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Geoworks Demands Royalties For All WAP Apps
Ian Davis writes "This Geoworks Press Release announces that they have U.S. and Japanese patents dating from 1994 covering some the essentials of the WAP and WML specs. They're demanding a license fee of $20,000 per year from all WAP phone manufacturers as well as WAP site owners. The WAP Forum have acknowledged the patent and their policy is to allow it provided the owners provide fair access to the technology covered. What do people think? Is this a fatal blow to U.S.-based WAP startups? Will it give the Europeans an even bigger lead in the WAP market?" The $20,000/year fee for WAP Web site operators is only for companies with $1 million or more in annual revenue. This _may_ not be as bad as it sounds.
1. Pick a website with a discussion forum, a newsgroup, a mailing list, or some other electronic forum. It should NOT be related in any way to petrification. In fact, it should be something "serious" like a technology site, a political discussion site, etc.
2. Start writing "xyz naked and petrified" messages on the discussion forum, where xyz is the name of some person (famous is good, obscure is good, fictitious is good -- take your pick). Appear serious, be consistent, be persistent. Write long-winded serious-sounding essays about why xyz should be turned to stone. Write harsh rebuttals to those who say such messages have no place there, or that xyz shouldn't be turned to stone.
3. Make your "xyz naked and petrified" messages always just vaugely related to the subject of discussion it hand. Tie it to the topic of conversation in the most bizarre ways. Remember: be consistent, be persistent.
4. Post using different names, so people will think that a bunch of people are writing the "xyz naked and petrified" messages. This is all part of the plan... people are going to jump onto the bandwagon very soon!
5. Have some of your fake names write really bad Haiku about xyz. For example:
xyz is fine.
I like to turn her to stone.
She has stone buttocks.
6. Write a bunch of lame Letterman-style "top ten lists," i.e. "Top 10 Reasons XYZ should be turned to stone"
7. Now, just sit back and watch. People LOVE to copy what others are doing, to jump on the bandwagon, to be in the in crowd. Before you know it, there will be literally DOZENS of new "xyz naked and petrified" people out there. They'll also take the "naked and petrified" trend in new directions, you'll be seeing "abc naked and petrified" and "fgh naked and petrified" messages all over the place in no time.
8. Sit back and watch as they spread it around the Internet, and you become a LIVING LEGEND.
9. Watch the cool stuff they output, like the picture you saw earlier.
CONGRATULATIONS! If all goes well, and you chose the right site, you will now be a FAMOUS Internet Troll, with many loyal followers. Leave the site for a while, go back MONTHS later, and see the "xyz naked and petrified" references STILL flying around on a daily basis. Watch how your disciples have taken "xyz naked and petrified" in all new directions.
MAMA MIA!!
Hi, I am about to patent EUL English the Universal language and EML English Markup language. Each one of you writing letters will pay me royalty of $1 a letter and $33 / email. When you use EUL you pay me .5 / 10 words said. The ones don't pay I'd have your tounge cut out and your arms chopped off by my friends! How about that? l8r, Pashka
...more people will access the Internet through their cell phone than their computer.
Hi all, \
I work for a large Nordic telcomm company (sorry thats why the AC). I can assure you that this is baseless. Some of the old-timesr in R&D have white papers dating back to 1992 showing development on early conceptual versions of what eventually became WAP and WML.
1st
Read their statement.
Note that many other GUIs apply.
- Tom
Remember that GEO WORKS seudo like windows environment for the PC? :)
he's a karma slut!
Can you read?
Phucking Phone? Are they a manufacturer like Nokia and Motorola or are they a carrier like AT&T and PacBell?
Can I buy stock?
Is the ticker symbol PHCK?
WAP will (has) become a standard as far as wireless devices are concerned. HTML is not a feasible standard for a wireless phone, as anyone who knows even the slightest bit about this topic will tell you. Lots of WAP Gateways will use IP and HTTP already however.
You can't just have a "new header" to state a resolution, colour, etc. First of all you have to consider the technological limitations of the devices, we're talking 96x48 resolutions (on a 7110 for example), with series memory size and processing limitations. You have to arrange the elements of your page into cards and make sure the total deck doesn't know the phone over! I know they'll improve and get better, but HTML is not realistic - there isn't a single browser out there than can accurately render the full HTML spec across all platforms. WML will at least save us from this "war".
mill said: "The only reason it is promoted is because the telecom companies want to control the standards. " This should be clairfied some more. As a person in the infra-structure side I remember quite a few of us saying: "what it this WAP the customer is yelling about?" With 64Kb links and better we never dreamed the customer would want a new browsing protocol on top. But the customer is always right so we gave it to them. Go figure....
Don't think so? Then try and derive it from scatch (first obtain a PhD in math or EE, then spend a few years tweaking your algorithm). Today most engineers can follow a textbook and do the math, but 10 years ago this really novel.
When you mangle GeoWorks, that is just SO CUTE!!!!
Let's see I been working with cell phones for the past 11 years dealing in all aspects of the field but one. I don't use them unless I really really need to. I have O.D. on all the recuring aspect of them. WAP is just another name for some lame service to let some bozo look at his phone instead of the road he is driving down. You shouldn't browse while driving or walking. Think about it. So the only real mobile computing is done by riders. So... Is wap useful to the kids in the back of the van playing interactive video? NOT LIKELY. Is is useful to the spouse co-piloting .. maybe. Should anybody be trading stock while driving down the road? I am not sure that's a good idea.. So.... messaging... SMS in its many forms and email. Browsing ... that screen on the phone is really small ... nobody over 40 can read it without glasses.... Just plug a CDMA HSPD modem into your laptop and now you can see it and browse without WAP. So whats the killer AP for WAP?
I am thinking this will alow me to telnet to my box at my house from school with a cell phone... at least at some point. Sweet. Check out http://www.nokia.com look at the nokia 9000 series....
Dont quote Orwell at me, young man ;) 1984 is my favourite book. What i said was that i didnt think it was wrong. Complain if you like - its not laziness on my part though - i see nothing wrong with enforcing ones legal rights to protect their investment. I dont agree with all patent claims, but this one sounds reasonable.
At the moment, maybe. With the recent Transmeta announcement I dont think screen real estate will be so much of an issue
I rigged that up too! I can use ICQ (hacked micq) with any SMS supporting phone (like my Nokia 6190). As well as execute shell commands, like starting XMMS remotely. Now all I need is to buy some of that x10.com equipment so I can start controlling my lamps and stuff.
To those that have put down WAP: remember WAP isn't just for web stuff, it's merely a protocol so that all cell phones can perform the same remote-based tasks. This doesn't have to be accessing tiny little dinky web pages that you can barely read. WAP will be extremely useful for simple tasks, like checking your bank account balances. Or if you're like me, you'll make a WAP app to start your car from the other side of the world using your cell phone.
You can do quite a lot with SMS, but WAP will allow menu front-ends that will work on all phones. It's for compatability guys.
-Justin
They save the COMPILED WML stuff in memory, no need to save the text stuff. Of course they could compile HTML, but HTML has all those tags that noone writing for cell phones would need. The point of WML was to make it easy to make things like menus. You have single 'cards' which are displayed alone and you can swith around those cards without the WAP phone having to reload the page. Maybe this is possible with XHTML, I never heard of XHTML before today, but we have XML, and WML is an XML language, so its all ok and can be used. Also, who cares about who controls the damn specs. They use XML/WML, its fine, its a good implementation and its easy and fast to use for WAP Phones, creates exactly what is needed, no more, no less. Fabian Thylmann STATSnet sprl
The GeoWorks patent claim covers a device driver or an object-oriented device handler in a program. However, it is written to be limited to device drivers that cover user interfaces.
Unix's TERMCAP is like this: the programmer gets an abstract representation of a terminal and the library converts generic terminal operations into various ASCII control sequences for terminals.
TERMCAP was around in the early to mid 1980s and their patent was first filed in 1991, thus invalidating it.
It has to do with battery life. Ask a hardware expert.
