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Ogg Vorbis Update: Thomson Trouble
3.1415926535 writes: "In this article on C|Net,
Thompson Multimedia's vice president of new business Henri Linde openly threatens the Vorbis project. The quote is, 'We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property. We think it is likely they are infringing.'"
Considering
Ogg Vorbis
is GPL, you'd think they'd already know.
What they're trying to do is cast doubt on Ogg Vorbis and therefore scare away those companies who might want to use it. Whether they win or not doesn't really matter: the idea is to either squash the technology in court OR to crush it by creating enough uncertainty that it isn't used. The biggest wild card here is the open-source developer community. If enough of these folks ignore Thomson and write useful software (and yes, stuff for Windows and Mac, not just Unix and Linux), then Ogg Vorbis could take on a life of its own. A good example is Napster. No matter whether you think that it's legal or illegal, ethical or unethical, you must admit that it's there, and it's had a big influence on several areas of discussion, including The legality of file-swapping
Whether CD prices are too high
How record companies treat artists
The state of P2P technology About fifteen years ago, the state of Mississippi had a restrictive set of what were called "blue laws". These laws outlined what stores could and could not legally sell on Sundays. I'm not talking about alcohol here. They covered many items, including hardware, food, etc. They'd been amended many times over the years to the point where they were totally illogical. For example, I seem to remember that you could buy nails but not a hammer. People grumbled about them, but the Legislature refused year after year to change them, and there never seemed to be a big public outcry against them, at least not enough to get anything done. Finally, some store owners got fed up and opened their stores on Sunday and sold items that were banned under these laws. Some even went so far as to state on the evening news that they were going to break the law because it was a stupid law, and they dared the police to arrest them. What happened? The stores opened, people bpught things, no one went to jail, and the Legislature repealed the blue laws in its next session. I'm not saying that there are direct comparisons to be drawn between the blue laws and Ogg Vorbis. What I am saying is that there comes a point when a group needs to forcefully push back against pressure brought to bear against it. Is Ogg Vorbis infringing on any patents? Whether it is or not, should there be patents broad enough to prevent anyone from developing an alternative audio standard? If our current patent system were applied about 100 years ago, could one company have patented the automobile to the exclusion of everyone else? Think about it. And in case you think that big corporations alwsys prevail, consider the case of etoy.com. eToys might very well have gotten away with its theft of that domain, but ordinary people pushed back. It didn't matter how many lawyers eToys had; they weren't going to win the war of public opinion. They were vilified all over the Net. Can you imagine the press a clash between Thomson and Ogg Vorbis would get? If you want a nice little public debate on IP, then this could be it. Personally, I think we need a big, ugly, bruising fight that gets tons of attention. Better to have it now while many issues are in flux than later, when too many precedents have been set.
You're assuming paths that aren't already mined with patents exist, which is unlikely in an esoteric field with fixed constraints (like average human perception). More likely we'll be tricked into waiting years for R&D on algorithms the monopolists have already made effectively unavailable (though it'd take a $20K patent search to figure out how) thus only benefitting them.
(User #184325 Info)
"If you're going to go into a marketplace where people play hardball, that's what hardball looks like," Scheirer warned
What an arrogant bastard.
What this corporate peon doesn't realize is that Ogg is both libre and gratis . It is neither a product for sale, nor a competitor in the 'marketplace'. I don't think these idiots see this coming - free software is going to render their profiteering schemes moot. MP3s will be kept as 'free as they are now' or OGG will replace it. Citizens of the planet are getting wise to the plans of these types...
Where is the PayPal site so I can send a donation?
The Revolution will be Webcast.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
You know, I've got to wonder whether a public admission of a nuisance suit is that good an idea. The courts often look unkindly upon people who file them.
Oh wait, I forgot. That only applies to little people 8-/
Agreed -- an excellent example of market forces at work. My my primary objection (however poorly it may have been articulated; It Was Late And I Was Tired) was that the decision to support Ogg/mp3/whatever is made based on practical decisions such as licensing fees and lawsuits, not because "people of the planet" care about libre.
Btw, I've seen several of your posts and need to ask -- what the hell is a "citizen of the planet"? You seem to presume that everyone except the money-grubbing corporatists thinks the same way you do.
I'd like a one-on-one debate. Please contact me by email.
Well, JPEG uses DCT and MPEG uses MDCT, yeah.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
You moron.
I suppose that you believe in the theory that if you scream a lie long enough and frequently enough, people will believe it. All tech stocks are taking a nosedive, you moron, open source or no. Tech stocks were way overinflated, especially anything remotely Linux-related, and now we're seeing things come back down to a more sensible level.
Should I become a Luddite now?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
OK. How many times does it need to be said.
For example, Apple has completely re-written Display Postscript and created Quartz to be Adobe-free (to avoid paying licencing fees) for Mac OS X. No patent infringement there.
Rewriting an application does NOT NOT NOT NOT get around patent laws. Once someone has a patent on a technologgy, they control any and all implementations of said technology. If they have only copyrighed their source, they have no say over re-implementations, unless someone cut-and-pasted code straight out of Adobe's code base.
--
Didn't Stop Diamond RIO from making a MP3 player. They where sued by RIAA and won. If you had to pay for a GIF you would use PNG in a minute. You would find it was technically superior. But only if someone asked you to pay up for GIFs.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
apparently no one else here has mentioned it, but Ogg Vorbis already has a 'Big Daddy'
somebody already mentioned Xiphophorus corporation, although that is little more than a name used by the author. more importantly, the author is a paid developer of IceCast, a company that has a strong interest in a truly free audio compression codec, as they are working on their own streaming media projects, which they would like to be able to do without paying royalties to Fraunhauffer. part if the reason for his employment there is specifically that they have lawyers on the payroll specifically to look into the patent and licensing issues with Ogg Vorbis.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Hahaha, yeah right, like there are any lawyers smart enough to grok C!
Actually, Jeff Merkey (ex-developer at Novell and author of the NWFS driver for Linux and Win2k) apparently is also a lawyer. So yes, some lawyers grok C. Whether or not lawyers grok Unix is another matter...
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
(Don't get it? Try foo.really.fuckingsucks.net or baz.really.fuckingsucks.net or anything-else-you-can-imagine.really.fuckingsucks. net)
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
His main problem (besides his tendancy to overreact to things) is that he's coming from developing for NetWare and Win2k to Linux and he doesn't yet understand the Unix philosophy.
He sometimes posts comments to linux-kernel which are completely foreign in idea (let's put fsck in the kernel, etc.) and than promptly gets attacked by a bunch of random tactless people.
Whatever his background is, he appears to be very competent, if a bit misguided and misunderstood.
And his comment about his brain being more electrically active then everybody else didn't help either...
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
"What part of free public resource suddenly becoming proprietary didn't you understand?"
That is the point. It was never a free public service you dolt. A couple of guys started it for their own benefit. And then they sold the rights to it. End of story. There was no law suit or anything of the sort.
The analogy you attempt to supply is flawed.
I understood everything. You did not.
CDDB was purchased from it's original developers by Escient. They did not sue anyone. They did not stop people from using the database. In fact, They have people assigned to maintiaining the CDDB database.
I suggest you investigate the facts, before you spout off. I have seen this same uninformed claim serveral times.
On a related note, I've been given a Thompson RCA Lyra MP3 player for my birthday earlier this year. The packaging claimed it to be an MP3 player with removable compact flash memory.
Unfortunately this device is only supported under Windows and requires the use of the terribly slow Real Jukebox software. This software downsamples everything to a maximum bitrate of 128 Kbps but even worse encrypts the MP3s before copying them on the CF. This whole process slows down the moving of MP3 files onto the player and makes it impossible to use anything else besides Windows. A major nuisance.
When I requested to get a software update without the encryption enforced RCA Thompson would not offer any support.
RCA Thompson (and other companies doing similar stupidities) should be forced to market this only as "ENCRYPTED ENCUMBERED MP3 player".
Hopefully somebody can come out with a nice player supporting Ogg Vorbis and non such nonsense. It would certainly be something I'd pay money for.
regards,
Heiko
if they were competent, and they thought it was infringing, they'd just download the source and figure it out themselves.
They already know. That's not the point. The point is they are willing to use lawsuits to keep themselves in busines, regardless of whether the lawsuits have any factual merit. Also, spreading FUD about Vorbis will influence PHB's in companies that might consider using it instead of paying license fees for MP3.
Because the Pong game on Keen's wristwatch is K-rad!
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
mp3 is basically a tool for distributing warez, doesn't it really matter if it's forced underground.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
A court case may delay widescale release of vorbis compliant products, but only for a short while.
The source will demonstrate to those Froenhoffer (or however the hell you spell it) bastards that their time is ending.
You can't fight open source.
>Have you seen a DeCSS based DVD player for Linux yet? I sure haven't head of one...
.ogg... and, besides, Fraunhoffer may not actually be willing to risk a court case until it's actually losing money: can you imagine how incredibly bad it would be for these guys if their patents were declared bullsh*t? If nothing else, it'll go underground; and inside 3 years I'd say, everything will be high-bitrate ogg, and mp3 will be something you use for portable players.
Obviously, you haven't looked hard enough.
http://www.livid.org didn't disappear, it just moved to http://www.linuxvideo.org/
CVS only at the moment, but it is usually mostly working; I suggest you give it a try.
Don't bother if you've got 2.4.0-test4 through test9 though as far as I can tell haven't heard of anyone who's got the css-auth working on those kernels. Then again, if people would *RESPOND* on IRC I would be a little more sure of that...
>You can fight open source, which is why we have to learn to fight back
that's actually what I meant;
You can't fight open source, because if it's open sourced, and is good, and there is community interest, the Open Source Community won't give a flying fsck what these bastards say; development will continue (though I must admit I have no idea how few people have expertise in the field of audio compression). Patent suits over good technologies provide interest; look at DMCA and DeCSS. Same will go for
One way or another, I think Ogg is the way to go, and I think those moneygrubbing sob's will be forced to retire into mediocrity.
That was generally my point. They already know whether or not Ogg has infringed. They are just confident they can pull the wool over the eyes of enough lawyers, judges and perhaps juries to break Ogg.
Isn't there a law against harassing suits?
If not, there should be. That would put a nice damper on using baseless lawsuits as weapons.
If it were enforced.
So should full disclosure, as in GPL and other Open Source, not be counted as equivalent to a patent?
After you've said that, can we then call you naive and stupid? 'Major allergies'? 'Major gastric problems'? So...you were sneezing and coughing, maybe with sinus problems, and you had digestive problems? And then recovered on our own? Good show. It's always best if you can get your body to heal itself without outside influence. For example, I don't take headache medicine. But, then again, I don't have migraines.
And what you did compares to recovering from cancer, or stopping heart attacks before they happen, or stroke recovery how exactly? Heck, how does it even compare to stopping a chest infection with penicillin, or getting a smallpox vaccine, both of which were invented fairly far in the past, as these things go. You can't walk off smallpox, and you can't take vitamins to stop a chest infection, much less the first things I mentioned.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That is really sad that they've recycled the great "Apollo" brandname for junk Sam's Club printers.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
For the record, Javascript was invented by Netscape, and has no relation to Java(TM).
-lx
Such lawsuits are commonly called SLAPP's, for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Common targets for such lawsuits are public interest groups such as the Consumer's Union (the publishers of Consumer Reports).
Some states have anti-SLAPP statutes by which a case can be thrown out simply by demonstrating that it is a SLAPP. I'm pretty sure California has one, but I'm not sure who else. Since corporations have started taking on high-profile organizations like the Consumer's Union, they have gotten more attention, and hopefully more state legislatures will be induced to act.
If you really think that such suits should be illegal, you could perhaps write your state rep (representative for state, not US, legislature). Politicians tend to listen if a large portion of their constituents tell them that they want something, and state government is not as easily corrupted/influenced by big business. If my state rep sold us out, he'd hear about it, given that most of the people he represents live walking distance from his house.
It's THOMSON Multimedia, not Thompson. Thomson is a company making TV sets (and, more importantly as I've heard, TV screens for other manufacturers) and similar equipments.
(joke)PatentOnBreathing * (posted_before_t)10000000000000 = NOT_FUNNY.
It doesn't really effect what you, an individual hacker, can do in your own home/car.
It does effect what mass-market consumer products are available and for sale at Walmart. The companies that make that stuff are easier to find and bigger targets than you are.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Maybe, maybe not. But if they aren't going to get a state-sanctioned monopoly (regardless of whether or not the "deserve" it or not) then they aren't going to spend a lot of money, are they? That means they aren't going to product, and you won't get the drug.
Because without those companies, the bottom line is zero.
Are you suggesting that research be moved out of the commercial sector and into the universities, and for the benefits of that research to be shared by all? That's fine, but if you want to do that and keep the existing rate of tech progress, then where is the money going to come from?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I mean, where's the bright-eyed lad who wants to get +1 Informative by determining if the GPL code uses the patented algorithm or not?!
Blar.
Hahaha, yeah right, like there are any lawyers smart enough to grok C!
--
You're a suburbanite.
A Class action suit, alleging that Thompsons' comments are to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding ogg vorbis, thereby hurting consumers/developers/website operators (pick one or all)
nothing is real
Baaad Monty, feeding the trolls... You should be spanked (though some people enjoy that ;) )
I paid for the drivers for the 9300 under win2k, had to order a disc from headquarters. Works great and fast now, and I didn't mind, but I won't pay again for drivers for the same piece of equipment, and if anyone asked for the CD I'd gladly send them a copy.
--
+&x
WMA does this too, right?
sup
Do these patents cover lossless compression as well?
sup
Actually, we have patents so that people will feel safe revealing the secrets of their technology, knowing they will have protection from competition for a few years.
It's not to provide incentive for people to find other routes to a solution, but rather, so that they can avoid having to reinvent the wheel -- in exchange for waiting a few years. Short-term innovation is stifled to further long-term innovation.
