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Comments: 95 +- Your Rights Online: Encyclopedia Britannica Loses Information-Retrieval Patent Ruling on Monday August 10 2009, @01:08AM
Posted
by
timothy
on Monday August 10 2009, @01:08AM
from the rent-seeking-behavior-thwarted-for-once dept.
from the rent-seeking-behavior-thwarted-for-once dept.
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angry tapir writes with a snippet from Good Gear Guide: "A notorious patent case about a technology that allows people to search multimedia content may finally be coming to a close. Earlier this week, a judge ruled that two patents initially awarded to Encyclopedia Britannica are invalid. The patents were built on the infamous 5,241,671 patent first unveiled by Compton's NewMedia in 1993 at the Comdex trade show. That patent, which covered the retrieval of information from multimedia content and is now owned by Britannica, would have been relevant to the many companies selling multimedia CD-ROMs at the time."
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How does this effect the OTHER companies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there now a resource that those companies can sue Britannica for possibly not ALLOWING them to conduct business as normal due to Britannica having a patent that's invalid?
If I wanted to make a CDROM with some info on it, and these guys jumped in and stopped me due to a patent, and now I found out the patent is invalid, I would be (pretty rightly) pissed off.
Any lawyers/patent-know-it-all's in the house?
Why Britannica (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Companies affected by piss-poor patent granting by the USPTO should start a class action against the US Government to enforce proper patent investigation.
Unlikely to happen. The companies that can afford this are mostly the ones investing in big patent portfolios...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The publishers of Brittanica shouldn't be sued because they didn't grant the patent.
Exactly. For all intents and purposes, they did have that patent, so there's nothing wrong if they enforced it.
What we need is to prevent companies from getting questionable patents in the first place. Make a law saying a company holding a later invalidated patent will be fined 1% of their profits that year, and I promise you, this shit will stop. If you're worried about legitimate patents getting screwed, make this fine non-cumulative.
Alternatively, get the USPTO to hire some clerks that actually know what
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Don't try to fix broken situations by coming up with laws which only make any sense in the broken situation. That is: If there weren't a lot of patent abuse, the law you propose would make no sense. So if the law were to achieve its goal, it would make no sense. So the law is either ineffective, or makes no sense. Worst-case scenario: people forget what the law was originally intended to do, and take it for granted that it must be morally right.
See previous well-known example in history: All "intellectual p
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can fix a broken situation by starting from scratch. You can't, however, fix a broken situation with lots and lots of money invested on all sides, by starting from scratch.
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What we need is to prevent companies from getting questionable patents in the first place. Make a law saying a company holding a later invalidated patent will be fined 1% of their profits that year, and I promise you, this shit will stop.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm pretty sure that whatever percentage you set, folks'll still do it if they think it's more profitable than the fine times the chance of getting caught. Even if it's a hundred percent chance to lose all their annual profits - some companies will still do it to pick up investors, to gain market share/destroy a competitor, and such.
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I know, but it's an arbitrary number to illustrate my idea, and as such, up for debate before implementation :)
Besides, you don't want to destroy a truly innovative company because they slipped over a detail. You want to destroy the trolls who try to patent the wheel.
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So, Brittannica should get a prize for trying to prevent its competitors from doing business? It's like letting someone who cheated into the Hall of Fame.
Man, B-School grads, like today's professional athletes, have an interesting take on morality.
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So, Brittannica should get a prize for trying to prevent its competitors from doing business? It's like letting someone who cheated into the Hall of Fame.
Retard. USPTO fucked up by granting the patent, not Britannica by using it.
Completing your analogy, the heuristics of the DM were broken. That's not cheating by any standard I can think of.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Make a law saying a company holding a later invalidated patent will be fined 1% of their profits that year, and I promise you, this shit will stop.
No it won't. The only thing this will do is get even more companies to set up shell companies to hold their patents for them. Those companies won't be making any profit so even if you fined 50% of it you still won't be getting any of it. They already do it for questionable legal procedures (RIAA), questionable monetary flows (Cayman Islands, products sold in Cuba
Re:Why Britannica (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since they own the USPTO?
Brilliant, I agree! In theory, at any rate.
Except for the fact that if a company can successfully sue the USPTO after it revokes a patent, then the USPTO will never again revoke a patent simply out of liability avoidance. Then we've made a half-broken system all-broken.
The process needs to be fixed at the front end, and the patent office needs to be REWARDED for overturning patents, not sued, in order to encourage it to continue this behavior.
