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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.
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
Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)
/TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec.
/TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec.
:)
Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.
The
The
Now you should get moderated out of existance
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
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.
NewDeal is a separate company that bought the old GEOS GUI in, I believe, 1995 or 1996, and made marvelous changes to it. I wrote about it several times in my "Cheap Computing" column on andovernews.com and before that on Time Warner's Netly News, which is where I wrote (online) before Andover.
I still have NewDeal running in DRDOS 6.something on an old monochrome 386 laptop with a 20MB HD. Works fine. Nice little "full featured" office program. Its only flaw IMO is the WWW browser, which simply doesn't cut it on "modern" websites with frames, tables, etc.
DOS, NewDeal and a throwaway PC make a great training tool for small children. There are a lot of old DOS games around that are still new to a 4-year-old.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
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