In the past (and in other fields), when the timescale for innovation was longer, this worked effectively. In the computer industry, especially with software, the timeframes assigned to patents can constrict innovation.
I wish there would be a little consistency in the community with regards to licenses:
A. "We use the GPL as a legal means to prevent commercial entities from using our code. They must respect the law and play by our rules."
B. "If we don't like the judgement of law, we will ignore it (i.e. DeCSS). We will continue to develop and distribute illegal code."
So the community expects commercial entities to abide by the law, but the Free Software movement should ignore the law if they don't like it?
Whatever.
"Good people drink good beer"
<RANT>
I just decided never to buy an MP3 player now, and never to use an mp3 that hasn't been liberated from the digital prison. Ogg files, on the other hand, will only be used legitimately in my world - to space-shift music I already own. If this isn't just a lawyer blowing some hot air to try to scare other companies off picking up the Vorbis flag, then this is a declaration of war. If it is just hot air, then it's pure gangsterism. Go to China, commie bastards!
Thompson, Fraunhofer, Bertelsmann, the Thule Society, whatever, it's all part of a Nazi plot to take over the information industry. Ever wonder why Bertelsmann is making kissy face with Napster? So they can bite the face off with their alien fangs!
</RANT>
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I'm not so sure. The economics of Music and the Internet make it such that you have to pay through the asshole to Real Media, Microsoft, Apple, or Fraunhofer under the current scheme. It makes it impossible to make a profit, especially when you really need at least two of these to not suck; I've done the numbers many times. But iCast realized that for a much smaller investment, they could leave this Gang of Four behind. These four each have their carrotstick to get you in line; market share, platform, monopoly power, free beer. In order to get a carrot of their own, iCast understood that they had to use the only one really left; free speech, free to use, free to go.
You might find this article at The Standard interesting. Any one of the companies mentioned in it - or the alliance they are creating - could find Ogg a useful starting point. What's more, they have the power to do it. And the motive; saving megabucks in licensing to the Gang of Four is a good motive to tell Thomson where to stick it and commit legal resources to it.
Exactly. Let's emulate corrupt third world economies because it sounds macho! We can pretend to be free marketeers and no one will notice that we could care less, as long as the powerful win and keep making us money!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I understand where you're coming from, but I like to use the oldest, lowest level of technology that will do a good job, and this conservative philosophy does seem to be shared by many in the free software field.
Remember that Linus didn't start out to write an innovative new kernel, he set out to write a free version of something that was already around twenty years old at the time. I think that this was a good decision.
Of coure, if a new aproach is *needed* to get a job done, either from a technical standpoint, or a legal one, then it should be used.
Jim Buchanan
My big question is whether or not this will hurt companies that plan to use .ogg files.
Thats exactly the plan:
"We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property," Linde said. "We think it is likely they are infringing." Whether this is true, analysts say Thomson and the German company are likely to file patent lawsuits the moment Vorbis appears to be a viable market candidate. By creating a perception of uncertainty around Vorbis' future, MP3's parents could prevent conservative digital music companies from adopting it. "If you're going to go into a marketplace where people play hardball, that's what hardball looks like," Scheirer warned.
Whatever it looks like, I know what it smells like.
You are absolutely right. But do you think you could possibly have been a little more of a jerk in pointing it out?
Patents can keep competitors out of the marketplace (resulting in higher prices for the innovator), can help a company increase its market share (since it has technology that its competitors can't copy), and can result in a stream of revenue if it is licensed. That's how.
- Have a picture
I wouldn't be surprised. Their native language is even more obfuscated.
How much longer does IBM's patent on arithmetic coding run? I know it was proposed as an alternative to huffman encoding for JPGs, but since it was patented noone used it, even though it produced superious results.
Ok, so I wanted to verify your opinion, so I did a google search. It appears that you are right
Jeff Merkley sucks.
I'd never seen that one before. cute.
(why does the preview strip links?)
Jeff Merkley sucks.
(the reason the link was broken was that slash hates linebreaks inside tags. I thought it was just a preview misfeature)
HP charging for drivers ain't so crazy. The first one's free, of course, but updates might cost you. They did this with their scanners a while ago - if you wanted to make your scanner work with a fresh install of Win98, you had to pay.
Seemed outrageous to me. I figured it was time to upgrade anyway and bought a $100 Microtek. But on the other hand, it costs them money to keep updating drivers for newer OSs... and once you have a humongous product line, where older equipment doesn't necessarily get obsolete, I can see where you might be looking at some serious manpower to update drivers for all your products for each new OS release. Kinda makes sense to charge a nominal fee at some point. Yeah, it sucks, but there it is.
'Kay, I agree that there *IS* a place for copyrights and patents in the world. Your perfectly right in that without SOME intellectual property protection there is little to no incentive to invest in R&D, or to create new music/movies/art....
... tho I do maintain that a real artist (eg. Ani DiFranco) creates because she has a passion for her work, rathar than to be a corperate whore (ala metallica)...
But the situation has run amok. Artists and inventors do NOT control their work anymore, corperations do. And those corperations are determined to stifle innovation and see to it that the public NEVER has access to them.
Witness the recent "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension" BS. Basiclly, the copyright on Mickey Mouse was due to expire soon. So the Walt Disney Corperation bought enough congresscritters to get copyright extended from an already absurd 75 years, to a patently ridiculous 95 (IIRC) years.
Even the 17 years that a patent lasts is excessive IN THIS DAY AND AGE. Sure, back in the 17/1800s, it prolly took a good decade for one half of the country to even HEAR of innovation on the other side. But it's not the 1800s anymore. We're only a few weeks from entering the 21st century. The world is different now, and the copyright/patent periods of the past are obsolete NOW, and need to be depricated NOW.
Think of how damn FAST innovation proceeds NOW. What is the "Next Big Thing(tm)" just emerging on the highest end this year, will be the standard, ubiquitous technology NEXT year. The year after that, it will be obosolete junk, relagated to the lowest end by the *next* "Next Big Thing(tm)".
Examples? Who here remembers:
EDO RAM?
Pentium MMX?
28.8Kbps modems?
"Disk Doubler" utilities?
All of the above made their creators HEAPS of money. But they fell victim to the burn rate of the MODERN world. It's time to let the public play with them. So much for patented IP.
Copyrighted IP?:
The Spice Girls seem to be at the end of their run.
Hanson must be in puberty by now.
Who remembers Silverchair? Bush?
Hell, do ya REALLY think James Cameron is gonna make a sequel to Titanic???
Whoops, so much for copyrights too.
It is time for copyright and patent terms to be reset to something sane. With the rate we advance thesedays I'd say five years. Given that most new tech has a burn rate of only three years or so, five years is PLENTY of time for inventors to make HEAPS of money, but short enough a period not to stifle innovation by the little guy.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
I'm patenting the perceptual processes in your brain. From now on, the perception of pleasure
will be regulated by me available to you, the
end user for a marginal fee. The perception of
pain shall remain largely free, except to those
individuals for whom it acts as a form of pleasure. Your perception of perceiving that
you are being manipulated shall be annulled
thus maintaining your illusion of clear
perception. Dogma's and religions pertaining
to perception (in particular Dianetics) shall
be persecuted as infringing upon my patents.
In particular, the idea of 'clear' proposed by
Dianetics shall henceforth be reffered to as
'fogged' to avoid litigation. The process of
self perception is still largely undocumented,
but rest assured as soon as it's encoding algorithm is reverse engineered, it too shall be
patented by us.
void this_is_a_stack_issue(){this_is_a_stack_issue();}
retards
Snorp
Now you know, why it is against german law to patent mathematical algorithms, algorithms in general, games or computer programs.
I don't disagree (at least about algorithms). I was just saying that their patents appear to be very specific and so it should be fairly easy to see if ogg infringes. Now as to whether what they patented should be patented is another question.
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
When looking for patent infringement you look at the Claims rather than the specific Embodiment.
I figured that but...as you said the Claims run in concentric circles. In other words, on many of the patents I couldn't figure out for sure what the claims were claiming: not that they were necessarily broad, just incomprehensible. And since I figured any part of a patent was "upholdable", I gave an example from part of a patent that was perfectly clear to me.
Thanks for the info. Next time I'll just spend all the time figuring out the claims...instead of trying to read most of many patents. :)
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Or recent geophysics graduates?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Have you seen a DeCSS based DVD player for Linux yet? I sure haven't heard of one...
You can fight open source, which is why we have to learn to fight back.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Open source programs can be modified by anyone. Sometimes they are maintained by groups of volunteers, and sometimes companies make most of the contribution. The comapny, however, does not own the project.
- The High Priest of Audhumla
Arrogant assholes assume infringement or know in fact that there is no infringement.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Targets... I dare you to say that to their lawyers. There is no definition of target behind closed doors.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
From the article:
;-(
Thomson and the German company are likely to file patent lawsuits the moment Vorbis appears to be a viable market candidate. By creating a perception of uncertainty around Vorbis' future, MP3's parents could prevent conservative digital music companies from adopting it.
Beyond the obvious problem of threatening lawsuits basically without any evidence of infringement, timing the lawsuits purely in an attempt to hold onto market share is a pretty frightening concept.
Makes me want to boycott MP3. I just haven't figured out a good way to do it
We had patents to protect garage inventors and small companies from being run out of business by larger corporations. Having a patent does not preclude using that patented technology, it merely forces others to license it for a fee. Now, I have no idea who regulates what that fee is but I've heard that a 1.5% royalty per unit is considered extremely high. It also tends to take several months to years to get licensing agreements hammered out amongst big corporations. The initial incentives for grabbing those patents were to 'make your big bucks' just like the IPO craze, get in, get rich, get out.
Today patents are being abused. No question that the process needs more oversight and large companies should have less power concerning patent issues.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Then again, suing whoever is responsible for Ogg Vorbis will not stop it from being used. Looking at the rampant spread of decss, one might say that suing would encourage Ogg Vorbis.
Almost correct.. They don't control any and all implementations of said technology, rather, they control the implementation specified in the patent. Of course this might be ridiculously broad (due to the stupidity of patent office) or just the only reasonable way of doing things, but still patents are only obtainable for specific implementations.
Monty, get back to work and code some more, instead of posting a bunch on slashdot! :-)
Actually, this is probably as good a time as any to ask: what is the time-schedule for beta4 and 1.0? I'm really really anxious to see this stuff come out soon, so that Thompson and Fraunhofer can be beat with a stick...
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Thank you.
Fire Jon Katz. Hire Neal Stephenson. (make this your sig too)
Dear me.
Here I was thinking that it is actually the users that are providing the content (submitting stories, posting comments) on slashdot. Why do you need money for that?
Now, of course servers and bandwidth costs real money, but thats what the ads are supposed to cover. In case they dont another solution might be needed. In 5 years I see a distributed /. running on the users machines anyway, so this might be a moot point.
/Dervak
"A method of compressing audio to preserve quality but reduce space usage."
Well then there's no problem! Ogg Vorbis could be patented under the premise, "Another method of compressing audio to preserve quality but reduce space usage."
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Attack is the best form of defence.
Attack is sometimes the best form of defence. But you have a good point. Unfortunately, I don't know how much funding the Vorbis project has. EFF might be a good choice on this issue though.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
There is something to the "it's GPL so beware" argument.
It might be shown that they were just fishing and intending to scare off and harass xiph coding.
Assuming they would file a suit without having read the source and with no other basis they may be liable for a Rule 11 violation which prohibits filling such frivilous suits. See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11 (it's not blue booked, so sue me...).
-- This is not legal advice or solicitation. See an attorney for legal advice. My views, not anyone else's..
Guys, software isn't going away and lawsuits aren't either. If you are being frivilously threatened you may still end up in court but there are people working to protect open source developers. I am one and there are clinics that are popping up all over to address the communities needs. Alot of us also are programmers.
;)
;)
If you've got an issue that relates to your development work one good place to go now is www.opencode.org. It's "cumbersome" for a law student to offer to help because they need an attorney to supervise work. Generally, a student can do work for an attorney but not an individual. That's why the emerging clinics will be important.
Now... Westlaw listed 107 cases involving copyright and rule 11 motions. I found 4 involving copyright/software and 3 patent/software. Point being cases needs advocates and at the very least people do file these motions with summary judgement requests. I am not familiar with German or EU "civil" civil law..
General blackletter law under Rule11(b) reads filings must have been "to the best of hte person's knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances." 11(b)(1) discusses intent to harass or cause unnecessary delay. My civpro book discusses when a suit is not formed after a reasonable inquiry and discusses some cases. If the extent of your knowledge of Rule 11 is having watched "Civil Action" you might merit some more reading..
I'll assume that anyone else following up will have taken a Civil Procedure class and will be competent to discuss the federal rules. Stop the FUD guys. Debacles like DeCSS & OLGA (rest their soul) are going to continue till the word gets out to our parents and other "normal" Americans of what's really going on and we start standing up for ourselves.
Lawsuits are lawsuits and rich plaintiffs are always going to be scary; doesn't mean you have to run away without a fight if there are people willing to fight with you.
--
The above is general black letter law and is not a substitute for legal advice from an attorney. The above is not legal advice; does not constitute the formation of an attorney client relationship; and is not a solicitation.
-- This is not legal advice or solicitation. See an attorney for legal advice. My views, not anyone else's..
ah, crap. i ment LZW.. i think? whats the freakin difference? there both window based compressions right?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Oh, I'm talking prevention, not cures. Drugs are quite useful for quick remedies, but any kind of habitual use ain't healthy at all.
Most people in the US have a deficiency in Omega-3 oils, which could be simply cured by eating more nuts and fish. Most people in the US breathe a lot of car exhaust, which contains known carcinogens. Most people in the US eat almost entirely processed food, lacking in vitamins, enzymes, minerals, and essential fats, and pumped full of msg, nutrasweet, sugar, or hydrogenated fats.