You miss the point - i`m not bored after a couple of cases - i said that i agree with the right to protect investment in all but a couple of cases - the opposite of what you put, really. Just because i agree with the current system, doesnt mean i think its wrong for you to try and change it. But since i became aware of peoples dislike of it, and the occasional `abuse of law` (sorry for my semantic typo previously!), i`ve heard a lot of `thats not fair...thats like the communists` but absolutely no viable alternatives being suggested of tried in the courts. Whether `justice is happening` is a matter of perception...
WAP is just hype. There is NO reason WHATSOEVER to use WAP, it was old a few month ago. All the companies are just trying to salvage some money by hyping it even more. GO GO crusoe!!!
>Why don't we get a petition here on /. to have the congress abolish the patent office?
What the hell - put a line in your petition to get them to make the rich give away all their money to poor people too and i`ll sign it.
Meanwhile, back in reality...
...when they list "Making the Same Look Different"-ORACLE 1990 (Advertisement) as a reference in their fricking patent application? What a bunch of crap... Using the words "Making the Same Look Different" in a patent application should be immediate grounds for a big, red DENIED getting stamped on their application.
You know what I would like to see when someone patents anything software whatsoever? Source code. None of this patenting "ideas" and this crap. Make them disclose the source code because that's what you do with anything else you patent, dammit...
The same patent applies for the web. HTML is a device and presentation independent media. I DARE GeoWorks to go up against AOL (Netscape) and Microsoft (IE) over that patent.
Everybody is on the take - doesn't anyone believe its abaut changing the world anymore. The other thing I don't like about this is it's a bit like an ambush. In a normal contract people agree on a price. Here you wait till something is being widely used (because if you enforced a royalty in the beginning it would probably kill it's adoption) and when it is being used you unilaterally demand some fee - what say does the user have in setting the $20,000 price why not $20M?
Exactly. And Don Knuth could have patented three volumes worth of algorithms, and then where would we be?
Why? WAP consists of many layers, where WAE, Wireless Application Environment, is the top layer. It is made out of WML amongst other things. The WML content is delivered over HTTP, using common HTTP-server techniques. Any HTTP-server, such as Apache or IIS can therefore deliver WAP content using any technique available. It might be static WML pages, or dynamically generated pages using CGI, ASP, Servlets, JSP or something else.
The patent, as I see it, only covers the client side, so no sites will have to pay up. Anyway the license that GeoWorks wants to use allows for private WAP content on the net, so limitation of speech will not be limited.
However, GeoWorks will get a small fee for every sold mobilephone over the next decade, since all of them will be WAP-enabled, if Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola has their say.
The $20000 fee is nothing for the phone manufacturers.
However, the WAP-browsers available for the Palm Pilot, such as WAPMan and the AU-system browser will be withdrawn. They have been distributed for free, and with GeoWorks licensing demands it will no longer be possible to give away WAP-clients.
As for WAP being an open standard - it is - anyone can download it and implement a service using any technique they wish. phone.com is but a hoax, their software is in no way necessary. You can download SDK:s, emulators and servers for free from Nokia and Ericsson instead. The emulators are necessary for testing, but otherwise nothing more than Apache is necessary.
Wireless Application Protocol...
--fred
I'm currently doing some WAP development work and I've found that the market seems to be very immature and only just gathering momentum. This alleged IPR infringement is a serious setback.
More seriously, read this article about how Microsoft will soon have a microbrowser on all our mobile handheld devices. Transmeta supposedly heralds MircroLinux, but I don't see a MicroMozilla browser in development. Bills new microsoft role specifically deals with wireless devices. Will he rule the world after all?Isn't this a opportunity to develop a true "open" standard (open sourced under some sort of BSD license)? Someone should talk to Nokia and Ericsson about that. Even with WAP phones shipped, it maybe would just be a matter of flashing some bios to implement a new standard. And i think our friends at Transmeta could be quite interested to throw some knowledge into the developing process.
Hooray, three cheers for EU!
So if I put a WML page on Mindspring, does Mindspring have to cough up $20K?
Prior work will get this shot down if they find it too onerous. Postscript does the same thing, adopting the underlying PS program to the resolution of the printer Allowing an application to display using different widget kits is not new either. Neither is using hints. Visualworks does this, with it's MVC classes mapping to generic superclasses that then use the underlying widget classes on the platform it runs on. Heck, JAVA 1.1 did this! ( Motif wrapper, WIN wrapper, etc for all widgets, you only ever worked with the generic one though). More than likely, someone will get it pulled.
Engineers and management need to spend large amounts of time dealing with software patents, companies spend a lot of money on legal fees, and they don't get any overall benefit compared to the situation where nobody has patents: most of the patents are simply traded. The main effect is that it prevents new small companies from entering the market because they don't have a patent portfolio.
Incidentally, I have also written a number of software patents. I don't like them and I think they should not be permitted by the US patent system. However, no matter how much I dislike them and dislike spending time on creating them, you need those kinds of patents for trading or your company goes under. I'm still very much opposed to them and hope we can change patent law to make them unnecessary.
So, it isn't like there are a few bad patents. Most of the patent system is broken when it comes to software. The good patents are the exception, not the rule. What makes this patent particularly unusual is first of all that the owner tries to enforce it (rather than keeping it as a landmine) and that there is actually an attempt to extract licensing revenue (rather than simply trading it as part of a patent portfolio). If anything, that's actually good because it creates an incentive for others to challenge it. More generally, a "use it or lose it" provision for patents would probably eliminate most of the silly patents pretty quickly, rather than keeping them around as legal pitfalls, mostly harmless individually but serious in aggregate.
WAP Forum and W3C are not trying to compete with each other. See for example their announcement of co-operation: http://www.w3.org/1999/12/W3C-WAP-CG-pr.html.en WAP is trying to address some special problems that are _not_ addressed by WC3. Heikki
Last numbers I heard, less than 20% of US inhabitants have cellphones. In Scandinavia, for instance, the number has passed 60%, and most of that are GSM phones - for Norway alone, it is expected that the number will be 80% at the end of the year, and that there will be 900.000 WAP enabled phones, for a population of about 4.2 million).
I can tell you something right now, I been doing this for quite some time using my cellphone! I have also used my cellphone to hang on irc. What is needed is SMS, you can send an email to an email that gets run through procmail that echos the content of the email into a pipe or something that does the commands, and the stuff that goes to stdout or stderr gets sent in sms to you :> Smart no ? this also applies for irc.
After reading Geoworks' whitepaper outlining their patent claims at
I P.html
http://www.geoworks.com/technology/ipr/Rev7GeoW
it seems to me that Java's JFC/Swing library, particularly the pluggable look and feel aspect, infringes on the Geoworks patent.
Of course, by the same token, I'd say that xlib may be an example of prior art.
I suggest you read up a bit on the history and individual participants of the W3C; it is definitely not "just [an] association of big companies".
Well, you're wrong. The key here is Analog. The rest of the world outside the US has moved on to almost only digital (GSM based, except for Japan, soon to start transitioning to UTMS) cellphone networks. And all the big (European) cellphone makers like Ericsson (Swedish), Nokia (Finnish) and Siemens (German), as well as the Japanese, are pushing WAP and WML hard. Nokias WAP phones are selling like crazy already, and there will be quite a few million of them sold this year.
Also note, that about 80% - 90% of the cellphone use in Europe is GSM based. All digital, and SMS enabled, baby - no more analog junk phones. And soon most new phones will be WAP capable too.
There will be quite a few million WAP enabled phones out there by the end of the year, and if that patent isn't overturned, the US will keep lagging behind.
20 years from the application date.... It used to be 17 years from the issuing date.
Wait...whats a search engine for?
You are allowed to read the body of the article before posting a comment, you know!
Why is everyone so excited about these Crusoe web pads? Im looking at a web pad right now. It was made in the early 90s, it runs a very stripped down version of linux and grand total was $250.
Thats what they wanted all along?
The reason is that in Europe most cellphones are heavily subsidized by the telcos. Some phones are subsidized with as much as 300 USD.
The most I've ever paid for any of my cellphones was 1 NOK (about 13 cents), with a new subscription.
