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MIT Sues Sony over digital TV
dfinney wrote to us with a story from The Tech, concerning MIT suing Sony. Basically, MIT claims to have a number of patents, has worked with other folks in the industry, sez they've talked with Sony for a year, no headway, don't want to sue, but have key claims - etc etc.
when the economy is good all men and women are brothers and sisters...
when times are BAD.....
the Japanese economy just hit a two-decade (17 year to be more precise) low...
Japanese banks are being given lending capital from the Central Bank at ***ZERO*** percent interest, and there are few-to-NO takers....
at some point, the Intellectual Property War between the West and the East is really going to heat up
historically, MIT has been very much a "Good Citizen" on the issues of cross/conflicting patents...Sony, historically, has been so-so
could this be an early skirmish in the upcoming IP Wars????
Now, if we're going to do "Lawyers At Dawn", I officially suggest that we carpet bomb Tokyo with attorneys from B-52's and B-1B's in HUGE WAVES
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
you should never be lenient with these money hungry corporations. MIT should go for getting an injuction and get them to licence under their terms and make them pay big $$ or better still stop them from manufacturing (that'll hurt them really bad) cuz if they don't then they'll be setting a bad precedent and everyone will start taking the educational institutes for granted.
MIT has devoted time and money into this research.. no one should be allowed to use it for free just cuz they're big and rich.
Can you tell me the patent no.? We are working on streaming over network and I'm afraid we are walking into their domain....
No MIT is not a federally funded university.
From mit.edu:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- a coeducational, privately endowed research university
Ofcourse there are some projects which get federal grant but not all and so it also has the right to patent stuff like any other research institute
To see how well Sony reacts to somthing like this. Almost every time you hear the words 'lawsuit' and 'Sony' together Sony is the one doing the suing. Also what happens if Sony looses? I'm sure the competiton would love loosing Big Brother in the HDTV wars....
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Sony should be careful here. While MIT doesn't want a conflict, their Jedi are more than capable of turning the Sony corporate offices into the world's largest VU Meter. And if that doesn't show them the light, how are they going to work without any offices.
If the roles were reversed, Sony would sue in a heartbeat & seek damages too.
On the other hand one wonders, whether Sony will readily hire MIT graduates in the future.
If certain colleges get labelled as sue happy will their graduates have a hard time getting hired by established corps?
sez they've talked with Sony for a year
U R IRCing 2 much when U think "sez" is OK. Drivz me nutz.
(Bonus points if you recognize the source of my subject line.)
This might be a Judge Judy case ;)
42 + 1 = 42
I believe that in comparison to other educational institutions, MIT is quite a bit more enlightened, giving inventors 1/3 of any licensing revenues (at least in some departments). Universities like USF (hint: a place probably best avoided by smart students) have their student inventors thrown in jail if they want the exclusive rights to a promising invention.
As for these specific patents, it would be interesting to know what they are for: do they really represent interesting inventions, or is it the kind of patent that claims "any television that uses a framebuffer and a CPU".
...then why should a large overseas megacorporation like Sony be able to walk away with a HUGE amount of research, essentially for free.
Intellectual property is important...and if MIT weren't allowed to file a patent on it, someone else who can, will.
Then everyone gets screwed.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Newsflash:
While MIT is preoccupied with suing Sony for
allerged intellectual property disputes, MIT
itself got sued by those who originate the
concept of INSTITUTION - in which, the word
INSTITUTE is part of it.
Great and dead Greek philosophers from ancient
time, such as Socrates are among those who
are trying to get back the INSTITUTION idea
from MIT.
If MIT lost the suit, MIT will have to drop
the word "INSTITUTE" from its namesake.
Therefore, it *IS* a possibility that we may
see MT to replace MIT. Or perhaps, MUT -
Massachusette *UNIVERSITY* of Technology.
But then.... the intellectual concept of
UNIVERSITY was not orginated from the campus
of MIT either.
Ah
Stay tuned for the result !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
2) Just because you sometimes get more than you pay for, doesn't mean you should expect it.
Especially on /.
Try walking around in the sunshine a little. (my excuse: it's night)
Ah... so that was what happened when I tried to check some stories from the past from the Search function (while logged in).
Not enough people commenting on the not-front-page story, so we can never see it again because of this? Hmm.....
And here I was thinking it was just a generic script error message.
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
Sony is a Japanese company. Does the US Legal system really have much right to tell a Japanese company what technologies it can and cannot develop?
The only reasons I can think of for Sony to comply are Japanese surrender terms from World War 2, or trade agreements that would get Sony to recognize US patents. In that case, it would be the Japanese Govt who should be enforcing this, not the US courts.
END COMMUNICATION
Google Cached Page
The post above has a space in it that shouldn't be there.
The server appears to be down(/.tted?) The google cache of the page can be found here or in geocities.
...when I put the finishing touches to the library I developed for my Masters' degree, I wanted to make it freely available. I'm not so keen on the GPL, so I decided to use a... get this... "MIT style" license.
These are the same people who brought us the X-window system, released under what is probably the least restrictive public license of them all, right? So why the sudden change of heart?
OK, so there's a lot more money to be made out of digital TVs than there was out of a network-transparent client-server windowing system for UNIX. But YKWIM.
Another reason to want people to license to avoid a court battle is that you think you're gonna lose. I bet this is some undefensible patent or two, like Rambus's BS.
Give em hell.