Parent
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They wouldn't have a choice in revoking them based on court rulings. That's when it should be subject to suits. Where the USPTO takes initiative and revokes a patent based on an internal review, they should not be liable. Positive reinforcement as you suggest would help too.
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>Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since ...
Sovereign immunity makes that pretty difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity [wikipedia.org]
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http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID195 [chillingeffects.org]
They need
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Surely you mean æffect!
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Sincerely,
They
Adios (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Adios (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you ever read an encyclopedia pre-internet days (I'm guessing you're too young)? An encyclopedia was an enjoying read just like wikipedia is today. Literally EVERYTHING in the world was accessible to a young kid in 200-500 word chunks. Britannica did not monopolize information, they made it available to anyone that could pick up one of their books. That was their mission, and they did a damn fine job of it. Yes, they didn't keep up with technology and couldn't find their niche, and it looks like the company is going to die... but that really is sad - to have a company devoted to learning die off is never a good thing.
BTW: getoffmylawn!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hardly! That is EXACTLY what they were trying to do with the Compton's patent.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Adios (Score:5, Insightful)
You BOTH have a point.
They used to dedicate their efforts to making information available. Then they tried to conquer the new media restricting access to information. Now they're on the brink of failing. It is the same path to failure lots of newspapers follow.
I too spend hours reading Encyclopedia Brittanica, mostly mechanical and scientific stuff. Probably the first thing I read in English.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Wikipedia is much closer to "literally EVERYTHING" than Britannica, but still hugely short of such a goal (except that neither actually HAS such a goal)
That's much better achieved by the Internet, which owing to its lack of any coherent systemisation is able to include instructions for making children's stuffed toys, video of teenagers dancing to popular music, the source code to several operating systems and so on.
An encyclopedia, even one on the scale of Wikipedia, must have scope rules. You can't write a
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Yes, I had the same experience with encyclopedia encarta.
What?
The last recoverable technology (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.
Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.
The last print Britannica might
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While Wikipedia is an amazing effort, it will not ever be Britannica, unless you pour a lot of money into it to hire writers and editors. They are both a luxury in the Internet media world, and the lack of them shows in the uneven writing and many factual errors Wikipedia suffers from.
The error rate of Wikipedia versus Britannica is about the same [cnet.com]. While it has more errors per article, it has a lot more information per article. I would dare to guess that Wikipedia is much more accurate than newspapers. The experiment is over, and it worked.
The belief that Wikipedia must be less accurate is purely religious zeal; print is not automatically more accurate than electrons, a small group of editors doing it all isn't better than the Wiki model, and paying for encyclopedic information doesn't
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Sounds like an interesting study, but '95? Wikipedia was started in '01
Whoops. Well, the 0 and 9 keys are right next to one another. It's just a typographical-type error; don't get too excited.
Fanboy minutae... (Score:2)
While Wikipedia is an amazing effort, it will not ever be Britannica
Don't knock Wikipedia - I bet Britannica never had an entry on the various slime pits in the Masters of the Universe, um... universe [wikipedia.org]. :-)
Oh great, 16 years later the patent is invalidated (Score:5, Insightful)
Issued in 1993, invalidated in 2009, what a deal. Valid patents only last for 20 (or sometimes 17) years, so this invalid patent turned out to choke the marketplace for almost as long as a valid one would have.
Re:Oh great, 16 years later the patent is invalida (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the real problem with patents these days - they were designed in a time when 20 years still meant the patent was useful at the end; it was reasonable to give the discoverer/inventor a short term exclusive right in order to spur more invention and, overall, increase society's knowledge.
Unfortunately, for computers, 20 year old patents are virtually worthless to society. Net result is that society is paying (by restricting itself) but not getting anything worthwhile at the end.
(LZW compression, for example, is completely eclipsed by more modern standards *except* that it's part of certain file formats.)
Compare to drug patents, where they are (generally - antibiotics perhaps excepted) still relevant and useful after the patent expires.
(Plus, there is the occasional overly broad patent - no drug company would patent using any drug to cure a type of cancer; but people try and patent using a Computer to do Commerce.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Compare to drug patents, where they are (generally - antibiotics perhaps excepted) still relevant and useful after the patent expires.
Silly me, I read that as "after the patient expires", in which case the drug patent has probably proved its uselessness, no?