And when Nokia announced their new WAP phone, it was priced at about 1200 USD here, but due to high demand, some retailers sold it for as much as 2500 USD, and they were still difficult to come by...
That being noted, I'd bet this is 99% publicity...
We should create an open patent license; something similar to the GPL, but for patents instead of copyrights.
GEOS lives on as New Deal , which is a pretty cool low-resource footprint GUI for legacy PCs. It's excellent for schools, and developing countries. Shamae it doen't get more attention.
:-)
It is also quite incredibly fast running on a PIII 600
I'm not sure that they're still connected to Geo Works. New Deal was probably spun off some time ago.
GEOS lives on as New Deal , which is a pretty cool low-resource footprint GUI for legacy PCs. It's excellent for schools, and developing countries. Shamae it doen't get more attention. It is also quite incredibly fast running on a PIII 600 :-) I'm not sure that they're still connected to Geo Works. New Deal was probably spun off some time ago.
How much software cones out of Italy anyway? Oh wait... M.A.M.E. Shit!!!!!!
Well who cares..
WAP is utterly useless.
The concept of mobile internetaccess is a good one if it is based on standards. WAP is a place you dont want to go.
Use the proper Internet standards like HTTP, HTML and IP (Although WAP-gateways use IP in some applications)
One way to approach the idea of WAP and to make it open for future appliances is to maybe have a new header field in HTTP that states which res,col etc the appliance has.
Sort of like the accept header field where one can say no to GIF and yes to PNG..
Cheers,
Fredrik
I hope they enforce this licensing fee strictly, across the board... and as a result content providers scrap WAP and settle on standards like HTML, XML, TCP/IP... which means that I can see the same stuff with a browser, a handheld, or even a phucking phone if I pheel like it.
-- Adam
I LIKE Mork & Mindy!
Pam Dawber is HOT! I'd live in her attic anytime!
(I even tried to once -- damn restraining orders....)
No! Wait, Mr. Moderator! I didn't mean to be offtopic! I'm sorry! It'll never happen again! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh....
This kind of thing can't happen in the Free World - only in places like the USA.
I hope we don't get software patents here.
Despite all the whining, i`ve yet to hear about more than a couple of cases where patents have been abused (xor-ing cursors, for example). You could just as well attempt to argue that the law on , say, murder is wrong because of a few abuses of justice. Sorry to sound like a troll, but this comes up every time someone protects their patent, and its beginnging to get *very* boring. These companies arent going to stop protecting themselves - are you lot just going to complain forever?
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05327529__
States:
A method for invoking a user interface for use with an application operating in a
computer system which involves providing in the computer system a generic object
class that corresponds to a class of function that is to be performed using the user
interface; specifying in the application instance data in the form of a generic object
specification that corresponds to the generic object class, the instance data including
attribute criteria and hint criteria; providing in the computer system at least one specific
user interface toolbox and controller that operates in the computer system to provide a
selection of possible specific user interface implementations for use in performing the
class of function; and providing in the computer system at least one interpreter that
corresponds to the at least one specific user interface toolbox and controller.
A method for invoking a user interface for use with an application operating in a
computer system which involves providing in the computer system a generic object
class that corresponds to a class of function that is to be performed using the user
interface; specifying in the application instance data in the form of a generic object
specification that corresponds to the generic object class, the instance data including
attribute criteria and hint criteria; providing in the computer system at least one specific
user interface toolbox and controller that operates in the computer system to provide a
selection of possible specific user interface implementations for use in performing the
class of function; and providing in the computer system at least one interpreter that
corresponds to the at least one specific user interface toolbox and controller.
Can anyone understand this? This is IMHO pure,
100% lawspeak-trash. Nuke 'em.
Kirth
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
This only shows that current patent system is very far from helping innovation. How happened that they invented some cool technology and holded it for 5 years until *other* inmplemented it and started to revenue from it - without any help from the parent holders, notice it - and then they jump out and cry "Gimme all your money!". How exactly this is going to help innovation? All innovative startups just close and/or go wait until the patent expires, or just leave it alone, and only corporations with deep pockets can continue now.
And imagine this technology won't interesting enough? Then all the manufacturers would hold it back for some 15-20 years to get rid of the patents, and then start working on it - pretty innovation-advancing scenario, right?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I can't find anything in that announcement that specifies what these "special problems" are or how they aren't addressed by the W3C. It is just the usual marketing-speak with little to no content.
/mill
No I have no real idea why it was made outside of generating money for the telecom industry and related consults.
/mill
If they can't save the information contained in an HTML document how would they be able to save the same information in an WML document? It is no different! If they have found a way to store the information with WAP that uses less memory the same can be done with HTML or whatever. But then you already know that since you wrote "WML is just the way you WRITE the pages". Since WML is an application of XML why not "compile" XHTML or something similar? Solves the bandwidth problem (the better way would be to spend all this money on providing real bandwidth).
Tiny displays? HTML doesn't have any requirements on the size of displays or the existence of a display at all for that matter. Of course moronic "web designers" impose requirements on all sorts of things but that is separate from HTML itself and need to be solved with WML anyway.
We could use XHTML instead if we wanted, but since the telecom companies can't control such standards we won't. They do control the cell phones and there is little we can do about it.
Wouldn't it be great if the people that have moderated something would get their 'names' assoicated with it too? The cluelessness shown in the above post and moderation would then be exposed as it should be.
/mill
I believe you have to have implemented the idea yourself in order to receive a patent on it.
This pisses me off to no end. IE does it right, Netscape does it WRONG.
Are you referring to sites that don't include the tags but do include the tags? Browsing malco's movie listings on their web site always looks screwed up in aol/ie and looks ok in netscape because of this. I've just gotten used to always using both sets of tags.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
grrr...slashdot stripped some formatting...what I meant was sites that don't use the tr tags but do use the /tr tags.
Offtopic: why do the & lt/gt characters get processed and displayed for preview mode, but not after the post has been submitted?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
If I am not mistaken, at one time there was a web browser developed for the Palm platform that surfed through a proxy. You would send a request to your unix box, the unix box could go grab the page and render it appropriately for your platform (no color, limited fonts, limited screen) and send it out to you. I should go look up the reference. I use AvantGo for cached sites and it seems to do something similar.
Also, why not use lynx and extend it to let you see images when you need to (maps, photos, etc.). Maybe webmasters would make their sites lynx friendly.
ed
Mobile phone coverage in the UK is 98% of the
population, which is more (obviously). You could
mean percentage of the population who *has* a
mobile phone of course - that's about 60% here, I
think.
I like my Nokia 7110e - WAP is damn useful.
I am not a lawyer but as I understand it, there's no "failure to defend" clause for patents. Surely, any such clause would have been used against UNISYS.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.
I think Mork and Mindy reruns would be pleasurable, not painful.
Meant to get this comment in earlier, but I'd lost the link, and Dan Lyke, at Flutterby, whose weblog I'd gotten the link from, hadn't run his index engine recently; I had to mail him for it.
If you have any interest in WAP et. al, at all, I'd suggest reading this paper.
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
Um, "oops".
:-)
And I forgot to make my primary point too. Drat.
Whenever a new protocol comes out that purports to solve all your problems, _and there's already protocol out there to do what you need_, examine the motives of the proponents _very_ carefully.
Cf: DivX.
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
> I am thinking this will alow me to telnet to my box at my house from school with a cell phone... at least at some point.
Nope.
That's precisely what they'd like for you to think. Read the paper in my above message to see why that's _not_ what will actually happen.
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
I believe that time in this case is 7 years. If the patents they are using to require a license on this technology dates to 1994, that would only give them one year to get as many licenses fees as possible. After the patent expires the process described in the patent becomes public domain and can be used by anyone. Correct????
Based on this assumption, I'm not surprised we are hearing from them now, nor at that apparent willingness of the WAP Forum to cooperate.
-==-
From my initial reading to the documents on Geoworks site (IANAL), it seems there will be no possibility of developing OSS tools to develop WAP applications... at least in any country that has the Geoworks patents.
According to Geoworks, anything touching WAP/WML is theirs, and you have to license it from them. This includes sites that serve WAP applications, phones, development tools, etc.