If we're dropping left and right from disease and bodily decay, it is our own fault. A healthy body needs no drugs, and it's our own fault we aren't healthy.
That's all to say nothing about the dangers of taking two medications at once - my best friend died 4 years ago from taking two flu medications at once.
A drug companies job is to make money. What method gets them more money?
1: Go out in nature, find cures for disease, tell people about them, and sell the remedy.
2: Find a new drug that offers quick relief of pain, but you have to keep taking it and it need not do anything to actually saolve the problem.
Drugs? I don't do drugs. If everone would just eat their vegetables, take some vitamins, and go for a half hour walk each day, the entire drug cartel would collapse.
Before you start calling me naive and/or stupid, I'd just like to say that I was suffering from widespread allergies and pretty major gastric problems, and I recovered. No drugs. Natural medicine.
Patents and all intellectual property needs to be abolished. I won't go into why right now, but later. I'm talking copyright, trademarks, all patents, all software licenses, including the GPL.
"What is the incentive to write music if one can't reasonably expect to derive royalties from recordings and for-pay performances during her lifetime?"
Art? Love? The joy of creation?
Take away the monetary rewards, and you filter out the gold-diggers and the corporate whores. Are you saying the real artists wouldn't get compensated with money? As a general rule, *they don't now, either.*
What is the correct spelling?
Hear, hear, or Here, here?
Anyway, I totally agree with you. Natural medicine all the way. Eat your veggies. I'm eating mine.
"The sad truth is that if companies were not afforded patent protection, then their massive research budgets would go to cutthroat marketing and developing snake-oil."
The sad truth is that since companies are afforded patent protection, their massive research budgets are going to cutthroat litigation and sueing anyone who invents anything that might sometime threaten their profits.
"Damn right they have an interest in protecting it!"
They have an interest in blackmail, libel, and extortion?
Open source is whatever the developers want it to be.
If it's conservative, I don't mind. It works for me.
Question: What countries don't respect patents? Seriously, I'd like to know, maybe I'd move there.
(I was going to have a go at patenting one about 5 years ago, before I saw the light!)
Bless you, sir. Or ma'am. Somebody tried to talk me into patenting an idea of mine, but I resisted him because I had a bad feeling about patents. Now I know, and I'm glad I didn't.
Since when was corporate backing vital to the success of an open source project? Or, for that matter, equated with technical skills and knowledge? There are plenty of Open Source or Free Software programmers out there with an "in-depth knowledge of signal processing." Like a good number in both the BSD and Linux communities, as well as other places.
-RickHunter
History suggests that this is not the case. CMGI and iCast apparently did not want control when they invested in Ogg Vorbis. The potential of a free audio format was enough.
AOL didn't fork anything. They branched from a developmental browser to gain the stability needed for a release. Netscape's changes have been reintegrated back into "Mozilla 0.6".
Were you trolling?
Sun doesn't own Javascript: Netscape created it.
HP won't get too far with charging for stuff that's free now (like printer drivers) because it will annoy the hell out of users. The thing about printers is, it's hard to capture and keep market dominance, because "incompatibility" isn't an issue - I have little to fear about paper from my Epson printer being incompatible with your eyes which are used to HP printouts.
Sony has tried highly proprietary music formats before... and you see how prevalent the MiniDisc became. (It's actually a cute little technology and I know audiophiles who say nice things about it, but it's too expensive because it's proprietary...)
comment.c:3: invalid lvalue in assignment
put it under both...
they'll probably sue them anyway if there patent is something like, "compressed audio"... you know, something nice and general...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Personally, I find that very likely. Lawyers are generally very bright people. They actually have much better education than the average hacker. And, the ability to grok C isn't too hard. Most people can pick up C very fast. Even for someone without prior programming experience, half a year would suffice for most people. And lawyers aren't stupid! If they were, they would never managed to become lawyers.
You just have to realize that just because you know something about programming, that doesn't mean you are particularly bright. It just means that at some point in time, you were intrigued by computers (which is likely to be true of a lot of lawyers as well). On the other hand, if you are the leading personality in your field of programming, that definitely means you are bright, but then you would probably not brag about knowing C.
On the other hand, there is the question of whether lawyers understand current audio compression technology good enough to make sense of the Ogg Vorbis source code. I seriously doubt that, as neither does most hackers. And that is the issue at end.
But regardless of this, the most important fact is that no lawyer with his wits clear would do such work himself. After all, just hiring an audio compression expert to do the review would be much better, both in terms of quality of review, and in the amount of money spent, because he would be able to do so much faster.
I can't possibly imagine how that would take less space than the actual sound. And the encoding would probably have to be for one particular person's ear. How would you want to do playback? By attaching directly to the neurons?
Anyway, there is one rather cool aspect of this idea, by attaching electrodes directly to the neurons, we could induce sound patterns in the brain that could have never existed in reality. Maybe this would just give you a headache, but it could also make pretty weird effects in a computer game or something like that.
Patents aren't evil, only software patents are. Or to be more precise, software patents aren't evi either, but their current implementation does.
How has the decss lawsuit helped decss? Did this encourage lot's of hackers to work on dvd-players? The only thing that happened was that lot's of people started mirroring a short piece of source code that was almost useless in itself all over the world. If it hadn't been for the lawsuit, we would most likely have several useable and legal dvd-players in every linux-distribution by now.
Given that sounds get from your ear to your brain through neurons, could you make a codec which encodes sound as a representation of which neurons would be fired as you perceive that sound? (To increase compression, you could lower the sampling rate and the percentage of neurons represetned.) That seems like the obvious form of perceptual encoding, since it's what they'd have to use to make an artifical ear for a deaf person. If perceptual encoding is much like that, wouldn't it be too obvious to patent?
Disclaimer: I realize that anyone who knows anything about physiology is probably laughing at me now. I know almost nothing of the subject.
RTFA, Phil .....
Fraunhofer made some deal with Thomson so they (Thomson) collect the royalties for both patents ....
Here's my ideal scenario: A group of opensource toolsmiths comes up with a brilliant new idea and patents it. Now, patents can be selectively enforced (unlike copywrites) they allow all opensource projects complete and free access and charge the mega-corporate patent whores crippling licensing fees. The whole world cheers, RMS strides the planet as a Titan, and Bill Gates is thrown to the dogs.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
The only logical course of action, from a company stand point, is to sue. Consider the situation -- a free, potentially better product is coming up. If you can smear its name before it becomes widespread, mass market adoption is a lot less likely. The important part is the lawsuit -- winning or losing, in this case, is not. Sure some people will take to it, but wide support probably won't be there.
Like DeCSS, mirror early, mirror often!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
HP actually already tried charging ($10 or somesuch) for the privilage of using the latest-and-greatest DeskJet drivers a while ago, not sure if they still are though.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
If so, that would prevent any benefit coders would gain from re-locating, methinks..
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
iCAST (a CMGI company) was going to be focusing on using vorbis, but now iCAST is closing its doors and vorbis is losing it's main corporate support for the moment. Seems that this may be the reason for the timing of this announcment.
Previously iCAST had spent a good deal of money on IP Lawyers to make sure that Vorbis didn't infringe on any patents. Doubt any of those lawyers will be defending Vorbis for free.
Sometimes it is all about money.
Maybe I'd be more incliended to listen to you if your spelling wasn't that shitty... It's still in development, dammit! If you think you can do better, go and help them instead.
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
The Powerpoint presentation!! You forgot the Powerpoint presentation!!!
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Well, Hurd, which is GPL *really!*, is a microkernel.
monolithic kernels are good for speed (but, well, bad for maintainability)
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Ok. I concede that there is a philosophical school of thought based on the (IMO, naive) notion that if I scratch backs, mine will be scratched too.
That does not address the mechanical ineptitudes that cripple the document known as the GPL. It will take a better agreement to effectuate the aspirations of that philosophy.
Do me a favor. Read Paragraph 0 of the GPL, and tell me you understand what the scope of its terms are. I guarantee you that if I ask 9 other people the same question, I will have 10 unique and useless answers. The scope of the GPL is vague and poorly drafted. The document will not hold water. This dog won't hunt, people. This horse refuses to run. What more can I tell you.
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
You are correct that you can place restrictions on a grant of a license of a copyright up to the limits of the law and public interest.
My point is that the GPL is a very poorly drafted document that does not accomplish any of what it sets out to do. Just read it. The first paragraph (para. 0) does not make any sense whatsoever. Since that paragraph defines the scope of the terms and conditions, the document is crippled before it can even start the race. I've never read an agreement as redundant and inarticulate and misguided as the GPL. Well, that's a bit hyperbolic, but IAAL and I do this for a living. The GPL is going to fail in its purpose once a judge gets to rule on it.
You said: The exact moral and legal purpose of the GPL is to make sure that you have absolutely no protection against competitors using all your secrets, because Sharing Is Good. So, the incentive for disclosure is a desire to be good? The GPL is a philosophical document that will suffer the fate of all philosophies: it will bow down to the reality that life is "nasty, brutish and short." Ergo, the patent system.
In the USA , commercial gain is not a factor in judging the seriousness of a copyright. The U.S. Copyright Act takes an infringer's commercial gain into consideration when determining whether the infringement is punishible as a criminal act.
Hah... At any given time, I can walk down the hall and fall over three people who know what a Fourier transform is....and I am at a small technical college. Then picking out how to weight the coefficients so your ear doesn't know what's missing has got to be found in some journal of acoustics. This is not rocket science for chrissakes. In three months, you could write your own.
It was because the good samaritan DID something.
Hell i was at a dinner party the other day when a bunch of rich people pontificated that it was far too dangerous to stop and help someone in distress on the side of the road.
They got the money but they won't do squat.
Its in the doing not in the "being able to do"
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
When will these people stop bitching about their intellectual property?
Company: I want my candy!!
Me: Listen, you still have your candy, they just have some too now...
Company: boohoo
lysergically yours
It seems some lawyer who knew Math thought, "hey, any non-infinite number is technically 'limited'. So copyright could last 10^100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years and still follow the letter of the Constitution!"
Firstly your first Patent is registered to the company name Fraunhofer, not Thomson.
Secondly, doesn't the second patent infringe on the first. Shouldn't they screw themselves before they try screwing others?
:-)
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The first one:
"
utilizing a code in such a way that the more frequently said spectral coefficient occurs, the shorter the code word
"
Don't use a "code word" scheme. Use any sub-bit encoding scheme. Arithmetic is out, but there are several others. (I was going to have a go at patenting one about 5 years ago, before I saw the light!)
The second one:
"
The same number of bits is assigned to all values in a frequency group.
"
Trivial - change the bit allocation.
It only takes one claim to be not violated, and the patent as a whole is not violated.
Thomson are just full of hot air.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
In the real world
Stop accepting this screed as truth and it wont have to be. Raise your standards, stand up for what you think is right even if it seems 'hopeless' and you are in the minority, and dont accept the dark, faceless future these corporatists are trying to build. Stand up to them - keep the faith.
Ditto.
Perhaps they've learnt from DeCSS et al that legal brute force isn't as effective on the Net as in real life, and so are opting for a more subtle approach. It'll be interesting to see what they do from here.
Or maybe I'm being excessively paranoid and conspiratorial.
They don't deserve state-sanctioned monopoly status just because they spent a lot of money. Some people spend a lot of money trying to start businesses that eventually fail, but I don't see anyone rushing to make things easier for them. Corporations have more than enough legal protection. They can declare bankruptcy leaving thousands of workers unpaid while the directors and executives walk away with millions. They can break laws (in some jurisdictions) without culpability for corporate board members. What else do they need to ensure their survival? I thought free-market economics was about the survival of the fittest. If you really look at it, it's just as bad as the ancien regime. Just the powerful doing favours for each other.
Don't families deserve to be protected as much as ideas? The state doesn't guarantee that my children will generate a return, nor does it enforce my residual rights in them after I have finished parenting. Here is my demand: I put lots of hard work and resources into raising my children, therefore the state should ensure that they have guaranteed employability when they graduate from high school. This is an absurd demand, as I'm sure you will admit. And yet aren't intellectual property owners whining for just this kind of guarantee?
Intellectual property protection was never included in the Rights of Man, nor does the Canadian Charter of Rights ensure Intellectual Property rights (The Canadian Charter doesn't even guarantee *property* rights). The US constitution added provisional support for intellectual property protection merely as a means to promote a public good, not as an essential right.
Even if one allows the moral argument that a certain level of intellectual property is required to protect human dignity (in cases of outright plagiarism, or personation perhaps), such a requirement could be met at a threshold far below current conventions. We are experiencing the equivalent of a land-grab. Even leaving moral questions aside, there is probably a practical case to be made that intellectual property rights of all kinds merely stifle creativity. They make us afraid to imitate, and everyone knows that people learn by imitating. We can't explore the landscape for fear of trespassing.
If you look at the broader purpose of intellectual property laws, it becomes quite evident that granting property rights is just one way amongst many to stimulate creative work. It's not the only way and it's not necessarily the best way. Property rights are supposed to benefit commerce and profit-taking. Does the profit motive provide enough bang for the intellectual property dollar? Some types of human activities are more commerce-friendly than others. Sales, manufacturing, wholesaling, shipping, agriculture, mining, forestry and other old economy businesses can be conducted more-or-less profitably without interference from the state. The ownership of ideas is meant to encourage commercial involvement in scientific research and artistic expression. Do the goals of profitability conflict with those of pure or applied research? Can artists create most effectively when they respond to market pressures or is there something else at work? These are the questions which ought to guide intellectual property legislators.
Research is a crapshoot, like you said, most of the drugs never reach clinical trials. So why then should we entrust critical research to companies who have no incentive to pursue the truth, but are only driven by the bottom line? Is this really the best way to promote understanding of the world around us? If we give up on pure research and satisfy ourselves with applied science, how far will knowledge advance? And without the advances in pure science, applied science would be starved for innovation.
