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FTC Investigates Submarine Patents
Schnake writes: "An article on USAToday talks about how the FTC is investigating Sun Microsystems, Unocal, and Rambus to determine whether they illegally kept patents secret while helping set industry standards! And a quote from the ZDNet article: "It noted that all three companies had filed patent infringement lawsuits against firms they say owed them royalties. But the litigation backfired when those firms countersued, charging them with concealing their patents, and complained to the FTC.""
I'd never thought about the prospect of companies keeping their patents secret. For all we know, Microsoft could have been awarded a patent for gravity *years* ago and never told anyone. Then one day they announce that anyone who does not pay them licensing fees (on their terms, which will include replacing your TV with Windows Media Player) will simply have to get off the planet.
...piss off *everyone* (excpet corporate america)
Japan espically... about a year ago, Japanese television had an hour long program about how some patents for robotic assembly and inspection had been granted over 20 years after the patent had been accepted. If I recall correctly, there were some very devistating consequences for Japanese industral conplex.
If Japan had a military, it was the kind of issue that might start a ware.
The point that seemed to fall on deaf Japanese ears was that the paten office is inherently a political tool of the unitied states government and corporate america. This particular patent had been "submarined" for the direct purpose of secrewing the patent filer out of roalties.
So, just remember, patents don't protect the inventer. Patents exist to the benefit of corporate america and the us government... and in a country where the patent generators a systematically screwed as a routine, generic part of the culture, it seems a little disingenuious and completely unnecessary to submarine a patent.
The whole point of the patent system is openness. You only get a patent monopoly in exchange for full disclosure. So it should be easy (in principle) to find out what patents cover something you are working on. But in practice the sheer volume of patents out there is too large.
I think that a legally binding 'patent challenge' might be the answer. You should be able to send a letter to Rambus or whoever saying 'I am developing the following... please disclose whether you have any patents or patent applications which cover this area'. The company receiving the letter then has to disclose what they have patented. If they lie or keep quiet, they lose the right to sue you later on. Obviously you couldn't do this for internal R&D, but for standards bodies (where the process is open anyway) this could be a useful tool to reduce threats from submarine patents. The only question is whether it places an unreasonable burden on the patentholding company.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4 ?
It seems most (or at least some) of them were requested and granted just when the relevant technology/algorithms got accepted into the standard. (See also this article)
As the article on advogato mentions : why can't ISO/ANSI/whatever enforce policy stating that no patented work should be included in standards released by it ?
A bit harsh, don't you think?
The Taleban website, appears to be continually hacked. Every time they fix their site, within minutes it's defaced again. WAY TO GO!!!!!! I'll make a mirror of the hack for prosperity. I don't feel so completely helpless anymore! There has to be more that we as a community of geeks can do, other than giving blood (VERY IMPORTANT!), or donating cash. I'm sure that the lowlife communicated electroniclly, maybe have secure or hidden websites. Think about a cell based organization, picking up and dropping off information anonymously via FTP. I'm almost positive that info is out there. LET'S FIND IT!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Do I need to say any more?
another "quality" nivelo9 comment
They all survived ( http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/12/sun .htm )
http://www.panynj.gov/pr/9-99.html
Gunfire in midair is exceedingly dangerous, but less so than cowering in terror while your surroundings become a missile guided by a handful of psychos with pointy sticks (or the modern equivalent). Their victory was the inevitable, intolerable result of a helplessness we've learned at the hands of an overreachingly intrusive government.
It was a field office. I believe there were sales, service, and education personnell there.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
These cases are very similar to the one I'm currently fighting. You see, I own the patent on the English language. I kept it under my hat while helping to develop it, so I'm in the process of suing anyone and everyone for their unwarranted use of it.
/., you've been good to me, so I'm willing to settle out of court with you. :)
Don't worry
United States Patent 6,270,404
Sines , et al. August 7, 2001
Submarine chamber door allowing partitionment of exterior from interior while still allowing a beautiful, roomy feel with plenty of fresh air and sunshine.
Abstract
System consisting of wooden frame and screening material used as replacement for airlocks on submarines. After sitting here long enough, we decided that submarines just don't get enough fresh air or sunlight, and that the main problem is that their door is either open or shut. The solution: screen doors for submarines.
Inventors: Sines; Randy D. (Spokane, WA); Kuhn; Michael J. (Spokane, WA); Gregory; Randy A. (Spokane, WA)
Assignee: Digideal Corporation (Spokane, WA)
Appl. No.: 749046
Filed: December 26, 2000
For example, Unisys's patent for the LZW compression in the GIF format leaps to mind. They didn't exactly keep it a 'secret', but they did wait ten years before trying to enforce it. By that time the vast majority of the developers out there had forgotten about it.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
How is it possible to keep a patent "secret?" Aren't all patents part of the public record?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Will they also investigate Microsoft's submarine software patent on procedure invocation which make it impossible for anyone else to legally make a ECMA standard .NET runtime.