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Drug companies are some of the worst for patent abuse really. I've seen patents on any drug related to a certain protein for example, they also love to patent drug x + pre existing drug modifier y (such as extended release drugs).
aelig (Score:4, Informative)
Am I the only one going to comment that it is spelt Encyclopaedia Britannica? While an US firm, Encyclopaedia Britannica still retains the British English spelling, as well in its look up, e.g. it prefers "colour" over "color" and so forth.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, isn't it a shame that a reference/educational book publisher actuallu uses correct spellings rather than the incorrect/lazy spelling we Americans have standardised on? Look at "standardised" for example: that is the technically correct (not just "accepted") spelling, and the US English spell check in my browser tagged it as misspelled. Our incorrect spelling
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Please refrain from posting while drunk and irritable as you may end up fighting an argument that isn't taking place.
Re: (Score:2)
For an obvious example, look at 'to read' and 'I have read'. Or explain the difference in writing between 'to keep, kept' and 'to leap, leapt'.
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-ize endings are probably the more "correct" spelling since they were used in the UK and the US far before the -ise endings became proper. Spelling everything with -ise was an attempt by the UK to differentiate themselves from the Americans. They have some bullshit justification about how it's closer to the original Latin, but they only did it after the US standardized on -ize.
Err... you mean Greek, not Latin. That's where the -ize ending arrives from. I have nothing against the -ize spelling, though I prefer the -ise spelling myself, as it look nicer.
My real bone to pick with Americans is that they use it incorrectly as well, on words like "analyse", which does not have the original etymology as the Greek -ize ending. The "y" is the hint here. These words should always be spelt -yse, never -yze.
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The Encyclopaedia Britannica *was* originally a British (more specifically, Scottish) company for 130 years, before it was taken over by Americans around the start of the 20th century.
I hinted at that when I said "still retains its British English spelling".
The legendary Iced Tea said it best (Score:3, Funny)
Don't hate the playa. Hate the game.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
a great big "fuck you".
Fuck you for taking my freedom.
Fuck you for engaging in a game where the rich steal from the poor, because the rich can afford longer law suits.
Fuck you for capitalizing on the ineptitude of the USPTO.
Fuck you for standing on the shoulders of giants, and patenting everything you can reach from there, so that no one can stand on your shoulders.
So protecting your work is evil but knocking off some one else's hard work is good? If I spend five years developing a device but some one else can knock it off in a matter of months then what's the point of developing anything new? I loose my development money plus some foreign company under prices me and I never make money at all. Patents are out of control but some encourage innovation and development of new technologies and they aren't all held by big corporations or trolls. Do you honestly believe the
Re:To all people seeking software patents... (Score:5, Insightful)
What might surprise you is the fact that the computer industry was doing just fine for forty years without patents. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (patent maximalists by anyone's standards) have said many times that if patents had been more prevalent back in the day, neither would have succeeded with their businesses.
Parent
Maximalism (Score:2)
[Prominent CEOs] have said many times that if patents had been more prevalent back in the day, neither would have succeeded with their businesses.
That reminds me of Disney. Had copyrights been at their current life + 70 terms back in the 1940s through 1960s, we probably wouldn't have several of the films in the Disney animated canon that were first published the year after copyright in their source material expired worldwide, such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I spend five years developing a device
And spend most of that reading every line of code to see which software patents it infringes (there will be dozens, including several that are not published because they are "pending"), and then cross-license it with the other big boys... oh sorry you aren't a top-ten company? They won't cross license it with you, but they will each license it for 5 percent of your revenue though. Unless they are a troll, in which case they will wait until you release your product,
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You completely ignored the part about how he limited patents to SOFTWARE patents right?
I support the patent system, with some serious reforms, but I will NEVER, EVER, support software patents. They stifle innovation a hell of lot more than encourage it. For the most part, they are FUCKING RIDICULOUS.
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That's not the problem. The problem is these are getting patents:
[$SomethingDoneForCenturies] but on a computer
[$SomethingDoneForCenturies] but done wirelessly
[$SomethingObviousToThoseSkilledInTheTrade]
Those are all not allowed to be patented, and yet due to work overload and quo
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Because a mechanical can-opener is only patented "as is". If someone else builds a different mechanical can-opener that uses a different mechanism then they are free to sell that.
Business model and software patents are starting to become "a method for selling can-openers using the internet" and "a can-opener using a touch-interface".
The patents should protect you from a direct copy and if you design a great new feature (say a new material for the cutting edges), that feature should be protected. But if some
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Yeah, right. Without patents some poor people would have never gotten rich, since the rich have more experience, money and manpower.
I dunno. I daresay I have more experience than, say, Paris Hilton.* I mean, I am a (ha ha) level 5 dwarf, after all.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls.
Microsoft bought the F&W encyclopedia in 1993 and rebranded it Encarta [wikipedia.org]. It finally lost to Wikipedia in 2009.