For us USA citizens, it's going to be the same situation as it is for working on OSS crypto. Blech!
I remember reading in 1991 or so in Byte that GeoWorks was fully object-oriented with extreme code reuse. That's one of the reasons it offered so much functionality in so little space. Alas, they promised a development system for the longest time, but never delivered. People were lining up to get into GeoWorks development. Heck, it looked SO much sharper than Windows 3.1, with a lot of the Motif look cloned, and tear-off menus and all kinds of other stuff. It looked up to date even by todays standards. They seriously shot themselves in the foot by not delivering development tools. At their brief peak of popularity Windows wasn't that entrenched yet, and they could have had a serious shot at never letting Microsoft happen. But, in the word(s) of Jerry Pournelle, alas...
WAP has been simmering for some time now and it is poised to take off now that tere are enough WAP devised in service and on the market to merit significant WAP/WML site development. Even if hand held wireless devices get more and more capable, WAP deals with both bandwidth and latency problems that are characteristic of wireless. It will prove valuable.
Here here. HTML is a markup language and is used to mark the structure of text. Table tags like TD are used to mark the limits of a span of text that is part of a table cell. As tags that mark a span of content, they damn well should have starting tags and ending tags. Just like the P tag. It marks a paragraph. There should be a tag that shows where the paragraph begins, and where it ends.
Now, IMG tags and such are replaced entities and therefore need no closing tag. They mark the location in a document where another entity is placed. The BR tag is the same. But don't use a P tag when you mean two BR's. And don't use a TD tag as if it were a replaced entity.
HTML is not a layout language, and it's the goddamn treating of it as such and "fixing" broken tags that has made this www the mess that it is. If people would just use the language as intended, as a markup language, oh the wonders we could work. Imagine, if our content marked up by structure we could acutally build decent search engines that could parse the structure of documents they crawl in order to better distill their content. Hey, we could actually get some work done on the Internet rather than using it to just replace the Sears catalog and the movie channel.
oops, i'm ranting. time to get back to work.
I have been using geoworks' products for a longtime, both a hand-held device and their desktop operating system (now sold via NewDeal Inc.) as well as the old 6-64 GEOS (Graphical Environment Operting System.) While Geoworks could certainly use the revenue generated from charging royalties for WAP, it will be a big mistake. What this is going to do is force people to move to other protocols. That is going to make Geoworks devices incompatible with the rest of the world, cutting deaply into their marketshare.
Sometimes, like in the case, enforcing a patent to protect your intellectual property is more likely to hurt your bottom line than simply allowing free use (and thus universal compatibility with your devices.)
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
I don't think that it's a fatal blow...if the industry is going to be successful, that fee will not stop it. But I think that it might have been more politic to license the the technology at no charge for a certain period, then consider charging a fee, if only to foster rapid deployment of WAP.
Since this is the era of intellectual property companies, I guess this will become the standard way of doing business...create an idea, patent it, then license it. I suppose the only real difference between IP now and IP ten years ago is that ten years ago a company would have been more vertically integrated. Now the idea seems to be to patent the idea, then license it instead of developing it.
Complain all you want about patenting ideas, models and concepts...but the heart of the matter is that the patent system, as it exists in the United States, allows for that very thing. And as long as the system allows it, companies will take advantage of it...and who can blame them? For the most part, the US PTO isn't a bunch of blithering idiots. They are following the letter of the law, so if you don't like it, then you should work to change it.
20,000 might be problem to small WAP content providers, but it is starting to look that there probably won't many of them anyway. Cell phone operators are demanding that WAP be made more closed so that they can be the only content providers. If the operators get their way, WAP, even without the $20k fee, will never be like the web where you can surf to where ever you want, but instead are restricted to a fairly limited amount services your operator has decided to provide. This would obviously be Bad Thing(TM) for the consumers, lack of choice combined with high prices resulting from the "content monopoly" is never very appealing.
Still, saying that WAP is dead does sound a bit hasty to me.
Of course that's a direct cut and paste out of the press release.
bnf
this space intentionally left blank (oops)
If they are just now enforcing a 6 year old patent, then it could be thrown out - after all, letting everyone adopt a technology without saying anything and then suing is something between entrapment and extortion..
But, IANAL, etc etc...
These patent claims may simply be speeding up WAP's demise.
The solution to this is obvious I think.
Modify the standard and exclude the GeoDorks stuff (and any other propietary crap).
I wonder if GeoSucks realizes the bad press they have generated over this? Reminds me of UniPiss and the GIF patents fiasco...(thank-you PNG)!
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
What's happening is that when the text from the Comment field is pasted into the TEXTAREA tag to create the Preview page, the The workaround is to click Preview, and if it's okay, click Back and then click Submit. The fix, for Rob, would be to replace < and > signs and suchlike with their HTML entity equivalents when generating the TEXTAREA tag.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
it's frightening to think that people who don't know the difference between a sarcastic remark and a flame are moderating slashdot. this pretty well pisses me off.
-- Adam
Wait....what's "WAP"?
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Such as the Open Patent License described at www.openpatents.org perhaps?
Are there provisions that GeoWorks is allowing for non-profit WAP sites?
Yeah!
We should trademark the word open so that nobody else can use it without a license.
</sarcasm>
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
They are not required to defend it. It is not going away.
Actually I belive you do have to enforce patents. Why this wasnt used in the Unisys/GIF case is odd (though did anyone challenge them?).
IANAL
I think people have been overlooking the potential importance of the story poster's comment about giving an advantage to Europe. Europe's GSM networks are highly developped and high-quality, and I wouldn't be surprised that part of the battle for the control will happen there rather than in the good ol' US of A.
:)
I was at the Telecom 1999 gathering in Geneva and I heard from both Bill Gates and Larry Ellison that they are betting Europe could be leading the way to mobile applications.
Oh and weather it's WAP or not I don't really care, as long as it's XML based
I wonder how this will shift the balance of power between the WAP Forum and the W3C over markup languages? They both have specs in this area: the WAP Forum with WML (Wireless Markup Language) and the W3C with XHTML Basic. (XHTML Basic is part of the modularisation effort of XHTML).
One thing people should be careful of is deciding that the W3C is morally superior - both the W3C and the WAP Forum are just associations of big companies.
How about royalty fees on obscure acronyms? That's where the big bucks are.
The problem with the US Patent office is not the underlying principle, I.E. Encourage the development and dissemination of new technology by providing a mechanism for the developer to profit from it. The problem is implementation. The existing requirements for patents are just fine, if only the patent office would enforce them. I.E.
1. Your invention must be novel/original:
- That is to say that the patent must ADD to the body of knowledge.
- You can not patent parts of nature or other things that already exist.
- The idea must not be obvious to a skilled practitionar in the field.
2. Reduction to practice:
- A practical demonstration of the patent must be at least described.
I think that if the patent office simply enforced these two principles we would be in reasonably good shape. Unfortunately, in the absence of the necessary expertise required to be able to appraise proposed high-tech patents, the USPTO seems to have taken a "grant them all and let the courts figure it out" attitude.
Historically speaking the patent office has always had problems. If the bio-tech patents of today bother you then imagine what it was like for South American farmers when they discovered in the late 1800's that the wheat they grew had been patented in the US and that they would have to pay license fee's to import it.
I can't believe that the WAP-Forum acts so stupid, and that they really have acknowledged this patent; I could not found anything about it on their Website. If they did, someone really stupid or bribed has acted there.
I browsed the Patent and it describes in detail an architecture of a graphical user interface framework where multiple classes of dynamic viewers can be used due to an abstract definition of all the user interface elements. (MacOS, Windows, JAVA, JAVAScript, Postscript-RIPs and every HTML-Renderer do usually have an architecture with the same pattern, which is basically the model-view-controller pattern (MVC), dating back to the 1970'.)
As far as I understand the US patent system you can always get a claim for something if you make your claims narrow and specific enough, but then it is easy for someone else to get around the patent by changing just a detail.
If this patent would be challenged, a broad interpretation of the claims would not hold, so I think even GeoWorks position is has a quite narrow and specific interpretation of the claims.
