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SightSound Patent Case to Move Forward
Masem writes: "CNet reports that a preliminary hearing has allowed the case that SightSound Technologies brought against CDNow over patent infringements to proceed forward, indicating that the judge believes that SightSound has a chance of defending it's case. Sightsound claims that patents it filed in the late 80s covering the "electronic sale" of music and video over a "telecommunications line" cover most of the methods used today on the Internet to peddle music or vidoes, whether by CD/DVD or by MP3/mpeg tracks. Not mentioned in the article, but there are notable parallels between this and BT's patent claim on hyperlinks, in that both patents have an overly broad language, and were filed before the Internet became what it is today, and in both cases the defendants are arguing that the non-specificness of the patents to the Internet make them unapplicable to the specific case."
CDNow = Dot.com survivor, yet damaged and broke
Both sides purchase a legal team and guess which one is going to win?
I'm ashamed to be american when unbiased judicial branch of government can be so easily manipulated.
sighs>
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
They have patents on "selling music online".
Quick, get on to the patent office NOW! Own your patent on "Selling Drinks Online", "Selling Pizza Online", (well the list is endless...)
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
1's and 0's.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
;-)
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
doesn't this case kind of show how over the top patents can be? i mean, is there no limit to the broadness of patents? surely one company shouldn't own an entire industry like that? oh wait, Microsoft already do...
Sure, now we think it's overly broad, when we have more internet sites than grocery stores and more ways for computers to interoperate than was imagined when the patent was filed. Maybe, just maybe, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Happens all the time.
I keep seeing the same statement occuring throughout these IP lawsuit threads, and it's getting a mite irritating.
Just because a patent/copyright was filed, "before the Internet became what it is today" doesn't make a damn bit of difference. It's not the patent holder's (or the patent's) fault the 'net went commercial.
Since no one has apparently thought of it, then I guess I can patent it. I am going to apply to get a patent on selling brocolli of the phone.
While I am at it I might as well patent selling everything else no one has apparently thought of selling over the "telecommunication lines"
In 1993 - 1994 I was looking at a text only hyperlinking solution called Black Magic. It was partly what I needed but when HTML hit the scene my interest in it died.
It's only difference from HTML is that it was a little more labor intensive and rather non-intuitive.
Pigdog has the story here here
6 year old little Johny has been in the director's office since noon, complaining that 8 year old little Bob stole his lunchbox last week.
The sad thing about this, and the other kajillion petty court cases between multimediocre companies trying to position themselves as yet another toll booth between artists and listeners, is that, in the end, it's the consumer who ends up paying the attorney bills.
I seem to remember that one of the early uses of telephone technology was a subscription service that let you listen to musical performances (live opera, etc.) over an ordinary telephone.
;-)
I'm pretty sure this was in Europe somewhere and would have probably been about 1905 - I read this about eight years ago in a colleague's thesis on the telecom industry.
An interesting side note was that they could give you a 'stereo' performance if you had two telephones.
Does this 'ring a bell' with anyone?
Perhaps we can ask Bob Bemer?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Thomas Kyd Spanish Tradgedy William Shakespeare Hamlet Sightsound "sound of music" CDNow "sound of music" ???? borrowing is one thing but owning the method of creation and distribution . . . whatever happened to American ingenuity?
Try here for one version of this story.
Gotta love Google.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
The judge says that it covers "any means of transferring information so long as it can occur over telecommunications lines." That sounds like it would fail the nonobvious test by definition, since we were going to end up moving data across telecommunications lines like crazy without ever knowing about SightSound's ridiculous patent.
Is it true about the nonobvious issue, though? Anybody out there a patent lawyer (preferably one specializing in defending against frivolous patent claims)?
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Someone did patent that. A university professor. Some company baught the patent from him for a few thousand (I think) and proceded to try to sue everyone (this was a couple years ago). I don't know what happened.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I wonder if anyone has ever patented the concept of money. No, really! If totally obvious shit like selling stuff online can be patented, then anything can be. What's next? Patent breathing and eating? You could make a killing!
[sigh] Our wonderful U.S. patent system has once again shown us how horrifically broken it is. While patents serve a useful purpose of allowing inventors to (hopefully) recoup their R&D expenses and actually make some money, now they are being used as legal cudgels to prevent someone else from even doing business.
Anybody got any brave ideas on how we could overhaul the patent system? Doing away with it is NOT a fix, BTW.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For those of you who don't know much about patent litigation (ie almost all of /.), this hearing had NOTHING to do with the validity of the patent. In all patent suits these days, there is a preliminary hearing called a Markman hearing where the judge determines what the scope is of the claims(the important part) of the patent. If the judge decides them to be overly broad, it can hurt the patentee because it will make them easier to invalidate with prior art. As of this point, the judge (and/or jury) have not looked at the prior art at all.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
http://gamefu.org = best gaming site around
http://gamefu.org = best gaming site around
http://gamefu.org = best gaming site around
I'd like to announce to the Slashdot community that I've patented the process of respiration.
