce your patent within 2 years of being aware of someone starting to use it, then you have tacitly liscenced it to them. In this case, AT&T has known from the beginning that MPEG4 infringes on their patent - they did nothing. They have therefore tacitly liscenced their patent to the MPEG consortium for this use. New uses may of course require a new liscence, but you shouldn't be able to go back and retroactively enforce patents like this.
Patent Number (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it any wonder innovation is slowing? (Score:4, Insightful)
I leave you to decide whether this constitutes progress.
Progress in the biological sciences is enormous and constant, but the translation from scientific understanding to treatment & prevention is slow, because it needs to be as close to 100% safe as possible. There are about half a dozen known treatments against the HIV virus that work on monkeys and cats, but few would dare try them in their own bodies.
Compared to biology, electronics is so simple that it is child's play.
SCO business plan (Score:2, Insightful)
1. alert the world that "ubiquitous thing X" is infringing on your IP
2. start sending out bills
3. use the court system to refrain from telling the public exactly how they are infringing.
Re:More like TradeMarks (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure why Estoppel By Silence isn't invoked in such cases.
What is Estoppel by Silence? Let me consult the Great Lazyweb for a good explanation:
From nolo.com
Estoppel by Silence is a "type of estoppel that prevents a person from asserting something when she had both the duty and the opportunity to speak up earlier, and her silence put another person at a disadvantage. For example, Edwards' Roofing Company has the wrong address and begins ripping the roof from Betty's house by mistake. If Betty sees this but remains silent, she cannot wait until the new roof is installed and then refuse to pay, asserting that the work was done without her agreement."
I don't see a difference between this and what these submarine patents are doing. But IANAL and this is
Re:Call me stupid, but how does AT&T have a cl (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing. They probably patented something a long time ago that got independently implemented in MPEG-4. This is the very definition of a submarine patent.
Obviousness was:XVID? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that this test can not* easily be applied in a proper manner.
If you place a dozen random engineers in a room, and ask them to solve a problem, you are likely to get only a couple of different solutions. Patents on these should be disallowed. Other solutions would be patentable.
Note from the link that An invention is nonobvious if it would be viewed as an unexpected or surprising development by someone skilled in the technology of the particular field. Note that it's not nonobvious to joe-six-pack, but to someone who is knowledgeable in the field. Are we really to believe that the poor people down at the USTPO are experts in every field? Almost by definition, even if you start by hiring 'skilled' people, they lose their 'skilled' status as soon as they leave the field (due to changes in the field) to work the patent desk, and you end up with non-skilled people reviewing for obviousness.
The patent system as designed is set up to fail...it can end nowhere other than where we are today.
*some suggest independant review boards, but that smells like the old-boys club to me... i.e:the system will just be broken for some peope, not everyone. Perhaps patent review would be like jury-duty for engineers.... :)
Re:What's the time limit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, I won't hold my breath..
Re:On Patents Defeating Trade Secret (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents, constitutionally, only exist for the "promotion of the useful Arts and Sciences." They don't exist to guarantee inventors revenue streams.
Now, you could say that the potential revenue stream that an inventor may get is what caused her to invent the safety pin, and that without patent protection, instead of inventing the safety pin the inventor would have instead sat on the couch and watched Jerry Springer. But the burden of proof for such a counter-argument is on he who puts it forth: why wouldn't the inventor have invented it anyway? How many inventors of our most seminal technologies claim to be motivated primarily by economic incentives? If this inventor had not invented the safety pin, why would no one else have invented it independently?
The truth is, there are a host of natural incentives for inventing the safety pin that exist without patent protection. The obvious one is: people buy safety pins. True, you wouldn't be able to avoid others from also making and selling safety pins, but there is nothing that prevents you from selling them yourself. And there are a number of 'first-mover' advantages in any market. If you can't use those advantages to your benefit, then perhaps you don't deserve to make as much money as a competitor that can. And the marketplace, in general, actually benefits from this competition.
Substitute any invention or discovery for 'safety pin' above. The argument is the same.
The following is more specific: the safety pin is a rather trivial 'invention' -- anything that couldn't naturally be protected by trade-secret should be considered obvious enough that it doesn't warrant patent protection in the first place. This harks back to my original post, about the essential trade involved in creating a patent system: inventor discloses a secret, society grants monopoly. If the inventor couldn't protect his original trade secret, he has nothing to trade to society in order to get his monopoly. What is the secret he can bring to the table to trade for? Thus, the patent is invalid to begin with. The much lamented 'patent quality' issue is also at play here.
I know that the current patent system doesn't recognize these arguments; it grants patents for essentially anything that can be created, regardless of the value to society of disclosing it publicly in a patent application. But that doesn't change the fact that the constitutional basis for giving Congress the power to grant idea monopolies is based in 1) an argument for spurring the Arts and Sciences and 2) an exchange of value for value (disclosure of a trade secret for grant of patent).