I do not know how close the WAP-Specs are to the stuff described in the patent, but the scandal might be that some precise specs have been smuggled into the standard so that now the claims can be made, without necessity for doing so.
If the WAP-Forum will not handle this situation cleanly, this might kill the whole consortium.
Holding a patent means that you can interdict entirely to use a technology for commercial purposes.
Just my 0.02 Euro
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
In most circumstances, I would probably agree with you. However, not so in this case. Here's why...
Let's take the case of the small, independent programmer. They finally come up with a idea that could potentially enable them to make some real money. They hear the buzzwords like WAP and soon discover it's an Open Standard.
They then collaborate with other developers (the internet is a remarkable place) in their same situation and together they decide to build and market a system based on this technology. The classic garage business model
From their viewpoint, they followed all the rules and readily available information. They planned on selling their system for say, $1,000 (USD). Their business and marketing plans are based on this pricing and it looks like the business is going to take off. They build the product and begin selling it. Life is good.
But, then the Wicked Witch of the West comes and says..."Hey! You little creatons have stolen my patent leather shoes...I mean patent. Fork over $20,000 for each system and I might let you live."
What's the little startup to do?
What if they have sold dozens or hundreds of systems, bought a comfortable house, a modest car and clothes for their kids...Will they lose their homes?
Is the Wicked Witch of the West entitle to the money?
What if the WWOTW allowed the technology to be developed and refined for five years or so and took no effort to enforce their patent? Is the patent still enforceable?
Guess what??? That almost JUST happened to me on the WAP issue. Except I haven't build the system with my "partners" and we were just exploring WAP's potential to give us a competitive edge.
Perhaps, we should look at wireless IP and target the market now potentially opening up because of the Transmeta? Or, maybe we should simple forget the whole idea and relegate ourselves to being held captive to time in an hourglass by the Wicked Witch of the West....
While I wouldn't deny them their right to profit from their patent, I would say their patent is unenforcable since they did nothing to protect in quite some time. Either they are completely oblivious to what's been going on around them or they (rather their lawyers), see an opportunity to make big bucks.
In my mind, this just reeks of the stench created by the incompetance of the patent reviewers to know what is prior art in the computer industry and Shylock's out to make a buck by exploiting us all.
Ugh.
RD
No, the manufacturers are making money on the bounties the telcos give them. Nokia gets good bounties because they're the leading manufacturer now, and people know the name and like the goofy colors.
So the manufacturers are not getting money for their ideas, for their patents. They're getting money for enabling someone else's service.
Which is the way it should be.
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Klactovedestene!
Device makers are already getting screwed - margins on devices are ultra-thin, and with wireless phones, often negative. Any way you slice it though, it is coming out of the consumer's hide.
I say, pay for service, not ideas.
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Klactovedestene!
I lived Geoworks for many years, as I was one of only a handful of beta testers covering a span of several years.
Geoworks was just simply wonderful for its time. It provided [within Geoworks] true pre-emptive multitasking and ran on machines will small memory and CPU. I even ran it successfully [albeit slowly] on an original IBM PC 8088, 640K ram, and 20 MB hard disk, monochrome monitor. And I could still prove it since I still have that PC in storage and still have Geoworks.
It was so very amazing, and I still use Geowrite now and then, even though I have all the latest stuff on hand [Lotus Wordpro, Wordperfect 8, and MS Word].
Geoworks and Geowrite scream on todays hardware and it takes virtually no hard disk space compared to today's software. A complete install of Geoworks including the applications was 10mb. I've seen NT registry sizes [yah, the size of the registry db itself] in excess of 30-40 mb.
And the Geowrite application, which includeing graphical tools [even bezier tools] was a mere 90 kilobytes. What system files needed to go with it were shared with all the other applications.
So what happended to Geoworks? What did they do wrong? Well, nothing really. Like OS/2, and others, Geoworks did NOT have a chance to penetrate the OS market against the MS monopoly machine. They were MicroSquished [TM].
In a private conversation with one of the Geoworks staff back when I was beta testing, the statement was made by him that he figured there was a 50/50 chance they would be 'MicroSquished'. In looking back on it, and now knowing even more than I did then due to the DOJ and Caldera lawsuits, the odds against them were really much worse. They had hardly a chance.
=================
Is Microsoft a Tiger?
There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a Tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the Tiger.
I thought most cell phones with web browsing used ADSI? Well I guess they soon will be. -------------------------
Hope this helps you build your WML content.
Sigged!
details are a little different, but it happened almost just like you postulated (except it's with the compression algorithm in the gifs...Unisys has a patent on that).
http://burnallgifs.org/
- Uberdog
"Offtopic: why do the & lt/gt characters get processed and displayed for preview mode, but not after the post has been submitted?"
/. in a web browser and things get kinda complex.
Probably because the logic behind itwould be wierd. That's mainly due (this is a guess, here) to the fact that Rob allows html in the posts. I doubt SLASH is designed to try and figure out what you actually mean by & gt; or & lt;.
I mean, are you trying to make a tag, or illustrate a tag? Is that really html, or are you just trying to show a tag properly?
Add to this the fact that you're viewing
I just try to keep in mind the fact that SLASH is going to act this way, and that I need to respond accordingly...
Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
No we won't stop complaining. why should we not protect our interests the same way the companies claim to do?
Thank you for your precious time. Geez.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
WAP is a PROPRIETARY system, designed by phone.com, to permit wireless phone manufacturers and wireless service providers to provide LIMITED information services over LOW BANDWIDTH.
Why do providers like this? Because they make you think you can access the entire web, and they don't have to upgrade their infrastructure to support regular speed data connections.
14.4k/sec was just fine when the only way to surf these stupid things was over a cell phone. With Crusoe-based web pads coming out (likely with built-in wireless connectivity), it will be insufficent.
Why would you want to settle for WAP or WML when you could have access to the entire scope of open standards? TCP/IP? XML? XHTML? CGI? What have you?
phone.com is already charging ridiculous license fees to anyone who wants to actually operate the servers they provide. Yes, the developer suite is free -- but why would you want to develop twice? Granted, handheld screens are small -- but they're not THAT small.
Hogarth
Why don't we get a petition here on /. to have the congress abolish the patent office? Seriously people, if we could create a legitimate one that allows only 1 signature per person and/or ip address... then get a few million signatures we might have something going here. If we show that we have the people behind us, the politicians must act accordingly or they will lose many votes next election.
Does this cover HDML as well?
I'm not actually worried... I make zero from my site. I'm just curious.
do it now!
Was it GeoWorks that made GEOS for C64???
Kool, didn't know that...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
This isn't quite as bad as Unisys, yes, but this still really pisses me off. It's like Fraunhofer with the MPEG-1 Layer III stuff. "Oh look, here's a technology for everybody, an *open* standard."
After it gains acceptance, then the patents are announced. What happens to the open source efforts then? Last I heard Fraunhofer was trying to get free encoder implementations to pay up. Any changes in store for the open-source WAP gateway now?
We need to stress what "open" should mean. An open standard should mean no patents. It should mean "Open Source-friendly". It should also mean as low a barrier to entry as possible. The commoditized protocols and markets that Microsoft fears (see the Halloween documents) are precisely what is best for consumers, and for free software hackers the world over.
Martin
This isn't quite as bad as Unisys, yes, but this still really pisses me off. It's like Fraunhofer with the MPEG-1 Layer III stuff. "Oh look, here's a technology for everybody, an *open* standard."
After it gains acceptance, then the patents are announced. What happens to the open source efforts then? Last I heard Fraunhofer was trying to get free encoder implementations to pay up. Any changes in store for the open-source WAP gateway now?
We need to stress what "open" should mean. An open standard should mean no patents. It should mean "Open Source-friendly". It should also mean as low a barrier to entry as possible. The commoditized protocols and markets that Microsoft fears (see the Halloween documents) are precisely what is best for consumers, and for free software hackers the world over.
Martin
..the WAP version of Slashdot going to be launched?
I'm currently doing some WAP development work and I've found that the market seems to be very immature and only just gathering momentum.This alleged IPR infringement is a serious setback.