.22LR Shotshells would not breach the hull of an aircraft, no even a Cessna.
Cunning linguists
we could get the patents *revoked* on the human genome.
/.'s datab...(mysql error processing this directive)
complete BS, If you ask me, consider one case reported by 20/20 (IIRC) where a guy's blood (hence genes) were resistant to the AIDS virus.
Essentially this comes down to theft and fraud. His Blood, His Genes and a Corp. says they own it? MYHAPPYASS they do.
By that logic, I could let Kingston/Rambus/(whoever) make memory, figure out the tech for it (do all the work)...and go buy a stick of memory (or steal it/whatever) and say "this is my memory company now".
And the courts are *believing* this piffle?
Riiiiigggghhhttt.
Moose.
Losing Karma not to my own stupidity, but bugs in
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Well, there goes Junkyard Wars...
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
Don't forget to take advantage of the opportunity to acquire this flashy URL, from us. Be amongst the first on your block to have a url that matches what you do. Should be fairly easy to acquire, as there are but a few "entries" so far.
Java itself is full of such "submarine patents". Why is anyone surprised by all of this? This is not "open" source by any definition.
is the only one to accept patents after there is public communication.
In all other system I know of, once there is no longere secret, there is no longer patentability.
On a side note, monopolies are legel, abused monopolies are not. Patents grant legal monopolies, abuse of patent should be prosecutable (think of Brazil against pharmaceutical laboratories, selling remedies 10 times their costs. If it's not an abuse of monopoly, what is?).
What is being alleged here is a type of fraud/unfair competition. The crux of the claim is that it is unfair for a company to propose its technology be adopted as an industry standard without discloising that it has patents or patent applications on file. If adopted as the standard, the others in the industry will automatically infringe. Options at that point: concede the market to the patent holder, redesign the product so it deviates from the standard set by the industry, or pay a royalty to the patent holder.
To the extent that patents have already issued they are public record, as noted in another post. But currently the law is in flux. The general rule is that until a patent issues, the application and all materials submitted to the PTO is confidential. (The confidentiality allows companies who cannot get patents to still protect the way they do business under trade secret law.) There is a group of applications that fall into this category. However, since the passage of the AIPA (American Inventors Protection Act) and some other tweaks to the law, there is now a publication requirement - applications are published 18 months after filing.
So - in my humble legal opinion, it is unfair for a company participating in standards-setting not to disclose that it has patent applications pending, but as for issued patents, companies should be aware of what their competitors are doing. Especially if it is a public record.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
The question is, will they be enforced? .NET has certainly those too, and it is feared that MS will enforce them against open source implementations (which cannot license them). Microsoft isn't known for enforcing its patents offensively, but in the one known occasion it has, it was against an opensource project.
But there are more of them than there are of us! Doesn't that give you pause?
And one of them seems to be smarter than the CIA, FBI and NSA combined! Bin Laden seems to have realized that while Americans are limited by Echelon and all kinds of other bureaucratic restrictions, Bin Laden can simply ignore them by encrypting every message to any depth necessary. He has billions to buy whatever technology he needs. The CIA, FBI or whatever, in contrast, are on limited budgets because of tax cuts.
Doesn't it bother anybody that we are girding up for a battle between dubya, leader of the free world versus Bin Laden and we can't even keep track of where Bin Laden currently is?
I heard on TV this morning that Bin Laden apparently, believe it or not, has relatives in the Boston area. Like any Arab potentate with multi wives, I guess that he has family just about everywhere!
Believe it or not, the CIA and FBI, etc. seem to have blissfully ignorant of this fact, judging by events, until that fact was bashed in their faces. I guess that these organizations have to dumb down to the level of their political masters, namely dubya.
Where is dubya going to get the money for all of the obviously needed increase in security. WHY, HE WILL RAISE TAXES, THAT'S WHERE!!! LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON!!!
But don't worry, God is on our side.
What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4?
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, better known as the Joint Photographic Experts Group, developed the JPEG bitstream standard (part of IS 10918-1), the SPIFF (.jpg) file format (IS 10918-3), and a new "JPEG 2000" wavelet coding system. JPEG has a policy of requiring all members to license patents royalty-free if the patent is essential for implementing the standard.
On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yeah, your posting's very manly. So tell me.. do you get this way when your 2cm cock retreats into the fat in your crotch, or are you this manly all the time?
is that these companies had *applied* for patents, but not received them, so they had nothing to declare, or so they said.
This was the case with Rambus... they participated in standards writing.. and then *afterwards* were granted the patent.