In the future, each time you breathe, I will be collecting a small royalty from every one of you.
Thank you.
I had the patent on stupidity. Since most of the dot com ideas were "stupid," I thought I would get rich. But when it finally got down to the suing, I found out I filled in the forms wrong, and it didn't work as planned.
Sightsound claims that patents it filed in the late 80s covering the "electronic sale" of music and video over a "telecommunications line" cover most of the methods used today on the Internet to peddle music or vidoes
Right to sell something is the base of capitalism and ANY kind of free economy. In my opinion, this guys should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and put in jail for the rest of their lives, including the people that granted such a patent.
I could go on and explain 1000 reasons why things like this are ver dangerous, but i think it'd be redundant as a 10 year old boy could figure it out without help.
There should be a law that clarifies that "electronic comunications" is equal to eny other kind of "communications" be they verbal (buying over the phone), physical (buying at a shop) or paper (suscribing to a magazine with a coupon).
Will the EFF help CDNow with this case? I think they should and it's one of the many resons I support it (donations).
unfinished: (adj.)
What % of the total downloaded data would have to be audio or video to constitute violating this patent? What do they consider audio and video? I have paid for and downloaded games for my computer that had both audio and video in digital format before. What about the tax software I paid for via credit card and downloaded this year? It has both digital audio (wav files) and digital video (advisors and such) included in the download, does that mean they have violated the patent also? IANL so I don't quite understand the legalese of the patent but it seems to be rather vauge. Could CDNow get around this by including some non audio data with the download, like a text file or jpg picture of something? Where do you draw the line?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
One thing I notice is that most of these silly patents simply substitute (update) the "transport mechanism".
For example, delivering pizza by car is clearly not patentable. However, if you subtitute "car" with "eletronic wire" or "internet", you THEN have something patentable by today's standards. It does NOT matter that you did not invent the wire, nor the transfer protocol. It is simply substitution of delivery mechanisms.
I am gonna patent delivering pizza by ion rocket "or any other interplanetary device". No, I won't have invented the pizza, nor delivery, nor delivery of pizza, nor rockets. But put the 3 together and Shazam! Holy Patent, Batman!
Know that Dilbert Mission Statement Generator? I wonder if the same cannot be done with patents. The pattern is "deliver X by Y" where X is all the normal stuff we get now, and Y is a bunch of warmed-over dot-com buzzwords.
Table-ized A.I.
Does anyone know the patent number of the SightSound patent (or patents)? I was thinking about checking it out on the PTO website, PTO Patent Search, to see what it actually says. I thought it might be a good idea to read the patent before I made any sweeping generalizations about the patent system, American jurisprudence, or the character of the people enforcing it.
As of right now, I'm officially patenting the clicking noise a keyboard makes when you type.
That's *MY* noise, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let any of you MONKEYS use my incredible, edible invention without my written consent.
That is all.
Kudos to Slashdot. I love this Patents topic!
I'm an avid Star Trek fan and I'd like to propose a new Trek Race: The Litigants. Picture this non-violent species with me. They are a sort of compromise in between the Pherengi and the Borg. The whole society is based around the courtroom. They fly around the Galaxy and use the legal systems of other races to assimilate intellectual property. They wear powdered wigs and carry quill pens. Every form of communication is a legal negotiation. Their cultural rituals like marriage are all a series of legal wranglings between man and woman. This race never attacks races through weapons. They attack only through legal manuevering sort of like the ACLU.
Oh, this is patented IP too:)
Another abuse of patent laws. What we need is to have people go through all the patents and just yank out those that are blatently stupid or overbroad. Like this one. Oh, wait. No, that takes money, and we need the money now for other purposes. Like, oh, tax cuts, bloating up the military some more, etc. Just for once, can't someone with a bit of intellect--no, common sense--run the government?
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
If the law was simplified, thousands of shady people in busy jobs would be on the streets. It wouldn't be pretty. Keep them legal :)
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
There is a guy who got so good at this, he launched more patents then anyone in history, and found a good lawyer to sue for infringement. He'd modify his patent's constantly as he saw technology heading in different directions, starting off with a very broad patent, and then narrowing it a little to cover things other people invented and discovered.
He's (or rather his estate, I think he died recently) made over a BILLION dollars this way in license fees and damage awards. The US patent office recently changed the rules of patent SOLELY because of this one man. So these kinds of abuses will hopefully go away.
Just a general question that seems to apply to this story....
if congress didn't mess with the patent law that essentially says...
1. You can't patent an idea.
2. If you want to patent something, you must build it first.
The patent office grants patents based on a written description nowadays.
The patent law was supposed to be a way for inventors and tinkerers (the engineers of this world) to benefit financially from their work. Now it has become a way for bored lawyers to make money. I'm getting sick.