More seriously, read this article about how Microsoft will soon have a microbrowser on all our mobile handheld devices. Transmeta supposedly heralds MircroLinux, but I don't see a MicroMozilla browser in development. Bills new microsoft role specifically deals with wireless devices. Will Bill get to rule the world after all?
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It's life Jim, but not as w
WML is the next generation of HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language) that we have used extensively for projects for the past two years, now it is WML. If you want to see how HDML looks and works, go to phone.com, register as a developer and get yourself a simulator. To really bring WML or HDML to a phone you need a WAP server (one of these belongs to phone.com) we use one from Bell Mobility.
HDML looks like HTML for text presentation.
There is a difference though. HDML has a feature called "cards" where a card is a portion of the same document (same HDML) but it is really a different screen. Cards are like tags in HTML instead of going for another document to the server, the document is retreived from the same document that is already on the phone.
There is also a notion of user interface in HDML or WML that is closely related to the device. Basically these are tags for different buttons on phones.
The truth is, XML can work as WML or HDML.
Even more, WML or HDML are just special cases of XML and there is nothing new to those formats that clearly differentiates them from XML.
WML or HDML must be compiled on the WAP server into a page of bytecodes before that page is sent to a device (due to memory and processing limitations of handheld devices.)
Geoworks should have claimed their patent before XML was introduced, at this point WML looks just like a special case of XML and nothing more.
You can't handle the truth.
Geoworks claim that they thought up the idea to map a device-independent application specification onto a specific user interface in a toolkit they produced a few years back and that WML is infringing on their patent because it is a device (and UI) independent application language.
Yeah right. I suppose that in the whole history of computing, no one has designed a kit whose output is adapted to the limitations of the device it is running on.
Fortunately if I ever go into the business of producing WAP software, I can tell these sharks where they can stick their patent since I happen to live in Europe, a place with reasonably sane patent laws.
Note that they have a different fee of 10% of item cost for vendors developing products utilizing their patents. Kind of a rape of the consumer for some fairly obvious ideas. WAP has a lot of appeal for low bandwidth (transaction oriented) data services to resource limited (small, cheap, portable) devices. WAP is just now starting to get off the ground, but it hasn't broken ground effect yet. This could crash it on takeoff. Geoworks should have waited a little bit longer before stabbing the rest of the forum in the back.
Of course, it can't be too hard to find out if a company has a particular patent on a technology. Why didn't more of these companies research who owned the patent, and either bought the technology beforehand, or prepared their legal coffers for this incident? Of course, there's no proof that some of them didn't do that. :)
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Contrary to popular belief, stupidity does have its limits. It is a good thing, then, that our race is
hmmm...
If you're using a graphical browser, scroll up to the top of this page.
See those pretty logos and ads?
Most of those are GIFs, and that technology is the intellectual property of Compuserve, now owned by AOL. The web runs on GIFs, and it does it very well because Compuserve gave developers a free hand to make products using their technology. It was a reasonably efficient method of serving a need that was at the time unserved, and it was developed by a respected company in the field with a vested interest in its success. Compuserve knew that making the technology free would enable growth of their own business.
Now imagine this:
AOL, ego-inflated from its latest acquisition of a competent business, decides to demand licensing fees for all websites that use GIFs, but giving an exemption to those who offer content in their own network. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what havoc this would cause.
If Compuserve had elected to extract licensing fees like this when they first developed GIFs, we'd have all had the chance to develop our own free standard, but now we're locked in. I seriously doubt that it would be even legal for AOL to demand payment now, and they certainly would have a rough time in a reverse-class action lawsuit, suing some tens of millions of people with GIFs on their pages. The case of WAP should be no different. If they wanted a licensing fee, they should have said so up front, and given the opportunity for a competing standard to develop. I don't know the exact legal process, but I'm sure this could be challenged.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
How was it that the WAP protocol was based on a technology that had the possibility of a patent infringement? I have to read the patent to see if they patented the "idea" of extended wireless functionality, or if it is specifics of the WAP protocol. If that is the case it might push for a reviving of good old HDML, unless someone is right now rushing to the patent office with check in hand. I myself am patenting the process of "standards," therefore all new standards will fall under my patent! :)
I've got the Nokia 9Kil using the Geoworks 3.0 O/S and it isn't too much to be bragging about. I personally believe that they need to "cut their losses" and get to work on something better anyways.
Geowork's claims are so broad, that even by their own wording in their document, the potential for infringment falls on a wide range of people and products. List in their "white paper" is WAP-Enabled Wireless Telecom Services, WAP-Enabled Mobile Devices, WAP Microbrowsers, WAP-Enabled Servers, WAP Application Development Tools, Packaged WAP Applications, Custom WAP Applications and Consulting, WAP ASPs, and WAP sites. It would appear the mean to go after anyone and everyone doing anything WAP related, including content providers. What I want to know is if they plan on hitting the carriers themselves for licenses (and royalties). It would appear that for WAP Forum members with less than $1 million in revenue, they have to negotiate their own license with Geoworks for the application license. There appears to be no such limitation for platform licenses, which means EVERYONE, regardless of size, will have to cough up 20,000 plus 10% royalties. It just raised the price a minimum of 10% for WAP platforms. Second, non-WAP Forum members will have to negotiate for their own licenses, and risk getting charged a much higher license fee. As if that weren't bad enough, has anyone checked out the WAP Forum membership fees? Try 27,500 a year for one level, and 7,500 a year for the other. Either way, the small business, non-profit, or open-source project is the one that faces being shut out from this area. Does anyone have any doubt this is what Microsoft referred to when they talked about patent law and its affect on stalling Linux and other open source projects that compete against Microsoft?
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A $20K is a large amount when you're not expecting it. Imagine having $100K of funding, then suddenly to have 20% of it dissappear. I call that a problem. They're asking for the $20K from sites with more than $1M/year in revenue. From economics class, the average company make a profit of 6% of their revenue. That means of the average company with $1M revenue, $60K will be profit. 20K is a third of the profit. Ouch!
I know my 200K/year revenue company couldn't come-up with 5K off of the top (5K:200K == 20K:1M). You're not going to find many bankers who like to loan money to a small business for a recurring cost. The last few banks I talked to wanted loans on recuring charges to be paid back in half of the recuring period (so that you don't pile-up debt when you borrow again the next year). Calling a start-up weak because they can't come-up with 20K? That's lame.
The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...
But what prevents standard bodies from demanding everyone who wants to have their technology included in the standard, to abandon patents, or provide free blanket license? Then companies will have choices -- keep technology proprietary, or have it "endorsed" as a standard (and benefitting from already having that technology _implemented_) at the price that they no longer can put any restrictions or licensing fees on it?
RFCs about IP and related protocols don't contain patented algorithms, and TCP/IP seems to turn out just fine without them. OTOH, ITU "standardizes" all kinds of proprietary shit, and this is why telephony is such a mess when it comes to interoperability.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How about bidding? Bidding is done in all sorts of situations, and where institutions are involved (like in a large corporation, a government, or a standards body) and there isn't bidding, it's often a sign of corruption, because of the conflict of interests when chosing an implementor. As many of the people defining standards are employed in their respective industries, the potential for conflict of interest should be taken very seriously (though I fear it is not).
I can see bidding work well with something like sound compression. The standards body says: we'll pay a single fee to a company for their sound compression, and they will in turn give up all future rights to charge royalties on that patent. You could weight the quality of implementations against the bid, so a compressor that was 10% worse than another would have to underbid by at least 10%. (deciding on "10% worse" would have to be somewhat subjective, but it could be done)
There is a great deal of incentive -- if the standard becomes widely implemented (all the more likely because patents don't restrict it) and a company's compression isn't part of the standard, it's potential profits are negligable.
This could bring competition back into the highly anti-competitive realm of patents. It could also keep patent-holders from robbing us all blind. However, it requires some capital on the part of the standards bodies (not impossible) and some will on the part of the standard-makers (again, not impossible). But altogether, there's just too much money being made (stolen) to imagine it could change easily.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I'm not sure exactly what the laws state, but I'm not sure they *CAN* declare IP on something when they have allowed it to be developed without defending it.