Universities were supposed to provide shelter from market influences and mob mentality so that some people could free their minds and study the world for the sake of knowledge in the pursuit of Truth. The soul of democracy has now been dismantled. To fill the void that was left, patents, trademarks, and copyright have been extended and strengthened. Corporations have now been entrusted with the task of putting aside market pressures to deliver research which will benefit humanity.
Is there something wrong with this picture?
If I accept your claim that taxation is a necessary evil, I might still argue that spending the money wisely must include spending it on activities which I don't consider worthwhile. If, for instance, you pay $2000 per year in property tax, someone has to decide how to spend that money. If you alone could decide what to do with it, services such as sewage, water, roads, police, courts, legislators' salaries could never be dependably included in an annual budget. You might this year decide that you don't want any of your money to go to roads. Everyone else might decide to do the same. If that were the case, the maintenance of public roads would be subject to the whims of individual taxpayers.
This is not an impossible scenario. It may be possible for the government to allow citizens to direct their tax contributions. It would just make for unreliable government. What would happen if there were suddendly no inspectors to inspect meat sold at grocery stores? Store owners could keep meat on the shelves as long as they pleased. Allowing someone's child to die of Hamburger Disease is not conducive to a healthy economy.
Public infrastructure is what makes an economy possible. A healthy economy should be able to pay for the infrastructure which it needs in order to run. Otherwise, the negative side effects will wind make it impossible to conduct business at all. If someone doesn't pay for the road, no one will be able to deliver merchandise effectively. If the police can't effectively deter crime, no one will be able to work or live without fear. Without all the services and structures which we take for granted, the economy would suffer. This is not an argument for Big Government, it's an argument for Right Sized, efficient government. I'm not an opponent of individualism or a supporter of communism, since I can easily see that the government could not exist without the financial and moral support of the governed. That means the freedom for individuals to pursue economic goals is essential to the survival of modern liberal democratic states.
In short, I am saying that the relationship between public and private institutions is one of interdependence, not independence.
The economy is fuelled by consumption. Period.
Innovation would happen with or without intellectual property racketeering. Inventions would find their way into the market one way or another. Don't you have faith in man's desire to create? Most of the scientists I've met (a skewed sample, to be sure) think of science the way mountain climbers think of mountains. They just *need* to discover stuff. Curiosity is a much better incentive for innovation than property rights.
Property rights seem useful once something's already there, as in the case of a plot of land or a purchased vehicle. Claiming to hold residual property rights in segments of the human genome is a bit like landing on a planet and claiming it for humanity. We know nothing about it, so saying we own it isn't saying very much at all.
I could claim to be the first person to have passed through a certain part of the universe (as a passenger on Earth, I would have been the first Earthling to pass through *some* part of the universe) but I'd be a bit grandiose if I said I had discoverer's rights to anything.
Although this last analogy is "out-there", it demonstrates my point that applying the concept of ownership to objects without well-defined boundaries is confusing and inflammatory, not to mention being a category error.
I won't go under unless I depend upon intellectual property rights in order to make a living. As long as my neighbors don't use the power of the State to stop me from selling my own invention, they can do anything they want with it. My only reason for inventing, in this case (arguably a limited one), was to help myself, my family or my community. You're twisting my hypothetical case so that it includes the effects of intellectual property protection even though, by construction, the scenario has none. If those who "take" my idea don't have a State-enforced monopoly, they don't have an unfair advantage over me, nor do I have an unfair advantage over them.
An economist might argue that intellectual property laws add to the consumer surplus by making more and better choices available in the market. This is partly true. But the notion of a consumer surplus is quite theoretical and inexact. In order to claim that a consumer surplus exists in a given market, on must show that the *value* to the purchaser exceeds the *price* paid to the producer. Whenever producers can raise their prices without driving customers away, the difference between the "dollars" of benefit derived by the buyer and the price paid to the producer shrinks. That means the artificially high prices imposed by intellectual property laws eat up some of the benefits which technology provides.
Furthermore, by granting property rights in information, the State ensures that low-efficiency producers of intellectual capital will have an easier time surviving, while the efficient producers will have a smaller share of the market than they would have otherwise.
This may sound like a stupid question, but how do you know we need "said drugs" even before they've been discovered? You want to write a blank cheque for these guys without even considering whether the product in question is needed. What kind of priorities are you setting, or are you setting any at all? It seems you would rather have someone take responsibility for your well-being. This is the classic case of 'orphaned' drugs for which the market isn't large enough to justify the cost of clinical trials. On the one hand, intellectual property apologists want to believe that patents, trademarks and copyright promote public good, but when presented with clear examples which show the money-grubbing side of intellectual property ownership, apologists backpedal and say "Hey, they have a natural right to those inventions. So what if some inventions don't serve any real human need?"
But, as anyone who's taken a decent economics course cna tell you, private research generally yields much better results than public research.
Saying that is probably what got the economics prof her job. I took an economics course and it seems to me that the jury's still out on whether the state protection racket produces better results than universities. Call that one a draw. Most of the time, private industry uses the publicly funded research as a basis for further inquiry. The information flow used to be from universities to private industry, but cutbacks have probably done a lot to reverse the flow. When you say private research is better than university research, you could mean one of two things: On the one hand, you might be saying that private research is better because the profit motive makes it better. I don't agree with that claim, but at least it has some substance. On the other hand, you might be saying that while you don't understand the mechanism of their success, you believe there might be statistical evidence to show that historically, private companies do produce better research more efficiently than Universities. I really doubt whether you could amass statistics to support that claim, but even if statistics showed that business has the edge over publicly funded research, that would still be like comparing apples and oranges. You can't measure research success or progress financially. Long periods may pass in which no worthwhile results are discovered. This is another point on which intellectual property apologists appear to have a double standard. When I point out that Pfizer had revenue of 5.5 billion dollars in Q3, they reply "Oh, but research costs a lot of money and lots of drugs never even make it to market!" Yet when they look at university research (when they aren't too busy plundering it) all they can see is waste and inefficiency. Well no bloody wonder! How can you come in on budget and on schedule when you're exploring the unknown? Doesn't that strike you as an unreasonably high standard? In fact the drug companies have been blathering about how much it costs to do clinical trials etc., for so long that people have forgotten that universities have the same troubles. They just don't spend billions on public relations TV advertising campaigns like their private sector counterparts do.
I wonder how people can live in a civilized world and think of it as if they live in a vacuum. I'm no fan of porkbarreling or nepotism, but tax dollars *have* to support *some* things that don't benefit you directly. Are you mad that the government builds and maintains parks? You may not go to the park often. There are many parks you will never visit. By your lights, that money will have been wasted. Are you really saying that the government should spend the money on you and you alone?
What you are probably trying to say is that sometimes governments make bad spending decisions. Of course that's true. But to use that as an excuse for greed and selfishness is disrespectful to your fellow citizens.
It doesn't matter what society wants or needs, as much as it matters that each individual gets a fair deal.
I doesn't matter what society needs until it comes to things like the environment and public works. Then people need to act together in order to be effective. Without the collective and coordinated effort of many participants, most of what we value in society would be gone. Such basic social organizing principles as the division of labour require cooperation to achieve mutual benefit. You can't do everything for yourself and still have time left over to post comments to /.!
Yeah, uh, 'product' wasn't a verb last I heard.
If you want to accept blackmail as a form of public work, then sure, I agree. Me, I'd rather work with someone who wants to help rather than someone who threatens me that they won't.
Are you suggesting that research be moved out of the commercial sector and into the universities, and for the benefits of that research to be shared by all?
Not all research, just the stuff that's open-ended and really hard to make money at. Private industry is "more efficient" because it does all the applied research where there is often a specific market objective being studied. The Human Genome project was like that. Celera was right to say that the private sector could do that more efficiently than a university. It was all a mechanical process. Once the methodology had been put in place the publicly funded part of the human genome project would probably have best been left to someone with a manufacturer's skills, not those of a scientist. Now the ownership of the gene fragments is another story altogether...
That's fine, but if you want to do that and keep the existing rate of tech progress, then where is the money going to come from?
Where does it usually come from? Taxes. There's nothing wrong with taxpayers footing the bill for valuable work that isn't immediately profitable. A lot of pure science falls into this category and that's what technology needs to continue advancing. What would applied science apply if not new scientific discoveries?
Yeah, right. Patents exist to line the pockets of lawyers and corporations.
If you couldn't patent something, then you would put hard work into making something, and then everyone in the world could just take your idea as soon as it hit the market and duplicate it and make money off of your hard work.
So what? There's lots of stuff I work hard on that I don't get a guaranteed return on. That's life. Sometimes people take advantage of you. If it really bothers you, then just keep your brilliant invention a secret and no one will steal it.
So, if there were no patents, then everyone would just wait around for everyone else to invent something so they could take the idea and exploit it for their own gain.
Rubbish. People invent what they need *because* they need it. If I've got a good idea, you can be damn sure I'm not going to sit around and wait until someone else comes up with something similar. I have to eat and clothe myself. If my invention makes that easier for me and my family, what do I care if my neighbor uses my idea?
(I learned about patents in my Economics class -- see, education really does work!)
I'm not sure if you're serious or joking or playing dumb. Education only works because someone shares their knowledge. Patents (and copyright and trademarks) just get in the way of sharing.
The royalty for the is not that much: something like 0.50$US by player. I don't think it's a big market stopper although the minimum licencing is 15,000 units. BTW, I still prefer Ogg/Vorbis. I'm looking to make it in fix points algorithm for better performance on arm and other non-fpu embedded platform.
Fabien Niñoles - Debian Maintainer
In these absurd hypercapitalist rape cases, couldn't we just take hostages, blow up the building, execute their CEO and call it self-defense ? Because that's exactly what they're trying to do with GPL software.
"Your software is better. We'll copy it, stick our name on it, make a proprietary fileformat, then sue you for copyright infringement because you never patented your software. Oh look, you have no money to defend yourselves.. boo hoo game over. And to make sure you don't come back, we'll hire a bunch of hookers for the senators so they sign in a new anticonstitutional law that backs our fraud up. Have a nice day."
Just shove that text into an ISO 9002 certified english-to-bullshit translator and you've got what's on every IT corporation's lawyer's lips.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well, Thompson, I'm pro-open-source, pro-good-guy, pro-hacker, and VERY ANTI-CORPORATIONS-WHICH-USE-SCARE-TACTICS,-EXPENSI VE-LAWSUITS,-AND-CONSUMER-IGNORANCE-TO-FURTHER-THE IR-DOMINATION. AND not only do I vote, but my position in an industry laced with audio compression gives me influence with users of consumer and professional audio equipment.
Exactly what part of you throwing threats around encourages me to choose or recommend your technologies?
We're not ignorant enough to boycott mp3s, but you can be damn sure that the tide against corporate greed is turning. Go forward with this, and you'll be at the top of our lists.
So how long do you think before big blue announces their research leading to technology that will compress entire albums enough to fit on a single floppy?
Are YOU listed?
notice how many people *are* using png? not a lot...
Would that first patent cover huffman encoding a raw wave file in 512 byte chunks?
Hate to say this, but I just took out a patent on posts using words to express personal opinion. Everyone owes me $50.
But in all seriousness, maybe something like this would work. Patent something increadibly stupid that everyone uses, and the courts would defend under current copyright law. Then create such a big fuss about it that more people begin to relize how screwed up the copyright law is.
And I'm still waiting for Ogg to encode my 44.1kHz, 16 bit stereo WAV files.
The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents finally expired in the past few years, but they hobbled the growth of public-key cryptography for decades. And Vorbis's technical advantages over MP3 are no big deal. Its main attraction is being patent free. If that's put into serious doubt, then there's not much reason to spread quasi-legal Vorbis encoders around. It's just as easy, and more interoperable, to spread quasi-legal MP3 encoders. So, somebody needs to pursue the matter vigorously, which means burning a lot of money. Or else we may have to fall back on a lower-performance compression format using methods that predate MP3. That might not be so bad now, since storage has gotten so cheap. If an MPEG layer 2 encoder at 256 kbits gives audio as as good as MP3 at 128 kbits, it uses 2x as much storage, but storage is 5x cheaper now than when we started using MP3, so we're still ahead. Plus, encoding the older formats needs much less CPU cycles than MP3 or Vorbis, so CD ripping in realtime or faster than realtime because easy on today's PC's.
There are some companies that would love to support ogg vorbis without having control ... but at the same time, given how most open-source projects grow, I doubt that the lack of a corporate sponsor would actually KILL the format.
My big question is whether or not this will hurt companies that plan to use .ogg files. Not knowing a thing about the intricacies of the law here, I'm guessing that merely distributing the files, if you're incorporated, puts you at risk for a lawsuit. Beyond a small minority of geeks trading a "contraband" format, .ogg would be dead to the world.
I want to use .ogg. I've been waiting a long time for it. The question now becomes how much money I've got to spend to defend it. I really hate patents.
When there is cartoon character that was created before my parents were born and it will be not in public domain during my children's lifetime, I don't understand where is the "limited time" from the deal. And don't get me started about certain corp freely taking ideas and characters from public domain pool for their movies.
By the way, do you get paid for something that you did 5 years ago? Or 10 (15,20...75)?
Both claim working in the "the frequency domain". Ogg uses wavelets and especially mentions on it's homepage that these techniques effectively differ a lot.
These means Ogg can probably stand up easily in court. Of course you could pick a single claim out of the patents and sue for that( for example "adaptively using mathematical standard method X on topic Y", but eventually that won't work out ( I think ).
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
If this lawsuit actually goes through -- which is fairly likely -- Ogg Vorbis stands to fall into the same land where DeCSS roams. If enough dedicated people keep up-to-date mirrors of the source, development can go on even when the original team gets sued. This will probably cause a few forks before settling down with some new people, but the project will go on. I doubt that Thompson Multimedia has the sort of resources the MPAA has, and even that behemoth hasn't been able to stamp out DeCSS.
This is the height of arrogance. Of course no one could possibley develop a competing product without use of ours.
