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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...
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
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.
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".
Of course if the roles were reversed, most people here would be telling us how evil patents are and talking about boycotting Sony. Funny how that works, huh?
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 !
Because it also allows American small businesses and individual hackers to walk away with a huge amount of research, too. And no, it isn't free, because we all pay taxes, including Sony. Note that I'm not arguing whether or not MIT is federally funded or not, but if they were, then why should they be entitled to all the loot when the American people are the venture capitalists who are paying for the seed money?
Sony _has_ been in court for patent infringment before. The case was about the walkman which a german inventor named Andreas Pavel claimed to have a patent for (granted 1977!)
They stumped him with an armee of lawyers, court costs for him were abough 2.000.000 british pounds.
Note that before that sony actually had payed him appr. 50.000$ - while they sold walkmen for a couple of billion $s worldwide.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
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.
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.
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.
If the situation were reversed, MIT wouldn't stand to make billions off the stolen tech.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
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.
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.