Do IP laws function anything like trademark laws? I find it hard to believe that anyone can develope a set of ideas, wait untill something simular comes along, and declare IP licencing fees. There has to be some sort of law that puts a limit on it..
If there isn't, as the saying goes..
"There auta be a law for somethin like that"
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
...they had some fairly revolutionary stuff going for a while in the late '80s.
Anybody else remember GEOS, the GUI for the Commedore 64? (A GUI that fits in 64k of RAM? Who woulda thunkit?) Or GeoWorks Ensemble, the short-lived GUI on the x86 platform that (at least on my 386/25 with 1mb of RAM) seriously outperformed Windows 3.1? That also worked on an 8086 and maybe even an 8088?
InThane
As a programmer, I am always disturbed by "closing" tags without an "opening" tag (or vice versa). A C compiler would complain if you tried to use only }'s and never any {'s, just as an example. So I always "balance" my HTML (not that I write much html anyway, webpage creation is something I think other people can do) by using both p and /p, tr and /tr, td and /td, etc. The BR tag still disturbs me, since it doesn't have any matching closing tag. Not that it would make much sense, but anyway.
See the WAP Forum What is WAP page.
How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use[?]
;)
By 'Open' they mean that it is open for anybody to see how it works, so anybody can do an implementation. However, they probably *will* have to have some money
It's similar to the situation with MPEG. All the MPEG standards have sections in them that are covered by patents. However, normally for a technology to go into a standard, the patent owener has to agree to license it at a reasonable fee.
The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...
cheers,
Tim
I'd imagine that in the field of mobile information appliances, there are a great many patents held by the by the large mobile phone companies (ericsson, nokia, etc.) which will cover the technology needed to create their products. Most of them will have deals with each other to cover them. If the patent has merit, they'll pay up - I doubt $20,000 is a great deal to a large company like that. Otherwise they'll just team up, get some very expensive lawyers and see if Geoworks has the balls to go up against them. I don't suppose it's a big deal, and I don't think that people who create WAP content will be hit by it, but I could be wrong.
To conclude: I don't think it'll be a very big deal.
cheers,
Tim
The difference in this case is that levying a fee on the WAP-server side is impractical. A small fee per physical WAP-enabled device is easily embedded in the cost of the unit, takes place once, and is easy to account for. But any fee on the server side is inherently unfair because it is bound to be collected inconsistantly, and generally serves as a depressant to the size of the content base for these devices.
Having said all of this, I feel that the entire argument will be moot soon. My guess is that WAP will be a transitional technology, because it is not based on the standards of the rest of the Web and it is a solution that presumes low bandwidth.
I think once the display size and wireless bandwidth problems are addressed, everyone will have ultraportable devices that will use the existing standards for display and interaction -- in other words, not WAP. I would also mention power consumption, but Transmeta may have addressed that yesterday.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
But, the point I am trying to make is that a lot of the rationale for WAP goes away as wireless bandwidth increases.
Two small points in rebuttal to the previous post: Twenty percent of the US population is still over 50 million units. And, a large part of that 20 percent of the US population has shown a willingness to treat mobile technology as disposable over several technology cycles.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
No, we are just going to complain long enough and loud enough until some greedy politician hears us and decides to run on a platform that involves reforming IP abuses. Then we are going to vote this person into office and watch as he either:
Here are the words that I am waiting to hear:
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"providing in the computer system an interpreter for the specific user interface toolbox and controller"
Yeah, sure. This describes a browser to the T. Mosaic was first created in the early 1990's. Text examples of this "patent" technique date back to the mid or early 1980's.
There is so much prior art that I predict this will be demolished by the first company to take it to court.
Also, note that Geoworks claims a U.S. and a Japanese patent but no European patents. According to the Paris Convention governing patents, patent holders in the U.S. have one year from the patent issue date to seek a patent in Europe. Geoworks does not seem to have done this and, thus, cannot seek claims in Europe.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
I too remember GEOS and have been using it even recently on my Nokia 9000 Comunicator.
However, as a developer of a non-profit wap site and a developers mailing list, I felt that I should write and let Geoworks know how many developers will feel about this action and how it could harm the both the development of WAP as a serious standard and their own reputation.
A copy of the letter can be found at http://wapwarp.com/geoworks
I encourage others to write (an email address is on the letter), but also encourage people to write a civil letter of complaint - or don't bother. We should all by now know the damage that letters of abuse can do.
A little planning goes a long way...
If you read their actual Wireless Internet White Paper, they are intimating that any company that creates a WAP based site and has an income of over 1,000,000 USD will have to pay the licensing fee.
They are also extremely unclear as to how companies with lower turnovers will be affected - there is certainly no guarantee in their papers that there will be no license fee for general use by non-profits or low-profits.
Think it's not important? Where would the web be now if 5 years ago all the companies who wanted to start putting up sites had to pony up 20 G's first?
It may not hurt the MS's and RedHats of this world, but it's sure as hell going to hurt the development and uptake of WAP as a standard if the MSE's (Medium Sized Enterprises) can't get onto the playing field.
Steve Cook
WapWarp
A little planning goes a long way...
Microsoft was awarded a patent on the idea behind Cascading Style Sheets, one that is sufficiently general that it may also cover XML transcoding and XSL.
The whole Web is essentially just waiting for the other shoe to drop and Microsoft to decide that people have become dependent enough on CSS and XML technologies to start collecting royalties. It's probably only the antitrust suit that's prevented it so far, but watch out for the "Internet busines division" of any Microsoft split up.
With CSS and XML becoming ubiquitous across the industry (esp. with big companies), attempted enforcement of this one patent could finally force the govt. to come to terms with the whole mess they've been creating. It would be pretty entertaining to watch these big organizations that rely so heavily on patents themselves have to weigh the equally unattractive options of giving up all their own bogus IP or paying MS crippling royalties on their most popular products.
It didn't seem that obvious back when the idea was first developed. At GEOS developer training sessions, students seemed kind of confused by the whole idea of "hints". They liked the idea of putting a button at coordinates (24, 38). They didn't really like the idea of telling the button to look for a dialog-reply-bar and try to insert itself therein.
Of course, back then, object-oriented programming was pretty cutting-edge. The idea of "classes" that defined behavior--and could inherit behavior from other classes--well, it might have been a lot for those students to take in at the time.
This is a big bite to take for such a kludge, and after it's had time to become something of a standard.
I wonder if they may have lost some of their legal footing by keeping their mouth shut for so long.
The question is whether the bite is too big to survive; I doubt they can defend this in court if a big phone manufacturer decides to fight it.
I think it's a big mistake for an organisation or a consortium that create standards to include patented technology.
If one member of the consortium has patented technology that it want inserted in the standard, they should give the consortium all rights to the patent. The consortium, it turn, should make the technology availlable at no cost to all the consortium members.
It's becoming more and more common that a company offer technology to a standard body whitout telling anybody that they hold a patent on it. They a couple of years later, when the standard it being used by a lot of people, they requires licensing fees.
This should stop... Standard bodies and consortium should have rules to prevent that.
This would cover just about any menu generation language including the MGL in O'Reily's "Lex and Yacc" which dates back to at least 1992.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
After reading thru the patent (very briefly) I noticed a trend that most everything talked about was client side.
.asp script on my page that spews out some HDML to cell users can get a bite sized info chunk, I have to pay the royalty fee? Is this $1mil/year from services extracted from the wireless network or all services?
So, if my company makes more than $1mil/year, and I have an
I don't get it. It doesn't seem right that I should have to pay royalties to spewing out HDML pages. I didn't even need phone.com's SDK for that. They're easy enough to reverse engineer.
The WAP Forum Website says The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open, global specification that empowers mobile users with wireless devices to easily access and interact with information and services instantly.
How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use. It will be interseting to see what happens in the Sprint PCS "Wireless Web" market now.
Munky_v2
Jay
*sigh* This'll get moderated out of existance and my karma'll go down I'm sure.
Yes, even considering that it only applies to large companies.