Or maybe they have a patent on "A method of compressing audio to preserve quality but reduce space usage."
End of lesson. You may press the button.
...The technology is supported in the popular Sonique player, and a plug-in is available for America Online's Winamp player, for example...
AOL's Winamp. Even if it's true (now) I still can't get used to hearing that...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I think it was Eric Scheirer who said that. Eric is not their representative. He is a Forrester Research analyst.
I guess he is not threating there, it seems like a warning to me. And Eric is probably one of the people to be taken most seriously when he talks about such issues. He is one of the authors of a different MPEG audio standard, MPEG-4 Structured Audio, developed when was in the MIT Media Lab.
This standard (MPEG-4-SA) is probably one of the few parts of MPEG which is patent free. It deals with algoritmic sound generation. Unfortunately there is no way (yet) to encode standard audio into such representation...
The final standard draft is available from their web pages:
http://sound.media.mit.edu/~eds/mpeg4/
In the cnet article, they also quote Eric saying that vorbis is a technology which is competitive with MP3. It seems it is not only Monty who thinks so...
You're kidding, right? Rule 11 violations are almost NEVER prosecuted. And they most certainly wouldn't be in this case.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Unlike thousands of other projects started by startups that go bankrupt once the VC comes out, this one actually has the chance to go somewhere and continue to be useful to people.
Hopefully more programmers that have taken a personal interest in their projects can encourage their companies to do the same.
That way, if the company is just going to keel over anyway, at least the world gets something out of it.
By the way, I have several friends who are aesthetes, and I myself was one for a short period of time (ca. 1973-1976) but I don't believe I've ever heard of you. Have you published yet in the New Journal of Aesthetics?
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Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
Sincerely, Bob Costas
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Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
I've been spoiled by my previous accounts -1 default score. Now I've gone and posted a bunch of sure-to-get-modded-down comments. Well, I guess I will not be posting for a few days. This should bode well for productivity for my many open source projects, on the plus side.
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Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
Well that depends, was it Aliens Ate my Babysitter? I heard that has problems with 2.1.X
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Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
Hey, I'm a Window$ programmer (really). What's wrong with that?
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Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
Aren't they meaning they don't want anything better than mp3 because they own the audio compression patent? Isn't it too generic?
BTW, I had an idea. From now own, anyone that eats hot-dog will have to pay me royalties. If you try to escape, your soul will slowly and painfully burn in hell.
I AM GALACTUS
Knowing little about digital signal processing but slightly more about patents, I can point out that the "ominous words" at the end of the patent are little more than boilerplate legalese; you will see almost this exact formulation in many patents. It means simply that if they give specific examples in the description of the patent, that doesn't mean that the claims are implied to be referencing just those specific examples.
Read the abstract and description to understand the patent, but the claims are what are legally binding...this is the part where overly vague or inclusive language is truly damaging.
Their quote was specifically worded to not actually say anything. That way, they can't be sued for libel. A lot of "we think" and "it's highly likely" instead of "we checked and lines abc through xyz in the file qwerty.c are a violation of our patents".
Oh well.
It's already really good (recent CVS at least). Monty et al. do some really good work... I especially like the "concatenated ogg files play with no gaps and change the track info appropriately" feature, and once Icecast unicast and multicast (is Icecast doing multicast?) is done, people will have to be amazingly dense not to realize it's better than mp3.
But, realy...if OGG infringes on the patents, chances are..they are a little too brod (as are all pattents on things dominated by one company...or...all patents)Are patents realy good for anything but making lawers rich?
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
1) Know what your identity is first
2) Can you make a deal without compromising that? If so, make one.
3) No lawyer can ever control a piece of software when pitted against they who made the software.
p.s. dare to stamp out doggerel
Goat sex free since 2001
It seems likely that wether or not they have any proof over the infringement of intellectual property they will sue anyway. It seems that the system offers little or no penalty for large, entrenched corporations to effectively crush smaller startup companies with law suites that have little or no merit
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
How does the applying for patents and submitting the application fee help companies recoup R&D costs? The PO doesn't pay companies to apply for patents. Time to rethink your theory.
---- Just another spud server.
Hey, anybody out there who can prove to be a direct descendant of Jean-Baptiste Fourier, this math guy? Go ahead and sue the shit outa Thomson, Fraunhofer et al!
This makes me mad. Any company can get a patent for a general purpose, and then inflict it on any product that is remotely related to it. This is just like BT claiming that they owned the hyperlink or Apple claiming that Microsoft stole the're "Look and Feel". What's next, CueCat claiming that the've patented speach recognition because of a system to "change an analog signal into a textual website address". It's sad to see an entirely new audio compression format squashed by a big company just because it uses similar principles. If IIS can sue for MP3, couldn't Unisys sue the users of ZIP or GZIP for using "similar compression technology"? This is rediculous. IIS does not hold a patent on all music compression technology. If some developers want to write a free standard that's as good or better than MP3, then let them. The're not stealing the technology or the code.
Didn't Microsoft prove that you can't patent a principle, like the GUI or compression in the're case against Apple? Let's be real here, people. You can not patent audio compression. You can patent a form of compression, like MP3, but you can't patent every form of compression. If the Wright Brother's wing was a priciple, than audio compression is a principle.
Oh, and saying that the authors "must have" burrowed code from IIS software isn't good enough. We need to see the IIS code and the code for the free format and compare them.
How is the fact that Disney still has a copyright on Mickey Mouse harming you? Oh, you can't sell DivX :-) rips of "Steamboat Willie"? That's a shame. Oh wait, that's it. Have I missed anything?
You don't want to "stifle innovation by the little guy". That's great. If I came out with some GPLed EDO chipset schematic, do you really think that Intel (or whoever) would charge me down with guns blazing? I doubt it, because I wouldn't be competing with them, and I wouldn't be taking any dollars from them. Unlike copyright, patents can be selectively enforced and still retain validity. However, new markets appear all of the time. My GPLed EDO chipset might just interfere with Intel's (or whoever's) embedded systems plan, and they would be well within their rights to tell me to cease and desist in such a case, because they paid to develop the technology with the expectation that they could control it for a time.
Your copyright argument is similarly spurious. Perhaps it holds for the rubbish which is on the radio -- the sort of music which is barely worth the aluminum it's pressed on -- but what of real composers, like the USian John Adams, or Philip Glass, or John Corigliano? What is the incentive to write music if one can't reasonably expect to derive royalties from recordings and for-pay performances during her lifetime? Comissions are one thing, but very few composers get them these days, and they are really more of an "advance" than a "salary".
The Mickey Mouse example is also a little absurd. That character embodies Disney's corporate identity, which they have spent millions of dollars to develop and promote. Shouldn't they have the rights to that character?
It seems that you're advocating freeing society's junkyard for everyone to play in -- I'd rather give credit where it's due and not get tetanus. Thanks a lot, troll.
As a citizen of the EU, I have no real problems with socialism, but I feel that research-driven industries will only be supported adequately by governments when they (gov'ts) have a selfish motive (i.e. war).
How on earth is this post "overrated"? It was at score 1. It hadn't been "rated" at all. This post was not inflammatory, insulting, or factually incorrect -- it was just an unpopular view. I'd really like an explanation from the moderator here.
Let's think about this: in a research-driven industry, when you have time-limited patent protection, you need to (gasp!) keep doing research in order to retain profitability.
The sad truth is that if companies were not afforded patent protection, then their massive research budgets would go to cutthroat marketing and developing snake-oil.
Why the comparison of software to pharmaceuticals? Both are industries with extremely high research costs, and many companies never see payoffs for the majority of that research. Fraunhofer poured over fifteen years and millions of DM into the MP3 encoding and collecting the psychoacoustic data for spectral encoding. Damn right they have an interest in protecting it!
The only problem I see with software patents as opposed to other patents is that, since the law hasn't caught up with the tech, the patents are overly broad and, in many cases, serve to stifle innovation. However, not all patents are bad. In many cases, the only incentive for research is the potential that it might someday become a successful product, and patents provide the guarantee that the innovators may profit. I realize this may not be a popular view here, but I still feel it's valid.
Unfortunately, Free software advocates will have a problem in this war: in many cases Free software is not funded, and the developers are "hackers" -- skilled programmers, but not necessarily CS researchers. Since researchers cost money, and many problem domains are still the subject of active research, only a very special Free program in one of these domains will embody an innovation which is superior to an equivalent encumbered program. I believe Ogg may be such a program, but they'd have been wise to secure a patent lawyer to make sure they're treading on solid ground legally, and perhaps patent their techniques themselves!
Sorry about that; I stand corrected. I'm not a serious investor and read the report rather hastily, hence the faulty data. It still works out to 1.2 billion quid per annum, though. I was mostly going on some internal information we had here. (I work for a competitor of Glaxo's, who I can't name for obvious reasons.)
Now wait just a minute! Not all Windows users are completely lacking in grey matter. I am a Windows user and have never, ever, called tech support in my life, being just smart enough to sort out such common problems as the ones you mention:
1) Is the modem switched on?
2) Have you checked using anti-virus software?
3) Why are you still even playing Commander Keen?
Probably the only reason Linux users never call tech support is because (until fairly recently) there is no tech support! How could there be tech support for an OS whose kernel can vary so widely between different users?
(Note that this probably doesn't apply to the commercial distros, which in my view defeat one of the main principles of Linux in that they cost money to acquire.)
_____________________________________
I've been to Heaven and Hell, and all I got was this lousy sig.
If somebody started an entire .ogg hierarchy under alt.binaries.sounds, it would do ALOT to popularize the format. Napster supporting ogg would be a great step in the right direction. You'd really need guys like Sonique and WinAmp to push the format on their sites. The trick is to bring the supply to the source of the demand.
Speaking as a College Student who has their stereo hooked right to their computer and hasn't played an actual CD in months, .mp3's are far from dead. How else could I have all my music at my fingertips? If I was to convert all my .mp3s to .WAV files I would have somewhere near 100Gigs of music requiring a couple hundred dollarsd for a new HD.
.mp3) expansion in size for that last small bit of audio quality? Most music already has lost most of its subtlety so it will sound good on the radio (now that's low quality, whatever happened to sattelite radio??) now if you are really serious about your sound, you won't be running your stereo from your computer and it's flimsy sound card anyway, so I think quality is mostly a non issue. (as long as you have high quality .mp3s 128kbits/sec)
.mp3 will rule the portable audio format. Would anyone honestly trade 10 hours of .mp3 for 2 hours of .shns? (in your mp3cd player) or one hour of .mp3s for 12 minutes of .shn in your Rio player.
.mp3 is far from dead. In my opinion .shn is the HDTV of audio, sure it's better but who's gonna spend the extra money when TV suits them just fine.
As far as data loss is concerned I think it's acceptable considering the trade off. Is it worth the 5X (.shn over
Network bandwidth may be expanding, but until DVD's get really cheap/ or flash memory is as cheap as RAM,
So
Frosty (Mark Frost)
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
That wouldn't involve getting out of my chair, would it? If so, I'm afraid I can't help you. I can't even get up to get the remote control. I've been watching the Weather Channel for weeks now because the remote is on the other side of the room.
I ran across this information while on the LAME page, which has as one of its goals a completely patent-free audio codec. Look here: to see some of the myriad patents on audio compression techniques.
<insert diatribe on how patents on intellectual property should be abolished, etc>
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Also note:
"(b) Whoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer.".
So even a plugin-type architecture where the plugin is downloaded from xiph.org could be considered a violation.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Anyhow, given the amount of per-unit costs to be saved by availability of Vorbis -- I wouldn't be surprised to see hardware manufacturers (individually or collectively) supporting Vorbis for what it is. They certainly feel the need.
As for GNOME, just because it tries to attract business involvement doesn't mean it's under business control. I can still download the source, hack on it, fork it if I like. So can you. What's so evil about having a few companies pay people to hack?
I say this as a guy who gets paid to work on free software -- commercial involvement really ain't all that bad. Trust Me. (tm).
He may come across that way, but after reading some of his in depth technical posts, he is also an incredibly bright person. If you read the LKML often, you will see that there are quite a few people that come across as being jerks. Once you get to know how they talk though, you can see that they really aren't that bad.
Never confuse how a person says something with what they say.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
The Macintosh GUI, AFAIK, was not covered by any Apple patents. Apple did have number of patents on its redesign of the mouse, on various pieces of hardware, and numerous design patents. But in 1983, the uspto granted few[er] software patents.
The "look and feel" lawsuits (circa 1989) were based on copyright law.
Of course, if software patentabilty had been established in 1983, and if the uspto operated under today's lax standard, Apple probably would have patented all it could. It might even have won its lawsuits against Microsoft.
Today, of course, a search for "(an/apple)" on the USPTO web site reveals numerous software patents (trivial and otherwise).
As the article pointed out, Thompson and Fraunhoefer should know by now whether or not Vorbis infringes. The fact that they only "think" it "probably does" indicates they're just FUDding.
And if Vorbis does in fact infringe on one patent or another, it's nothing more than a sign that the patent was too broad in the first place. Honestly, this is the trouble with software patents; they don't protect the actual work (which is the code); they only stifle competition when applied to the context of software. Then again, this makes sense, as software is a written work and not a device (which is precisely why it shouldn't be patented; it falls into a completely different category of IP, where only copyright ought to apply).
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Actually independent development doesn't help you avoid patent infringement at all. It probably did help Apple avoid paying to use Adobe's copyright on their Display PS/PDF system, but if Apple used techniques that Adobe has patents on, they are liable.
Again, this means nothing. GIF writing software, including GPL'd software, was widely available for years before Unisys decided to start enforcing their patent. Unisys won (sorta, in reality most free software ignores the patent and Unisys ignores them. But commericial software makers most certainly cough up the fee to Unisys.
That said, I have no idea if Adobe has any patents on the techniques in question, no idea if Adobe enforces such patents, and no idea if Apple is paying for such patents.
