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When Should File Formats Be Placed in the Public Domain?
wccwcc writes "A lot has been said about file formats and standards creating network effects and huge profits. That said, is there a time when file formats should enter the public domain, or is it ok for companies to sit on them forever. These are some ideas on when and how file formats should enter the public domain, just like trademarks do when they become "generic"."
In direct opposition to my mostly pro-Microsoft stances, I am of the opinion that widely used formats, no matter what the licensing restrictions, ought to be forcibly placed into the public domain by law. This includes various compression schemes such as Sorenson used in QuickTime.
Companies with virtual monopolies, like Microsoft, should be required to place their file formats in the public domain (make them public and free). Otherwise, monopolies can use file formats to compete unfairly.
One problem with putting the Microsoft Word file formats in the public domain is that the "file formats" include all of MS Word's quirkiness and bugs that affect the way documents are stored. These would have to be carefully documented, also.
Maybe file formats should be handled the same way [as patented pharmaceuticals]?
Actually, they are. Apple/Sorenson's video codec (used in .mov) is patented. Fraunhofer's MP3 audio codec (used in .mp3) is patented. Unisys's LZW still-image codec (used in .gif) is patented. Iterated Systems's fractal-transform still-image codec is patented.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I respectfully beg to disagree.
The very idea of "forcibly placing" ones work into the "public domain by law" is quite distasteful.
If you spent 10 years developing a superior compression routine because you were sure it would revolutionize the graphics industry, wouldn't you expect to have some ability to control the sale of your work afterwards? I sure as hell would. I didn't invest 10 years of my life on a project just to have governmnet rip it away from me and say "Sorry pal, we're forcing that into the public domain."
On the other hand, as I already posted here - I do think the copyright protection on digital works should expire after a limited time period. (Let's say we agree that 5 years is more than adequate?) This is all the time a developer should ever need as a "window" to make all the money he or she can from their work. After that, the balance shifts.... It causes more problems than it solves to let the developer retain rights to the old code. By now, he/she has surely developed something newer/fresher, because it's no longer possible to make a profit from the 5 year old software.
[analogy between car tyres and video codecs]
You can drive down the street with any decent set of tyres; in general (excepting extreme road conditions), you don't have to match your tyres to the road. On the other hand, you can't watch a particular file with just any codec; it has to be able to understand the particular format of compressed data.
Sorenson isn't a file format
ASCII isn't a file format either, but both Sorenson Video and ASCII (as encodings) share the characteristics of a file format that apply to the present discussion.
Will I retire or break 10K?
having the lawyers tell you it might be illegal or a DMCA violation
The DMCA's circumvention ban makes an explicit exemption regarding reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability (17 USC 1201(f)).
So, in my opinion, hell yes there should be an experation date! There is no logical reason why trying to convert a 25 year old format when no one else seems to know how should present a legal issue.
If we were to allow (well-thought-out) software patents, this wouldn't be a problem, as any 20-year-old invention (in the USA, patents last up to filing date + 20 years) would be described in great detail.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Exactly! Every democratic government has a duty to use open file formats.
why not do a step further: make the government use open or even free software, just like france, argentina, peru and others try to do. not to mention that I'm from argentina :)
Coca-Cola is a good example of a proprietary "format." Their recipe for Coke is a company secret. They don't have it Registered because that would require they register the formula (where everyone would be able to see it). So Coke has simply relied on their ability to keep the formula secret.
The implications of requiring a company to release the specifications of their file format, would be much further reaching. Imagine Pepsi lobbying for Coca-Cola to open up their formula, because it's been proprietary for however-many years.
We tend to view the technology industry in a vaccum. But in fact, many discussions like this have already been resolved in the "real world."
The market needs to drive these things. If corporations feel safe using a proprietary format, let them use it. Then let them get bit on the ass for it several years later when they can't read their historical documents with the latest version of their proprietary software. Eventually, the market will demand open formats. In fact, there seems to be evidence (no, I can't cite, you'll just have to trust me or do your own research) that this is already happening.
The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of lusers out there have no idea whatsoever what a file format even is. They just write a document, or prepare a presentation and save it for later use and dissemination. If you tell someone at XYZ Corp to send you the file in a different format, they'll look at you like you're from Lalande 21185B or some other equally outlandish place.
Like it or not, Microsoft owns the document market right now, to the point where a book called
Building Linux Virtual Private Networks was written using Microsoft Word.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Monopolies imply ubiquity.
Ubiquity may imply generic-ness as a 'de-facto public standard'.
If that's the case, MS Office may well already be a generic public standard and the People may be well within their rights to revoke its special protection as a patented, trademarked, or copyrighted entity.