This was around in the mid 80's rather than the late 80's. QLink was the precursor of AOL and was designed for Commodore Computers. Later sold to AOL, which now owns what Bill Gates doesn't. For a stroll doen memory lane and to hear what music sounded like 15 years ago visit LI Dave's SID Collection He even has a Winamp Plugin as well as 'freestanding players available. I visited a while back, and was stunned at how bad the sids sound now, when we used to listen to them all the time, and actually enjoyed them..times change.
Well you lose this one. IBM had the patent on key clicks, but it expired in or around 1956.
If this refers to telecommunications line as a medium for the music - what about broadband? And how can you differentiate one form of access from another?
Even if one agrees with the ridiculous notion that someone can have a patent on a mode of sale, rather than a physical creation, it makes no sense that people who sell audio tracks from countries outside the country in which the patent is held would be bound by the patent. ie, if you sell MP3s from Australia, you are not bound by the US patent.
Another question which further highlights how ridiculous this patent is that someone from the States who downloads an MP3 from an Australian seller may in fact be breaking the law.
It doesn't change the fact that whoever allowed the patent to be registered initially should probably be shot. That's if pulling the trigger of a gun was not already patented by someone else.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Another rant of the uninformed. Selling "stuff" online was not obvious in the late 80's. They also don't have a patent on selling "stuff". They have a patent for a technique for "electronic sales and distribution of digital audio or video signals," specifically over a "telecommunications line."
It is not our patent system that is "horrifically broken". It is up to the court system (checks and balances of our 3 branches of government) to make the final decision on patents. The problem is that people are taking patents that are for something very specific and trying to apply them to general uses. There is nothing wrong with the patent, there is something wrong with the money hungry lawyers who know that there is no such thing as losing a lawsuit for them.
did they ever patent mouse clicks? maybe i'll try and be the first to grab that one. haha, you want to follow the hyperlink, that'll be $5!!!
I keep reading these stories about software/mew media related patents and clearly there's something very wrong in the USPTO (and probably other nations' patent bodies too, to be fair), however there's something in here that never seems to be addressed.
What resposibility does the patent attorney hold in these situations. I realize that there's no requirement that an attorney be involved in any way with a patent application process, and many larger companies likely handle them internally (albeit, i would guess, through their own office of general counsel). Most smaller companies though, and certainly individuals, would hire a patent lawyer to handle the intricacies of the patent application. It's not an easy process and that's why there are specialists, and it was my understanding, though i could be wrong, that part of what the patent attorney does before filing a patent is perform research for prior art and/or other patents which would conflict with the current application. The signature of the attorney on the application, I thought, was primarily to say "I'm an expert and I see nothing wrong about this application."
That being said, it seems that for any patent for which there is very obvious prior art, or which attempts to patent something obvious, there's a patent attorney who didn't do his job quite well enough (for whatever reason).
So then, what responsibility does this lawyer hold for such a misrepresentation, or, perhaps, what responsibility *should* he/she hold. Can they be disbarred? Or does the issue not really matter.
If I'm wrong about all this, by all means, educate me, but it seems like the USPTO can't take all the blame, nor be responsible for deeply researching each patent application it gets. Lets find a way to properly weed out lame patents before they even get to the USPTO, perhaps through greater accountability for the handlers of the pre-application process.
-k
Do you think the lawyer went in to the patent holder, and said, "I've been perusing your IP, and I have decided that it would be good for you if you sued these people because you can win. I would be happy to handle the case"?
Such a lawyer would have violated ethical rules if s/he did that. It is direct solicitation, and a lawyer can be disbarred for it.
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one. Lawyers are, unfortunately, a necessary evil. They provide us recourse to a complex body of laws. The threat of being sued is one powerful thing that keeps business from breaking the law, or at least makes them think about it.
When the Shakespeare character said, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," they were trying to overthrow the government. They were villians who said that.
Wow... these SightSound guys with their lucky patent are still around? I remember the first made a name for themselves trying to sue MP3.com (back when MP3.com was still cool) for distrubuting MP3s online for a fee.
Have you ever read their patent? It's so vague it's pathetic; and there's so much priot art it isn't funny. It basically says they invented the concept of selling digital music over communication lines. That's all? I remember BBSs back in the day that were pay-membership, having MIDI and MOD music files for download. long before they "invented" it.
But what surprised me is how many large corporations just caved in to this little two-bit operation waving around their bogus patent! I'm really surprised it hasn't been struck down yet.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
I'm at work now - at a TV station. We sell information to every viewer via cable both audio and video. Why is SightSound fooling around with the small fry. They need to go after ABC, NBC, Fox, etc... There is a helluva lot more money...eh wait that is why!
My other car is a motorcycle!
...were just made "legal" a few years back. They used to NOT be patentable subject matter, but the Supremes changed that. Can't remember the case, sorry.