New precedent is required to prevent this in the future.
The letter you ask for sounds great, but the problem is, who do you send the letter TO?
Rather.. companies involved in standards negotiations should be forced to sign declarations that they are not holding or attempting ot hold IP rights over the standards in question.
Ah yes.. casual bigotry. I wonder what it is we fought World War 2 against.. nope, fascism and genocide and helping to keep the world free wasn't it. It can't have been, on this evidence.
How about adding that this is a major high-tech failure!
There have been many comments about incompetence of organizations such as the FBI, CIA or NSA but I have only seen a few comments about the true reason, over-reliance on high-tech surveillance.
These organizations have relied more and more on high-tech gadgets. Words like Echelon come to mind. Because of reliance on such gizmos the CIA and FBI have been doing less fieldwork. Why do fieldwork when all you have to do is sit at a CRT screen eavesdropping on the world?
The only problem seems to be that Bin Laden doesn't seem to follow the West's nice bureaucratic rules. He apparently encripts everything but he doesn't use FBI/NSA approved encryption technology. How dare he not play by our rules! Being a billionaire, he can buy the finest high-tech communications gear in the world. The result is that our finest security agencies apparently cannot track where he is. I am only using Bin Laden as an example. There seem to be hundreds of potential Bin Ladens out there, none of them playing by our rules.
The only answer is that the CIA, for example, needs to go back to the good old days and get lots more agents out of their air-conditioned offices and into the field. They must learn local languages and make local contacts. High-tech play-toys, by themselves, just won't cut it, especially when budgets are being cut.
The USA Today article keeps saying "patent" where it means "patent application." Patents are on public record. Patent applications are not, for the first 18 months (formerly forever in the US), because it would be idiotic to let the gov't publish your hot new technology, and then take a year or two to process the application and give you some protection against imitators.
"Submarine patent" refers to patent applications that were kept in limbo at the USPTO for a very long time by a stream of amendments and other maneuvers, then finally emerged with apparent claims to whole broad areas of technology. For instance, someone filed a patent application about 1960 for several transistors grown on one block of silicon, interconnected by wires soldered between transistors, instead of the then-usual procedure of sawing up the silicon into individual transistors. After 20-some years of amendments, this finally became a patent which claimed to cover _all_ integrated circuits, never mind that there is as much resemblance between the original invention and a modern IC as between a high-wheel bicycle and a modern automobile. But the "inventor" hoped to collect royalties from companies that felt it was cheaper to pay than to fight.
The things talked about in this article aren't submarine patents, but rather are patent applications that became patents in the normal time, but belonged to companies sitting on the committees writing standards concerning the technology in the applications. That's clearly a conflict of interest, and so standards committees usually require members to sign contracts to disclose related patents and patent applications, and to license them at set rates. The three companies are accused of breaching those contracts. Rambus (at least) is also accused of using the standards committee discussions to target technology to add to their patent claims.
The feds seem to be claiming that this breach of contract voids the patents. That might be too far of a stretch under the laws as written by Congress, but it's certainly justice, and the Constitutional clause authorizing Congress to pass patent laws ("To encourage the progress of science and the useful arts...", or something like that) would seem to require voiding a patent like Rambus's that was deliberately written to _impede_ the adoption of new technology.
Forgot to say: "submarine patent" was not in the USA Today article, but is a mistake by the slashdot headline writer.
Strong disagreement here, at least within the low-capital-investment realm of software patents. If I had to poll everyone who might have worked on the same stuff that I'm working on, I would be sending out millions of letters per week. This is totally impractical for stuff like software patents.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Patent holders have the right to selectively enforce their patents. It is not trademark. The only thing 'allowing' people to use their patent limits is the amount of damages they can claim, because they chose to do nothing.
What is investigated here is different; this is about companies entering negotiations and striking deals/standards/etc, while keeping it a secret that they have filed for patents covering parts of the deal/standard/etc, and then later trying to profit from that. The premise is that if the other parties involved knew about the patent, they would have done something else.
it's not that black and white.
A better analogy is if you took some Rambus memory, and discovered that it actually acted as a high-gain subspace antennae. You COULD patent that, even though someone else built the ram, and held patents on it, because it's a new discovery.
Why cant the patent owning company stick the patents on their website? Job done.
Ali
haha this is funny
Sun does another dispicable thing (just like Microsoft) and yet no one on Slashdot complains about them.
can anyone say HYPOCRITE?
you didn't have to mod me down and kill my karma!!! i was agreeing with the second guy not the original poster.
another "quality" nivelo9 comment
If the moderator reads this, I'd just like to know.
Now all I have to do is find and digest fifty thousand company web sites if I've written a few lines of code that are even slightly clever.
It has to be centralized or it's unworkable.