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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.
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.
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Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
The GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System) was introduced by Br0derbund software during the mid 80's for the Commodore 64. Later versions were available for the C128, and I believe for the Atari and Apple II.
Around the same time that Microsoft began shipping Windows 1.1, the first versions of GEOS were made available for the PC, running on top of DOS (just like Windows). GEOS was a technically superior product, but like Apple, they discovered that superior technology does not beat out Microsoft's superior marketing. Around this same time, Br0derbund became Geoworks.
Geoworks experimented with and 8088 based PDA around '93-'94, called the Zoomer (marketed by Radio Shack, Casio, and a third manufacturer whom I cannot recall at the moment. The Zoomer was superior in many ways to it's contemporary PDA, the original Apple Newton, in fact the Zoomer was responsible for the creation of the Palm pilot as Palm created Graffitti to originally run on the Zoomer to replace it's less then perfect handwritting recognition engine. The Zoomer came with a version of the America Online client which allowed you to send and receive email as well as read news. America Online also produced a client for the desktop GEOS which was everybit as good as the Windows client.
Geoworks soon got out of the desktop market, giving the desktop license to New Deal Inc., and began focusing on "Smart Phones" - PDA enabled mobile phones.
So yes, GEOS was for the 64/128
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
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
No. This is within their rights as the patent holder.
They do not have to sue.. that implies damages. They sipmly state that they NOW rquire royalties, and will proceed to sue anyone who refuses to pay after this point. There are no past damages here.
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.
Unless the law requires you, as a developer, to research any prior art for what it is you are developing.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
WAP is about content, pure and simple. It's for delivery of news, directions, anything where all you need is the information quickly and in a mobile environment. Also, you are certainly able to use other standards within WAP. You list XML and CGI as two examples, but I wrote a CGI script that parses slashdot.xml (an XML file that CmdrTaco provides which contains info on the main pafe stories) for headlines and returns them in HDML (part of WAP). You can use darn near anything to process your info, but if you want remote, easy access to it, WAP is currently the way to go. BTW, if anyone has a wireless web phone and wants to see the script in action, you can get to it at thinkery.org/chewie/phone.hdml (no link 'cause you can't see it on a regular browser)
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49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
HDML can use ( and in mobile devices does use ) WAP as a transport. You may be interested in looking at WML as it is intended to replace HDML. WML was writen by the WAP consortium, If memory serves me correctly HDML was written by Unwired Planet. WML is based on HDML. You would be forgiven if when presented code in each language you could not tell the difference.
a point of interest: unlike HTML, WML and HDML are complied on the fly by the server. UP provide a proxy (?) that translates HTML into HDML for the WAP server.
D.
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.
--
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
WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here.
WML is like HTML for mobile phones.
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