The government granted monopoly of a patent does not expire just because it isn't enforced. That's part of the danger of patents, you can wait for a technique to become a standard, then you can start charging.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Levi's made a similar decision to not hire me. Soon after that, had major layoffs as a result of a 94% reduction of their sales.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Gah, you're so damned altruistic it makes me want to pay you. Where do I send money? I don't see anywhere on Xiph.org for donations....
I was just sitting looking at gracenote's 'documentation' they deigned to send me and shaking my head when I popped up slashdot and saw this....
;-)
Not only do they want to go after formats using mathematical constructs which they think they have a right to but they also want royalties for TCP/UDP/Whatever data transfers if the data just happens to be mp3 and the client decides it wants to play it while receiving . i.e. mp3 streaming.....
I did the whole live mp3 radio before they demonstrated any technology to do it... maybe I can claim prior art over mp3 streaming and distract attention away from vorbis
> Actually, some of us do have in-depth knowledge of signal processing. I've been playing with my own CODEC projects in my (near-mythical) free time.
You'll just be next to be sued. Who says we don't have thought police?
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
No it is not time to calm down. It is time to bash down these folks, Monty. Because if you leave these guys thinking that cheap words make a lot of more noise than lawyers then, soon, we will have three, four, five coporations shouting FUD in several other programs. And later we may face wholescale FUD on OpenSource. Because it will cost nothing to do it. You FUD the whole community and they only *sigh* in answer. And you get your customers, your silly users, the consumer herd for the price of nothing. Thomson could have long ago checked if oggvorbis was a violation of their patents. It costs NOTHING for them to get the algorithm, the source code and the programs. So why to FUD that way? I would accept something like "we checked their code and we have strong suspicions they may be violating our patent rights". But no. He speaks about some vaporous "possible violation" and leaves in the air the idea they are eager to get up to you. No more no less.
Such freeware FUD should not be tolerated. If one has a case, let him show it. If not, then his opinions are covered by the GPL. And can be copied, transferred, modified and used against him for free... but no one has the right to sell it to no one...
Not exactly. The guy is not so stupid. He built his phrase smartly enough to avoid a clear case of libel. Look carefully:
"We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property. We think it is likely they are infringing.'"
The guy expresses only a state of mind. A supposition, a doubt. In other terms, his opinion. In court he may state several reasons for not having seen oggvorbis code. Real or unreal he can state them, restate that he has a right to express his opinion and get clean with this one.
What is really interesting is that, under the conditions oggvorbis is dispatched to the public, they are still "thinking". This would sound like people thinking and communicating at old Bell protocol speeds - 300bps
So a GPL program and they "think"??? Well that's a HEEEELLLLL!
Can't you see? Some of the biggest market players. Some of the biggest makers of sound algorithms. Some of the biggest sound labs. Some of the most well known investigators. And they "THINK"????
Well is that SO hard to dig on a few hundreds of kilobytes of Open Source code? Is that SOOOO HAAAARD to understand a GPL program? Hey, maybe the code was written such way that it is hard to understand? Let's see...
OH MY! Look AT THOSE LINES!!! How they are ordered!!! It's like if someone cared for alignment. Naaa, that's to create confusion. So the code would look like clear and perfect... Like the commies. Everything looks good, all people smiles, but in that damn corner. Oh in that DAMN corner. They are there trying to take over the world. These damn rebelious bastards. Naaa there is soemthing hidden here. It looks too good to be true...
And what about those comments?!!! Don't you see? One comment here. Another there. Clear confusion! "first things first. Make sure encode is ready." "currently lazy. Short block dispatches to 0, long to 1". Pure nonsense! Where is the Developer's Guide? I wanna see the specs in three veluum volumes like in every good corporation! With resumes, marketing analysis, financial projections, accounting and a short explanation what the Hell is this for!..
And how about these variables??? "vorbis_info", "ogg_pack_write". What is a vorbis? And how do you pack a ogg? Isn't this taking people into confusion? Yeah that's it! They are clearly HIDING something. Maybe the patent "on how to sing with your lips"? Yeah probably that one. It can't be that these guys made a new fresh algorithm and get us with our pants on. There must be something hidden behind these orgs and vogues...
And this matters so much? Maybe oggvorbis will not go too far on what concerns hardware, if no one will support it. However there are three points you're missing:
Going "nowhere" is too heavy of a statement. Even today mp3 is mostly used through software tools. Besides the quality of algorithm has greatly improved. It produces files a little fatter than mp3 but with an envious quality.
Almost a couple of years ago mp3 was also going nowhere. There was not hardware support and there was a fear that all these big associations, corporations and mobs would eat alive anyone who dared to produce such hardware. Well, these same groups are still trying to eat alive someone but also trying to sell mp3s now...
When mp3 was outlaw, there were lots of expectations that someone would create a "mp3 killer". This was due to several technical and strategical reasons for such. Most expected that the "Industry" would finally get the "ideal packer" that would not only protect their egoistic copyright demands but also produce better quality than mp3. Well, a system that is starting to produce better sound quality is here. So what's the problem? That does not protect awkward copyright demands? Well, once Spain also wanted all America for itself. For some reason portuguese ended with more than half of South America and english with nearly all North. And in the end Spain lost even its own latinos... such egoistic ownerships have always a tendency to end quite badly...
All that Thomson is doing is laying the groundwork for the abandonment of perceptual encoding. With network speeds improving and storage prices falling, lossless compression schemes like Shorten will inevitably replace lossy compression schemes like jpg and ogg.
.shn files.
Shorten achieves 2:1 lossless compression on audio files. MP3 offers 10:1 lossy compression. Already people are distributing lossless audio files as
If Thomson succeeds in creating a legal cloud around any and all perceptual encoding schemes, this may be the "push" required for the industry to completely abandon lossy compression in favor of unpatented, lossless 2:1 compression.
A year or two down the road, if someone surfaces with a patent on Shorten's 2:1 lossless compression, the net will undoubtedly be able to easily handle uncompressed 1:1 lossless audio.
In short, MP3s are near obsolete, and nothing will force them into the dustbin of history faster than the fear of lawsuits.
(And please, let's not delude ourselves that the mythical Open Source Community will magically step in and finish the project: enthusiasm and spirit are no replacement for in-depth knowledge of signal processing.)
Actually, some of us do have in-depth knowledge of signal processing. I've been playing with my own CODEC projects in my (near-mythical) free time.
What's your issue with corporate influence on OSS? I'm the first to criticize corporations, but I fail to see what's so bad here.
"How many people's mothers and bosses have even heard of "Mozilla"?"
Who cares? Mozilla still exists and will continue to exist, with or without Netscape 6. All that NS has changed is the number of programmers and the amount of money available to the project. mozilla.org will continue to operate, regardless. Likewise, I'm a happy consumer of Helix Gnome. Although the Gnome Foundation's effects remain to be seen, Helix has improved Gnome considerably in features, ease of use and stability.
Methinks you're trying to sound the alarm when there isn't actually anything to be upset about yet. If some corporate "benefactor" starts to actually meddle and censor, then I'll be worried, but I think as long as it's open, it's hard for a project to get corrupted.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
You sir have just sold me a HipZip. I've been waiting for that, and I'm going to buy one now.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
This is a quote from the VP. He, like most of us here, has no clue how vorbis works. He probably also has no idea how MP3 works, either. All he knows is that his company licenses it and that Vorbis is a potential competitor. Now, there can certainly be trivial lawsuits, but in order to come up with those, one of their lawyers is going to have to find a patent that Vorbis is actually violating, or at least one that can be violated given a stretch of the imagination. Monty, Jack, et al have been very careful about reading the patents and are quite confident that they're not violating any of them (they haven't responded to the messages about this article on the vorbis mailing list; hopefully they're more concerned with their own future livlihood). Somehow I trust the guys who wrote the code and read the patents in a defensive mindframe than the VP of the company that owns rights to the MP3 patents and probably doesn't understand them.
Considering the battle between Epson, HP, Cannon, and others for the home printer market, trying to charge for an updated driver is, like I said, nuts.
First of all, relatively few people update the software that came with their computers. They are scared to. The revenue stream from driver upgrades would be negligable; it'd probably cost more to set up the system to process the payments than the payments actually bring in.
Secondly, I can buy an Apollo (really a relabeled HP) inkjet at my local _grocery store_ for $50. They're getting to the point where they are nearly at the disposable price range (for those who can afford computers in the first place). The money is in the ink cartridges, anyway. Nickel and diming people on the printer driver would just generate ill will and virtually no revenue.
Of course, I'm assuming that HP is run by rational people. This assumption isn't always true.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I am not a lawyer, but I think it may be useful to document the economic damages of Thomson's attempts at fear, uncertainty and doubt for possible counter-litigation if they want to play "hard ball" as the article says.
If you are working on a product or project which might include Ogg Vorbis and you receive any negative feedback from customers, resellers, partners, about FUD over statements by Henri Linde and other Thomson representatives or you can document internal costs or lost opportunities within your business, we should document it in some publicly accessible central place (so the data can be replicated by many independent servers).
For example, we are considering including Ogg Vorbis in our Linux distribution. I personally think it might increase sales by about 100,000 units per year of physical media, on which we might make $10 per copy, but only in the absense of Thomson's fear uncertainty and doubt campaign. So, that's about a million dollars per year of damages, although, obviously, these numbers are likely to change with market research.
If somebody wants to establish a central point for submitting and disseminating this type of data, please post a follow up here. In the meantime, it would be helpful for others to post their estimates as follow-ups here.
Okay. I didn't realize that (and I obviously didn't take the time to check).
I still propose though.. what about things that are purely non-corporate OSS projects? Is there not a point where there is nobody to sue?
Javascript, isn't that ECMA 262 in open source parlance?
:)
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Likewise, I don't see /. charging being even remotely feasible. Them selling our link histories? Yeah, probably. Probably do the referrers too.
:)
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
notice how many people *are* using png? not a lot...
I am, at least for the titles on my, erm, original MP3 page. Irony abounds.
Copyright should be 20 yrs.--long enough to make money, long enough for a work to no longer be current (and thus valuable), but short enough that it may actually do some good.
1. In apparatus of the type for encoding a signal by means of spectral analysis of overlapping time segments of such signal, and including apparatus for processing respective said time segments according to a window function for imparting a characteristic amplitude function to said respective time segments prior to such analysis of said signal, an improvement comprising:
"In an apparatus of the type for..." means that this paragraph describes the state of the art. "an improvement comprising:" means that the following paragraphs describe something new.
The state of the art in this case means breaking the sampled signal into blocks and doing an FFT or something similar to get its frequencies. The "overlapping windows" bit refers to the fact that sudden changes between blocks are audible, so you have the blocks overlap and fade one into the next gradually.
means for detecting occurrences of instantaneous frequency changes in said signal exceeding a predetermined frequency change, and generating control signals indicating occurrences of said frequency changes; and
In other words, detecting something that the existing system doesn't code for well. The word "means" here means a mechanism or system or something like that. Its the same sense as in the phrase "by any means possible".
means, responsive to said control signals, for adaptively providing said window functions such that respective time segments of signal which exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes are subjected to a significantly narrowed window function relative to window functions applied to time segments of signal which do not exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes, and wherein window functions of overlapping time segments overlap.
When we detect this problem within one of the data blocks ("windows"), we reduce the block size to compensate.
So, any audio codec which uses the overlapping window system, detects sudden frequency shifts and reduces the window size to compensate will infringe on Claim 1 of this patent. If there is any published work using this system which predates this patent then the claim won't hold up.
If you decide that this claim would hold up then you can try to evade it, perhaps by:
Mind you, I'm not any kind of lawyer. But computer programmers, of all people, should be able to handle dense complicated documents written in strange languages.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
The killer isn't the player charge. The paperwork and hassles involved in the licencing is what will really cause manufacturers to move to OGG. That, and the freedom to modify it. That's why the Tivo runs on Linux. It isn't as if Microsoft hasn't been trying to get into that market for years. But why licence something if you can download and use for free? Any hassles with the GPL are barely noticable compared to working out a licencing agreement with Fraunhoffer and Thompson.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I talked to several different hardware manufacturers at the most recent CEDIA show. Every single one of the engineers, executives and salespeople I talked to was very interested in OGG Vorbis. They have no particular love of Thomsom or Fraunhoffer. A free encoder and decoder means they can sell their product for less and get a larger share of the market, make more money and buy their baby a new pair of shoes!
I'll be spending an equal amount of time at the COnsumer Electronics Show doing the same thing. I might even make business cards with a description of the Vorbis project and URLs. As soon as the code is optimized, it will appear in commercial products. It doesn't even have to sound better than MP3, just as good as MP3.
The big product at this year's CES will be home audio jukeboxes. Virtually every one of these will be running some version of GNU/Linux. Why? Because it's free...and you can get loads of programmers practically begging you to work on the project. The only thing keeping the price from dropping and getting it into homes is the MP3 licencing issue. That is delt with via Vorbis.
We'll see MP3 jukeboxes with 9 gig IDE drives designed to hook up to your home network in the $399 price range if they choose to go the Linux/Vorbis route.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Proposed open patent license terms: This patent covers the following technology: ---fill in the blank.-- A worldwide, perpetual, royalty free license is available to this technology. However, any product incorporating this techology must --fill in the blank.--
The alternative, and somewhat cheaper, solution is to not file for a patent, but file a Statutory Invention Registration. This is basically a mechanism that publishes a patent application, without awarding patent rights.
The third, and even cheaper, solution is to publish the invention, with a declaration that the technology is not now, nor will it be patented. This means that no one else can patent the technology (since this is proof of your invention, and the US is a first to invent country).
There ya go, all yours.
Thalia
This does not constitute legal advice, so don't even think it.
Javascript isn't Sun technology. It's a Netscape creation, originally named Livescript but was renamed to javascript before release because of some type of marketing partnership with Sun. Aside from it's ability to control Java apps javascript has nothing to do with Java, they are completely seperate products.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Interesting - anybody know if anything similar would apply in the EU (Maybe Germany in particular)?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
This is a bluff. Do what you do in Poker: CALL.