If this charge is for companies delivering WAP web content, then consider that the WAP side of their business is currently very small, and web delivery already isn't bringing in revenue. Try convincing your pointy haired boss to spend an extra $20k on handheld delivery and he's not going to like it.
On the other hand I don't see how they can charge against users of the technology (people hosting web sites), as well as integrators of the technology (people building the wap delivery software). I'm not sure what the precedent of that model is. Although I'm sure the cost will pass down the line.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Seriously, this is stupid. If a company has a patent on a genuine invention, fine. But DON'T wait half a decade to "notice" (where "notice" depends on how rich the rival company gets).
This smacks of Patent Trawling, rather than serious protection of genuine investment of time and effort. May the day come when Patent Trawling is a criminal offence, punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That brings to mind an interesting question. Hypothetical situation:
- A company obtains a patent on, or relating to an Open Standard, in such a way that it is prohibitively expensive or difficult to use the standard without 'infringing' on the patent.
- The company allows the Open Standard to prosper, in order to gain in popularity, commercial value, and dispersion.
- The company decides, at some point, to seek financial remuneration from certain uses of its patented technology.
Does this make it likely that the Open Standard will falter or fail? Pro: Alan Cox's comment above (and I think he's credible). Con: Unisys and GIF (where's my PNG support?), Microsoft and theMy theory: it depends on how long the company can wait in the second step up above.
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how to invest, a novice's guide
I see loads of posts here saying stuff like: WAP sucks anyway, nuke it and use stuff like HTML, XML and TCP/IP instead. .... These people must not really have any idea what WAP is and why it was made, huh?
WAP is a Protocol used for low-bandwidth devices, devices where things like HTML or XML are really way too big to use well. Most Mobile Phones have so little available memory that they can not even save the same page in HTML. Also, WML is just the way you WRITE the pages. It is NOT the way that most mobile phones read it!! Most mobile phones receive cWML, which is COMPILED WML, from the so-called WAP-Gateway, which is basically something like a Proxy operated by the Cell Phone Provider which receives data from the real Web/WAP Server and compiles it to make it WAY smaller. cWML uses byte-codes for all tags and stuff like that, so that they do not need to receive and store all those Text-based Tags.
And this is just one single thing that makes WAP important for mobile phones, they just HAVE low bandwidth, so we will have to live with it, and on top of that they have low storage. Of course, later on it will make sense to have the possability to use full TCP/IP with mobile phones since speed and space in them will increase, but until this happends, it just makes no sense.
Another reason which makes WAP important is the TINY displays most Cell Phones have. It just does not make sense to use full HTML in them!
Also, for those people who didn't know. If you REALLY want to via normal web sites, there is no problem at all. Many WAP Gateways have HTML to WML converters built in which will make it possible to display those pages on WAP devices also!
About the Patent, can somebody please explain to me in WHAT way WML and WAP is SOOO much different to HTML and the any other protocol out there?? It doesn't make any sense to me why GeoWorks should be able to use their patent talking about USER INTERFACES with the WAP system! Except for one thing, mobile phones display WAP pages (and most WAP pages are written in such a way) to make them look like extended MENUS of the phone itself. Is THAT the only reason why they think they can come and charge those silly amounts for using 'their' patent?
Fabian Thylmann
STATSnet sprl
Are there any /. readers who were at the last WAP forum meeting last week which led to the fallout of GeoDorks with the rest of the forum? If you were there, email me, I need some good hard info to help put some pressure on the WAP forum to free up the protocols once and for all.
:-)
I've heard rumours that the meeting got really ugly, when the GeoFucks reps announced they were going back on their long standing promise to leave the protocol open and free. Last year the forum was told that GeoCracks had quietly sought patents on a lot of work done by all the members of the forum. There was a resolution passed requiring all members of the forum to disclose which parts of their work was going to be covered by IPR, patents, trade or service marks or anything else which would harm the status of a "free and open" protocol. I guess this is their announcement, I wonder if they wore eye patches and raised a pirate flag and threatened the others with cutlasses
I heard that some of the big industry reps announced they are all leaving the forum if GeoSucks starts asking for any money. So if anyone has any inside info, let me know.
This could also mean that any attempt at creating OpenSource WML/WAP/WDP applications or drivers for L*nux or BSD could result in lawsuits like the DeCSS shit going on right now. Yes, this affects me directly, and those of us working on a free/illegal (choose one) version of the protocols.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I investigated WAP a month ago in relation to an idea I had.
It took me about ten minutes to dismiss them. If you attempt to download the technical specifications from www.wapforum.org, it presents you with a license agreement, just to look at the specifications. They call that open ? It irritates me when companies put these EULA which they know are unenforceable in court on packaging. But a supposedly open non-profit body ?
It is also not clear what part the EULA restrained me beyond what the law does anyway. It says that you agree not to violate their copyright. The whole thing gave me the creeps -- should I pick through the fine print to find where they hid the real restriction in all the clauses saying that I couldn't do things I can't do anyway ?
The whole thing had a juvenile feel to it, as if the people making the web site just did not have a cultural background in the industry. I don't know how to express this well, but an EULA for a technical publication is the type of thing a shiny-faced freshman or high school entrepreneur wannabee would come up with.
They may or may not have some good standards and technology, but I won't be associating any business efforts with them. I never read the technical documents. If they have something to publish, then why don't they just publish it, like the rest of the world ?
2) I've been seeing this disturbing trend for companies to get in on standards talks, propose standards and then a few months later after much work has been done in that direction, we find much to our surprise that the company owns a patent on the technology they suggested (MS and XML Style Sheets is a great example of this.) There should be some basic requirements in order to participate in any internet standards groups. The company should be required to sign a contract giving up all rights to patents and IP rights for any technology they suggest to the group. The company should be summarily thrown out of the group and blacklisted from any internet standards group for one year if they try to pull this shit, and they should agree to pay for time lost by the group and by the industry if a standards group goes down a dead end due their pulling this sort of thing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If $20,000/year for a patent license represents a "fatal blow", then those startups must have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
My main query of this patent is, how it applies to only the Wireless Application Protocal and not Dynamically generated HTML (I'm talking about Zope and ASP mainly - as these have server side Objects, and to a certain extent ECMAScript).
... this has other implications, in that they have not made it clear prior art is of course things such as the HyperCard browser (i believe this came much before HTML/Mosaic, i'm frequently wrong though ...)
I don't object to them wanting to make money out of their patent, but it's painfully obvious that they did *not* invent the WAP/WML standard. I'm not sure if they helped develop it (this is unlikely, as the claim would have been made earlier if this was so).
I go back to another of my comments on Patenting - is it such a good idea? (Has anyone read Bruce Sterling's Distraction? The bit where he talks about the Chinese broadbanding US Intellectual Property? Then you'll have an idea of what I'm trying to get at.)
Okay, back to Geoworks Patent - one of the things they've highlighted is the top-down hierarchy of implementating a "label" or "hint" and displaying it according to context. To me, this looks like what any sensible expert/AI display system would do - don't get me wrong, Internet Browsers are min-expert systems in that they make decisions on how to present the HTML to the user (IE also goes as far to fix missing TABLE tags).
Their white paper insists on calling the display application a "mini-browser"
.my 2p
.my 2p
- we have objects that need be presented to the user
- each object has mandatory requirements and advisory attributes
- the UI engine selects a UI implementation that satisfies mandatory requirements; if it can also satisfy advisory attributes, great; if not, well, life is tough
That is, I have a list of objects, and want to present it with a listbox (mandatory) with 2 columns (advisory), but my widget set has only 1-column listboxes, so I have no choice but use 1-column listbox. That's it.Will somebody stand up and challenge this nonsence in court?
Moderate this down (-1, YANA(P)L)
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
The wap forum can do nothing but put a brave face on their ending. The $20,000 for companies will put anyone off meaning WAP will never get the rich content the web did. Nothing appears to preclude the patent owners from charging everyone later if the so wish.
There is a lesson here for the US goverment. Had their stupid algorithm patents got out of hand before the web they'd have no internet worth talking about, just a random bunch of computer wizards, universities and military sites
Alan