Personally, I've found that the only reason I needed to go to University was to prove to other people I knew lots of things, so I could get a day job to support my hobbies.
(University was also nice for the social life, and the high-speed internet access (10 Base T LAN, then a fibre hop or two away from the UK JANET backbone in Manchester - bloody fast!), but they're hardly necessary...)
The stuff I was interested in myself I learnt anyway, by getting books/ online docs and reading them, experimenting myself, and talking to people.
If there was some way to print a verifiable listing of the stuff peoples' brains contain (like a guaranteed-true CV), it would save a lot of people the hassle of paying for a University to rubberstamp knowledge they have anyway.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I'm glad I didn't get accepted to MIT. They've been officially declared 'evil' by the Slashbot collective.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Actually I believe that a University can hold a patent on even government funded research. One example I can think of is that the Chemistry Department at the University of Wisconsi holds a patent on fortifying milk with Vitamin D. I know that for every gallon of milk sold the University gets a couple cents. It would seem that they have a patent on it or why would anybody pay them a few cents per gallon. I could be wrong. Let me know if I am.
What good is a used up world, and how could it be worth having? --Sting
Offtopic: While I was looking for the MIT patents on this digital TV stuff I ran across this:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft95&s1=Massachusetts&s2=Tec hnology&OS=Massachusetts+AND+Technology&RS=Massach usetts+AND+Technology
Apparently Apple holds a patent on Icons.
Maybe I can find some that are relevent to the story now.
What good is a used up world, and how could it be worth having? --Sting
A four of those companies started as grad student projects
(routers were a computer staff project).
Stanford pretty much ignored them when they started
companies. This is documented in Revenge of the
Nerds, series II. And I used the the prototypes
of the first three during my years at Stanford.
In fact, the name SUN originally stood for Stanford
University Network.
On the other hand for each of these mega-successes,
there are ten failures. Todays NY Times has a
story about a Stanford student dropping out to
start an unsuccessful dot.com, then returning
to finish the degree. He says that his frathouse
had eight dot.coms running on Stanford servers
during the peak- none of them succeeding.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The hell they arent in it for the money.
Just because a patent is alledgedly infringed doesnt mean they actively used that patent or resulting research in their development... there's always a good chance in any patent infringement that it was indepently developed, not that it matters one way or the other.
The Patent and Trademark Office recognises the differences between inventing something and owning it and inventing something and not owning it. Work for hire is, in fact, the property of your employeer, if it is part of your job and/or contract.
If you work for Microsoft and you discover the cure for diabetes while on vacation at your grandma's house in South Texas, it is yours.
That is assuming you didn't sign away your life to your employeer.
jrbd
It hasn't been that way for a long time now. The sale and licensing of intellectual property can represent a significant source of income to a university, and those dollars can be used to offset tuition costs and operating expenses, which is a good thing.
It's no different than intercollegiate sports; the players aren't professionals, public funds help pay their tuitions, why shouldn't we get into the games for free? Because the ticket fees help support the program so my taxes don't have to.
If there was some way to print a verifiable listing of the stuff peoples' brains contain (like a guaranteed-true CV), it would save a lot of people the hassle of paying for a University to rubberstamp knowledge they have anyway.
The reason that I would hire someone who had a degree over someone who doesn't is that it shows me that the person has enough discipline and commitment to do something that takes four years. Someone may have a lot of a knowlege but would they be a good employee?
And it was like living inside slashdot 24/7.
(Actually a higher quality slashdot where
everyone knows what they are talking about instead
of the 20% here.)
The MIT Media Lab did considerable work on digital TV back in the late 1980s, from whence this patent dates. But the Media Lab was a place where corporations could buy in and get rights to all the technology developed there. Sony was one of those corporations. So I'd have thought they'd have rights to those patents.
I felt as if I was trapped in a bad Dilbert sequence on ISO 9000. I actually saw the answers coming. THeir focus now is on "outcome assessment." You can be as bad as you want, as long as you're measuring something.
At this campus, I'm involved in the Bachelor of Science in Business (BSB) program. It is a separate program from the Smeal college on the main campus, as they had accreditation concerns. Now some of the faculty in this program are talking about accreditation, and I (and others) are opposed to even applying. The Penn State name means a lot more than AACSB. We would be foolish to make any changes to satisfy them; it would be a tradeoff of standards for nonsense.
In fact, I don't want to stop at not applying; I want an official statement explaining the reason, and stating our willingness to joinin forming a body that accredits based on standards and quality rather than process.
hawk, of course speaking for himself and neither the program or the university.
Another multiple success story is the University of Wisconsin. In the 1920s, it developed a process for irradiating certain foodstuffs with ultraviolet rays to enhance Vitamin D formation--a technology that found its way into virtually every milk bottle. Decades later, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patented certain derivatives of Vitamin D now used to treat renal osteodystrophy and other bone-related diseases. Gross revenue surpassed $14 million, and the university netted about $8 million.
That works out to *a lot* less than a few cents a gallon. And it would seem those patents would have expired by now.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
This topic reminded me of an article in this month's edition of Tech Review about the impact of patents to university. They indeed can become a significant source of income and can be put back to more research, especially for private universities. There's a table ranking universities based on their license income from patents. MIT is not surprising judging by the proportion of their license revenue compared to their research expenditure, which is only 2.2%. Compare this with Florida State University, whose license revenue is 43.2% of their research expenditure. It's basic economics.