"If you think we are infringing, here's our legal address. Send the process server over and give us the papers, and we will see you in court. Otherwise, you will immediately and publicly retract what you've said, or we shall bring charges of unfair restraint of trade against you."
Can any of the noted attourneys in the audience comment on this strategy? <Paging Dr. Hawk, Dr. Hawk to the blue courtesy phone >
www.eFax.com are spammers
Is it really possible to stop MP3? Software and source code exists on every platform there is. Free source gives it an infinite lifetime. Who cares if Fraunhofer won't license it? I can go download the LAME source and make my own. I can compile it, upload it to my friends, burn CDs... I can even make a car MP3 player without their licenses.
Why should I worry? Am I missing something? If so, please reply to this and tell me.
I would think an open letter to them would be much better, get /. to post it, see about salon, wired, anyone who will carry it. Something very politely worded, along the lines of "We think you made that statement in error, would you please let us know exactly what portions of the program (source available) that are infringing? After all, we're reasonable people who would never dream of infringin on anyone elses IP and would be happy to correct anything we find doing just that..."
They pulled their heads out of their asses long enough to come up with this tripe for the sake of a little FUDmongering. Let's make them walk away with ogg* on their faces.
*Oh dear, that was bad. Terribly sorry.
First off, you don't need to prove your smart -or- not. secoundly i know how huffman encoding works. thirdy, where did you get the idea i thought huffman encodeing was patented? the patent seems to say that "huffman encoding on DCT transforms". which means the patent applies to applying the huffman encoding to the output after the DCT transform. (discret cusion transform) BITS->QUANT->DCT->HUFF is how JPEG, MPEG, MP3 and pretty much all media lossy compressions work. it just seems silly they could patent the DCT->HUFF part of it. -Jon
this is my sig.
I hope prior art is the keyword. If anyone can show prior art of the technologies Fraunhofer holds patent over, we might be able to save 50 cents on various mp3 players.
I mean - this is all mathematics. Surely, someone must have done this before Fraunhofer?
I haven't seen the specs, but isn't the mp3 technology mathematically similar to the JPEG technology?
Stop the brainwash
For example, Thompson (RCA) was going to sell a TiVo box at RadioShack this Xmas season. They cancelled production when Gemstar threatened to cut off ties with Thompson because Gemstar is suing TiVo over a patent for putting a TV schedule in a grid. (I am not making this up. http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=13657926 )
Lawsuits and Patents are corporate weapons, not about justice.
Or am I missing something?
Is it not simply the U.S. Patent system that is the problem here, and if so why do people continue to let the work they love be subjected to it? I can understand how International law would probably prevent the ogg boys successfully moving to Europe to avoid legal challenges, but could U.S. Patents have any impact on a project developed in Europe (other than the lawsuits that could fly over the distribution of the technology in the U.S., but if it is in a non-US section of the software mirrors and hence never held on a U.S. subjected server.....)?
Is it simply a case that despite the shit it causes, coders just aren't willing to leave th U.S. for any length of time? If so, perhaps its time the anti-european software patents crew along with the EFF etc to setup a nice new facility that coders can ask for permission to use to develop work in a patent free environment. Post to a website telling it what you want to do and why you need to get out of the U.S. If you get enough votes/are deemed worthy enough ... you get a ticket and a workplace (maybe even a subsistance grant) with individuals to help and distract you. The Free Software Reseach Laboratory
Bottom line, if Alan Cox (he does live in England doesn't he?) added mp3 technology to the kernel, could he be touched (if he sourced all code from non-US contaminated sources or wrote it himself)?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Really. Are you aware that Ogg Vorbis uses wavelet compression methods while MP3 still uses the fourier transforms only?
If no one owns the copyright, then it's no longer covered by the GPL, and people are free to incorporate it into whatever commercial products they like. And companies can still sue whoever distributes it, as with DeCSS.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
These clauses simply don't apply if you've got enough money to march into court with a pack of lawyers and a balance sheet that is the envy of most third world countries.
You might be able to stop Ma Barker from suing you for trampling her petunias using this clause - but big greasy corporate lawyers? Ha.
--
Eric Scheirer doesn't work for Fraunhofer, he works for Forrester Research.
Which does not necessarily apply. Yes, releasing something as GPL doesn't guarantee people will give you free development, good will, etc. But there are no guarantees in business in general. There are no guarantees people will buy a proprietary software package, etc.
Second, the GPL gives certain rights in exchange for you granting some rights back.
It would be naive if the GPL only pleaded with its reader. However, it makes a legal demand, you can NOT do certain things without permission, which is only granted if you do certain other things.
It's more like if you don't do something for me, I won't do something for you (i.e. give you a license). And it has the force of copyright law to back it up. Copyright law allows almost any restrictions to be made by the copyright holder. The only things not allowed would be things such as illegal discrimination against a protected class, restrictions designed to further criminal activity (e.g. encryption licensed for all but police), and anything similarly illegal or against public policy. Any lawyers care to comment?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Any lawyers (real lawyers and "armchair" lawyers ;) care to speculate if Thomson, et al could end up being liable for damages to Xiphophorous at some point?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
> Actually, Jeff Merkey [...] apparently is also a lawyer
This explains that. (For more information, check some of the Jeff posts on the kernel list. In my book, this guy is very very close beeing an asshole).
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
6,141,794 System and method for synchronizing access to shared variables in a virtual machine in a digital computer system
6,026,485 Instruction folding for a stack-based machine
5,899,990 Java -to-Database Connectivity Server Maybe it does not make sense right now, but the upgrades to your palm are nolonger free
- subsolar
If I say in an interview "I think it is likely Ektanoor is a criminal" then I've commited libel unless I can make a case for that.
Libel is disparagement of a person's reputation with commercial consequences. You can't libel a company, only individuals. I think what this whole stupid thread is trying to understand is the notion of trademark tarnishment. Strike 1.
Infringing a patent is a criminal act.
Only under exceptional circumstances will an intellectual property violation be a crime. For instance, willful copyright infringement for commercial gain (e.g., bootlegging). Strike 2.
Actually, I should have said that it's a crime in the common meaning of the word. The only way you can go to jail is if you refused to pay the fine or whatever. AFAIK, IANAL.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but the law steps in when that opinion is framed or stated in certain ways. It is true that a judge might require that a retraction is issued rather than a fine, if s/he feels that the opinion is not forcefully put.
However, although IANAL, I would say that making a statement in an interview which will be read by other members of the industry which makes activities such as raising funding harder for OV is not something which will automatically be taken lightly. It's not like he was down the pub, got drunk, and mouthed off in front of someone who happened to be a reporter. These words were spoken in the knowledge that they would see print in a medium where it is reasonable to believe they would damage OV's reputation and/or ability to continue their business, which in turn could quite easily constitute material damage.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"If you're going to go into a marketplace where people play hardball, that's what hardball looks like," Scheirer warned
What an arogent bastard.
What this corporatist pion dosnt realize is that Ogg is both libre and gratis it is neither a product for sale - nor a competitor in the 'marketplace'. I dont think these idiots see this coming - free software is going to render there profiteering scheems moot. MP3s will be kept as 'free as they are now' or OGG will replace it. Citizens of the planet are getting wise to the plans of these types...
Where is the PayPal site I can send a donation?
The Revolution will be Webcast.
Perhaps I've missed something here.... Ogg Vorbis isn't GPLed is it? It's public domain? The software developed by the Ogg Vorbis project is LGPLed, so if you want to use the libraries, it's relevant, but the format itself if public domain, you can use it anyway you like.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Ogg has much bigger goals than DeCSS. Ogg wants to be an open standard that would allow a free implementation. To be the standard, that has to include hardware implementations and closed source implementations by scared, law abiding corporations.
Development would also slow down. Legitimate corporations don't want to support an illegal product that they can't use. Open and funded, development goes much faster than it does when it has to be done underground.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
If I offended you ^^
Anyway, reading the patent, doesn't mp3 do some perceptual encoding magic between the DCT and HUFF processes, to actually throw away non-audible data?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I don't think Huffman coding is itself patented, as that is a statistical based compression algorithm, and in simple terms, the more often a 'word' appears, the smaller the number of bits is used to represent it;
For the readers unaware of Huffman coding:
If 'CompletELY' appeared 51% of the time in a document, then it would get the code '1'
Everything else would start with a '0'
'0100'
'0101'
'0110'
'0111'
'001'
'000'
etc. It would be proportioned based on percentage appearance.
Anyway, unless I am of course mistaken, the MP3 patent in question is the distribution of the data, the specific encoding table, and not the process of encoding, decoding, or storage, or whatnot. Huffman is used in a *lot* of places where mp3 don't tread.
But I could be wrong ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
That page is more disgusting than goatse.cx.
---
Bob Fucking Costas. Does anyone else hate that motherfucker?
Unfortunately, this seems to be symptomatic and a lot of open source development is permeated by conservatism that would make a stodgy company proud. Ogg-Vorbis is still based on decades old ideas about signal processing, the Linux kernel is still monolithically written in C like kernels were in the 1970s, and Gnome and KDE have barely progressed into the 1980s when it comes to GUI technologies.
Besides having a lot of upside potential (i.e., it may work better in the long run), going with newer, less proven ideas has the advantage that an open source effort has a much better chance of not treading on a well-patented path already. So, be adventuresome when you embark on your next open source project. Don't be content with just doing a slightly better job at something that has been around for a few years.
And if you are developing a new audio coder in particular, get out of the engineering straightjacket. Look at some new ideas in neural networks and pattern recognition and come up with something different from all the other audio coders in the market. Who knows, you may not just satisfy an open source need but actually contribute to the state of the art.
If by "success" you mean "used and enjoyed by other OSS enthsiasts", then of course none at all.
If, however, by success you mean "displaces mp3 as the dominant internet music encoding standard and withstands a barrage of patent-infringement lawsuits from a panoply of huge corporate interests", which were pretty much the stated goals of the OggVorbis project, then the answer is: pretty goddamn critical. The former requires some concentrated, full-time attention of the kind of coders who don't grow on trees. The latter is going to require some very, very expensive lawyers. Both will require some significant cash investment. Got a million or two dollars to spare?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The other is effectivel that OV version 2 is created. But who's to say that they won't do the same with it? This is not justice we are talking about, it's the law, and the man with the money is the man who can bend it to his will.
Remember, nobody would remember the good samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money, too.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Quick check -- do you believe the U.S. or the Netherlands is more corporatist?
If you answered the U.S., please take the time to read a book on political science so you don't abuse the term "corporatism" the way Katz does. The U.S. is one of the least corporatist developed nations on Earth. If you prefer the Netherlands' socioeconomic system to that of the U.S., your boogeyman is free-market capitalism, not corporatism.
If you were actually referring to the anticaptialists who wish to use government regualtions and government-union-corporate consultation to insulate big companies from disruptive market forces, then I apologize for questioning your use of "corporatists".
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Any company that makes an investment in Ogg is going to want to get something in return, and they're going to want more than just a freely available audio compression format. They're going to want control.
This isn't just some idle prediction. This sort of thing has happened before, and it's happening right now with other Open Source projects. Look at Mozilla. Netscape/AOL invested their codebase, and their staff programmers in an open source project, and now that it's just about ready for prime time, AOL forks the code, and retakes control of the Nescape browser, which is the only browser that the mainstream public is likely to use. How many people's mothers and bosses have even heard of "Mozilla"?
And look at GNOME. What started out as a response to the concern that KDE wasn't free enough, is rapidly turning corporate, with strategic alliances with other big business interests under the guise of the "Gnome Foundation", and the rebranding to the trademarked "Helix Gnome".
Realize, people, that unless we act to keep our Free Software free of commercial control, it will be Free in name only.
--
The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
Has anyone given thought to "open" patents? The next time someone in the open community has something novel - try to get funding to patent the idea and grant patent lisences to the open source community. Yes, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things a bit, but that's what the lawyers are for... I'm just part of the freaky-idea group. Would there be any merit to having such "open" patents? And please, no "moralistic" counter-arguments as to why this should not be - patents are not a moral issue - business practices behind the patents are.
For those of you who have not seen my past comments on the issue, I work in a heavily patented environment, outside the "tech" realm (in actuality, I work in the pharma/bio-tech/drug delivery realm - by far older (see pharma) and much more patent heavy (see all three I listed) than compu-tech). I have the misfortune of seeing patents every day - many of them are trivial, many of them are vague.
So, anyway... open patents? Thoughts? Comments? Irate blatherings?
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
I had mentioned this in a reply to another post, but I want to start a new thread on this one... Perhaps it's time to make a stand here. What do we have here? IMHO, we have a corporation (two, actually) that's apparently decided to play hardball, never mind whether or not they have a legal leg to stand on. Notice that this "issue" didn't come up until CMGI withdrew its support for Ogg Vorbis, probably because CMGI could have coughed up the cash to mount a defense, whereas the developers probably can't. So Thomson is going to try to steamroll over a potential competitor. Are there legitimate patents on audio compression technology that Ogg Vorbis is violating? Possibly, but I don't think that's Thomson's intent. They're out to crush a competitor that they see as vulnerable now and a potential threat later. Even if the applicable patents could cover this area, are they too broad? Once again, we don't really know, but we aren't going to learn anything if Ogg Vorbis is forced to roll over and die. IMHO, we need a very public, very nasty, very enlightening fight here, if Thomson is willing to oblige. Why? Because we'd better define how patents and intellectual property are going to be applied in the coming decades. I'm not saying who's right or wrong, but we'd better dtart defining some boundaries whiel there's something left to defend. Get the debate off of Slashdot and out into the mainstream. There are lots of ways to do that, and I'll leave it to others to define exactly how, but we need to make more people begin to think about what role patents and IP are playing in new technologies, such as computers and the Internet. I will pose this question: If the current interpretation of patents was in use about 100 years ago, would one company have been able to patent automobiles? If it was in effect 50,000 years ago, would someone have been able to patent fire? What about the wheel? I can see it now. "A device for the smooth transport of passangers and cargo across the surface of the earth by means of rounded edges and continuous motion almong the ground."
Fraunhofer owns patents on damn near everything .ogg hits them in the pocket, expect litigation.
sound related. Everything they do is cross patented. It's a research lab. This is how they
make money. They're extremely good at it. If
Here's a list of their patents pertaining to MP3.
http://mp3licensing.com/patents.html
Another factor is that a suit by Thompson will hardly appear as an act of good faith to a judge. If Thompson can download and examine the source code, they can hardly claim ignorance when they lose the suit.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
Try more like 2-6.00 US dollars a copy of any shipping software product.
Plus the 10k US yearly minimum.
It's quite a racket they have going with mp3. They did a good job pulling the wool over most people's eyes.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
In this case, if you abandon your principles, survival becomes irrelevant. What does survival in this context mean?
Y'know, I've always wanted to play those clock-speed dependent 286 games again.
But seriously, Ogg's been Ogged. Frauenhofer is making a kamikaze attack without regard to future repercussions. The irony is wonderful.
I forsee the rattling will continue. The Ogg Vorbis format will exit beta and enter into the Internet's various mirroring services and freenet-style anti-censorship services, the company Xiph will get sued out of existance, the CODEC will survive, plugins for Xamp and Winamp will abound, business as usual will continue. Anyone remember why we should be using PNGs instead of GIFs?? right. do you? same deal.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
For example, Apple has completely re-written Display Postscript and created Quartz to be Adobe-free (to avoid paying licencing fees) for Mac OS X. No patent infringement there. Furthermore, there have been third-party GPL'd Postscript interpreters for years; maybe a decade at this point. The other file format examples that you provide are equally impossible.
Sun doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript; you'd think that /.ers could figure that out after 5 years. Nothing in Java is patentable (it's a language and a spec for a class library), so submarine patents are unlikely. There are multiple sources for JVMs (both Sun and IBM make JVMs for Win32 and Linux), so if Sun starts to charge, people will stop using it.
HP charging for it's printer drivers (apart from the cost of the printer) is crazy. What would you do with a printer without a printer driver?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
As the project itself is not under the umbrella of any corporation, who exactly is being sued? The visible maintainers/authors? Who says it can't just be picked up by anyone else?
Can't anyone pick up where it left off? How can you charge a piece of information with a crime?
Is this not a way in which OSS can almost circumvent the system by simply not being part of it? The software will exists as it's own entity, and simply be serviced by whoever wants to work with it.
Did Microsoft license Fraunhofer / Thompson's patents when they created their Windows Media (.wma) format?
.ogg files disappear.
If so, Microsoft would have another reason to be happy to see
But if not, that's proof that it is possible to build a decent encoder without the patents. At least if you have barns full of money and don't need to worry about nasty legal threats.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
It's actually quite likely that Vorbis infringes on several of Fraunhoffer/Thompson's patents (now, whether you agree with the patents or not is a seperate issue).
The fact is that Fraunhoffer has pattent MANY different technologies used in perceptual encoding. Basically everything in MP3 and AAC is covered by strong patents. They even have many patents on other perceptual coding techniques not used in those formats.
One of the biggest impediments to commercial development of competitors to MP3 has been the Fraunhoffer patent collection - which makes it difficult to do any type of perceptual encoding without infringment. Pretty much the only other companies that can get away with it are people like Lucent (w/ PAC/ePAC) that also have their share of perceptual audio coding licenses that they can cross-license w/ Fraunhoffer so they don't sue each other into oblivion.
The chances that the Vorbis guys have discovered some completely revolutionary method of encoding that doesn't infringe on any of these patents is unfortunately very slim.
Of course, I wouldn't expect to see Thompson do anything about this until it becomes a real threat. No reason to waste money on lawyers otherwise.
Oh, erm, actually I was only talking to the folks that seemed ready to flee if MPEG said "boo". Sort of a "stop running, good, now breathe deeply, yes, good" in calm soothing tones.
Now if you're pissed and feel like getting a few hundred developers to march on Thomson headquarters with flaming torches (maybe we could get the Large Hot Pipe Organ to play) to make our opinions known (loudly, spectacularly, but peacefully), I'll volunteer right now for propane torch duty so long as someone volunteers crash space for the sleepover!
Monty
.
I agree, some are a stretch. But some are exactly what I'm talking about:
Although I use postscript and pdf all the time, I worry a little. I realize that they've been so useful to me because Adobe has published the formats and allowed implementations to thrive. They could pull a Unisys, though.
And MSFT's .doc format? Just Say No.
Whenever you depend upon something that you use by permission, not by right, you are creating a dependency that may cost you in the future.
SteveMaking groundless statements in order to sabotage a company's prospects is a serious crime, at least in the UK, and the fines are unlimited. Since the code is open the CEO or whoever it was has no defense: he should have known whether the patents were infringed or not before opening his mouth.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This will be a real-world test of GPL and the power of the internet.
You are right that the OV people have no resources, money, or lawyers, but the OV people aren't critical either. OV can live and thrive *without* the OV people.
So what can happen? Thompson stifles the top 10 developers? 100? 1000? Will they target everyone who's downloaded the code?
Lets say the top 10 developers are sued to, essentially death. That doesn't mean they lose; OV could be found non-infringing. At which point *any* developer could pick up the pieces and continue.
If it is found infringing, well, that's all folks. The code was infringing... Fix, and release again, I guess.
A commercial big daddy will help it nothing in proving the code is not infringing, I don't think. It can only provide resources. In the end, I hope OV survives, and that we have a better solution, that the GPL reigns powerful, and Thomson gets egg on their face.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
They very probably do. Of course, that's not to say that Ogg V does use mp3 technology, but it is certainly possible that it has been influenced by it.
What we are looking at now is a commercial company deciding to go after a defenseless GPL project. How will Ogg V survive? They don't have any resources or money or lawyers, do they? In the real world, that's what it takes to survive, and Thompson's know it.
Perhaps it would be good for Ogg V to get a commercial 'Big Daddy' that will defend it under the GPL.
But I fear that would be impossible. They would only defend it if they owned it, of course, or if they had some power over it.
If Ogg V is reliscensed under a more commercially friendly license, such as MozPL, It may survive.
What do you want more? Your principles or Survival? That is what it comes down to, I fear.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
There is a positive. At this point, while the Open Source community is quite supportive of this technology, the majority of the world is still fixated on MP3.
Likely, the lawsuit will be dismissed, or at least won by Ogg Vorbis, but the damage to MP3 will be that Ogg Vorbis will suddenly be well known to people who aren't neccessarily going to hear about it in the community.
It's free advertising via a nuisance lawsuit... sounds like a case of "Any publicity is good publicity to me." (Excuse the cliche)
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Ogg can't chain me to my computer or even to a PDA and expect to thrive. Ogg should spend some time bringing their codec to the typical embedded A/V processors found in the new generation of cheap OEM DVD and CD chipsets for consumer electronics (like the ESS VideoDrive 4308 and 4318, found in most of the DVD/VCD/MP3 combo players)
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I think the point was not "being GPL will give it some kind of special legal protection" but "if they were competent, and they thought it was infringing, they'd just download the source and figure it out themselves." Clearly, being GPL doesn't mean much- the license itself has not even been significantly tested in court. But it does lend a layer of transparency to the project that makes these types of threats both more irritating in their bluster and arrogance and more pathetic in their ignorance.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
"This is what hardball is like" is what their representative said. Essentially, it's plutocracy as normal.
The Claims are a series of mostly concentric circles. The outer ones are going to be very broad and will almost always have prior art against them. Inner ones will be progressively more specific. So the first thing is to look at the published state of the art before the patents were applied for and decide which of the Claims are actually real. Then you can look at Ogg/Vorbis and see if any of those Claims cover their work.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Troll. Your mama would spank you.
I was never a VQF developer. One of my professors in Japan, Sadoaki Furui, is head of NTT Human Interfaces lab, which developed the original VQF, then called TwinVQ. The fact that we knew each other was the limit of the overlap (and we met exactly because we both worked in compression).
Any technical commonality (there is some) is coincidental. Both TwinVQ and Vorbis draw more from speech encoding technology than mp3 does.
(Incidentally, VQF has noise problems because of the way the lossy/nonuniform vector quantization interleaves MDCT scalars. Vorbis works differently).
Vorbis was never a 'limited hack of VQF'. Please, *do* go inspect the original CVS snapshots as well as the previous generations of Xiph.org codecs, Squish, '95' and Stormbringer, all of which predate TwinVQ.
But, eh, I just fell for arguing eith a fool. Now I feel all dirty.
Monty
Of course, since patents now last 17 years, and are awarded for things that could never have been protected by being trade secrets (One-click, anyone?), or for that matter even required R&D, the situation is ridiculous.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I'm not totally happy with these items--none seem as obvious as the mp3/.gif examples. Oh well, it goes to show that there is an important difference between free and Free.
So let me get this straight. We have patents so people won't use existing technology, and instead will have incentive to create new solutions to problems. Now patents are used to make sure new technologies DON'T appear. When did this huge disconnect come about?
You have to wonder if either the submitter or the editors actually read this article.
Sure, Thompson Multimedia is doing some entirely predictable sabre-rattling. Anybody who didn't see that coming a mile off should see an optometrist.
The important thing mentioned in there is that CMGI has pulled the plug on Vorbis development. That's a far more important, and ominous development. Corporate backing was allowing progress to be made very quickly on Vorbis, and will be critical when the inevitable patent infringement suit comes. If someone else with deep pockets doesn't step in soon, we can just resign ourselves to paying Frauenhoffer's license fees for the forseeable future.
(And please, let's not delude ourselves that the mythical Open Source Community will magically step in and finish the project: enthusiasm and spirit are no replacement for in-depth knowledge of signal processing.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
> It's actually quite likely that Vorbis infringes on several of Fraunhoffer/Thompson's patents
Actually, no. Monty, Xiphophorus, and iCast did their homework, and also hired some clueful technology IP lawyers to look things over, some of whom I've met -- these guys are sharp, and they grok psychoacoustics.
Have you read the actual patents? If you work out exactly what is being claimed, FhG doesn't actually own the farm, as I've heard it told.
Yeah, I was skeptical too, but I've been convinced.
Note, also, this: FhG has never actually claimed any infringement by Vorbis. FhG's lawyers could certainly read the source if they wanted to know.
From this url given elsewhere by another poster, I looked up all the patents that Thomson Multimedia and Fraunhofer have in the US (apparently some weren't approved in US but in other countries). With all the hub-ub about overbroad/silly patents I thought I could go read some in more detail. The list of patten numbers is:
- 5,742,735
- 5,455,833
- 5,579,430
- 5,559,834
- 5,703,999
- 5,706,309
- 5,736,943
- 5,701,346
- 4,942,607
- 5,214,742
- 5,227,990
- 5,384,811
- 5,321,729
- 4,821,260
(You can look up any of them at the patent office. Just enter all the numbers in the search field separated by spaces.)Some interesting things I noted:
- Although the invention has been described and illustrated in detail, it is to be clearly understood that the same is by way of illustration and example, and is not to be taken by way of limitation. The spirit and scope of the present invention are to be limited only by the terms of the appended claims.
Since most of the patents I found did not specify that the encoded signal had to be audio, this seems like they have a patent on any use of whatever their algorithms are trying to do (which I found not very clear...) In other words, it is almost like somebody patented a specific hash table function (I'm sure someone has) and then patented it specifically for application X, but didn't rule out the possibility of "owning" it in any application that uses hash functions.All of the above must be taken with at grain of salt because the legal-ese in the patents (especially the beginnings where the claims are listed) is very weird and I had trouble deciphering what kind of math they were getting at. Not to mention one could spend days if not weeks reading them all and all supplemental material. Overall it looks like Ogg would have to include some very specific algorithms to be infringing (unless just the fact that the patents claim to patent one method of doing a certain type/part of encoding signals is enough to claim infringement--i.e. one form of encoding algorithm counts as owning them all...but that doesn't seem very reasonable.)
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
Linde said what he said only because it was an opportunity for some free FUD. Between the lines, it says, "we're worried/scared, they're on our radar, and we need to make some noise. Words are cheaper than lawyers."
Big surprise.
If Slashdotters didn't expect that already, well, shame on you. Sudden worried speculation about Fraunhofer's and Thomson's 'newly ominous tone' is just the snowball they'd like to start (while pressing full-steam ahead with the new webcast and download licensing). I'd be annoyed if they managed to start it with a single public sentence (we've known they didn't like us for quite a while in private). Let's not be a herd of sheep being maneuvered into the chute.
Thomson and FhG both have a reputation of a loud bark, but tend to pursue relatively little litigation in practice and they'll have to work hard to find basis against Xiphophorus. When we did our patent review, we focused on the FhG/Thomson MPEG patents. Our counsel advises us we don't infringe, what we knew already.
In other words, nothing's changed from yesterday except that Linde has decided to bluff before the call.
Monty
Don't attack Eric for telling what he sees to be the truth. That's his job.
Behind the scenes, he's a friend of the Ogg project and has been for some time. He's doing his job by calling it how he sees it, and we don't ask him to spin the facts toward our favor. He also doesn't have control over which quote a reporter will choose.
Monty
These delayed-action patent issues are becoming predictable. The community ought to keep its collective eyes out for this in the future. While not exactly the same, the similarities are striking:
We should all be experienced enough with this phenomenon to see it coming a mile away. From this perspective, things like Windows Media are not competitors to mp3, they are just different complainants in the patent lawsuits.
I strenuously suggest people use png, .ogg, and anything other technology that isn't trying to strangle open standards.
The Internet wouldn't have existed if they played by these rules at the beginning.
Steve