For that matter, this could apply to ANY kind of deliberate technological obfuscation from the CD and DVD 'red book' up through and including all of the MS office file formats and the Win32 API's.
If this were the case, it would provide the safety valve that we need to prevent the growth of dangerous technological institutions without bounds - feel free to make yourself popular, but make yourself UNFAIRLY popular and the People will take back their rights of fair use.
The idea here is that we do not want to dictate the software used, but we want to ensure that whatever software is used, OTHER software is free to interoperate with it, including open source software. By levelling the playing field through open file formats, open source software would actually be able to compete without all the belly aching you hear about "not being able to read and write Office formats" and the such.
Basically, the parent post is pointing out that this clause is highly contingent on the first part of the clause "to promote the progress of science and useful arts...." In other words, this isn't a right like Freedom of Speech, which is granted even without progress for anything or anyone, (and is only limited in certain cases where there is a direct threat to society, and even then, it isn't limited easily).
Intellectual property however, is not such a right and is (should be) only granted for the purpose of promoting progress in the arts and sciences. While it's hard to determine exactly which piece of art leads to progress, and therefore we should not grant copyright based on the merit of a work, we *should* grant copyright for a certain amount of time, as incentive, and no more time than necessary. 70 years past the death of the author is extremely excessive. Even 70 years alone is excessive.
To put it into perspective, back then it was only 14 years, and copyright should diminish with technology, not increase, since technology decreases the amount of time to bring something to market and for people to hear about it.
Actually, it's been shown that medical research is always just as effective, if not more effective, when it is funded by public dollars and not corporate sponsors. Therefore, we should fund medical research with public dollars, and end medical patents, since we end up paying 8 times what we would have if we developed it with public research.
And the best way the government can accomplish this is not by passing a law -- I am strongly against the government taking something that a company feels is proprietary and simply making it public. But, it could be accomplished simply by stating that the government itself will only use documented formats for data, which will require all major software vendors to document theirs.
AND just to clarify, this is not saying that all formats should be standardized or designed by committee or only changed with public approval...companies can make whatever format they want and change it whenever they want, as long as they document it.
So for this I came up with the idea of the Open Data Format Initiative...which I have done nothing with yet, but might one of these years. I even bounced the idea off a few politicians!
- adam
It think, the industry is becoming more and more aware of the dangers of proprietary file formats.
Beeing an mechanical engineer myself, I have the problem every single day when designing in CAD. Ever tried to convert a model from Pro/Engineer to CATIA? Or EMS to IDEAS? Or...
Sure, after only some decades, they came up with exchange formats like the teethless IGES which everybody can interpret it's own way. IGES in Pro/E flavor (i.e. created by Pro/E in the way they thought is right) cannot be read by CATIA and IGES in CATIA flavor cannot be read by Pro/E. (Forget the ridiculus AutoDesk products, nobody want to design in them anyway, so no reason for data exchange...)
In recent years, the industry has become aware of the huge amount of time and money they spend on dealing with proprietary file formats and they have pushed for better standardized formats like STEP and VDA-FS. In fact, they have not only pushed, but done the job themselves...
One problem though: IGES, STEP and VDA-FS are still not public domain, they are owned by certain groups and will cost money as soon as it is feasible. So, the latest trend is XML - and this time, it's gonna be right!
BTW: One very exiting project is using XML for exchanging dynamic models between simulation programs, like this approach at my own university in Linköping, Sweden.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I didn't invest 10 years of my life on a project just to have governmnet rip it away from me and say "Sorry pal, we're forcing that into the public domain."
The question, though, is whether your right to profit outweighs society's interest in being able to exchange data without paying outrageous prices for software, the most obvious example being Word doc files. The proprietary file format is what keeps people locked into Word, and it costs our government, businesses, schools and individuals billions of dollars annually. All that for the profit of one company.
You might spend 10 years creating a file format, but the bottom line is that to make money off of it, it has to be used with some program that customers use to store, create or manipulate data that they own - they should not be restricted in ways that they can access that data, which is the upshot of a proprietary file format. I agree that people should have the right to profit from their inventions, but not in a situation that puts the majority of society at a severe disadvantage.
Also - many people would argue that putting file formats in the public domain would have a "chilling effect" on the development of new file formats. I heartily disagree with that. We've already seen a number of file formats developed for Open Source / Free Software programs, or developed by consortiums where many universities and businesses sponsor the development of standards for their mutual interest. This is far preferable to the development of formats by companies that then try to monopolize a market and charge outrageous prices for their software. Yes, it might slow down development, but is that a bad thing? I think not. The cost of upgrading software to keep up with software upgrades that are driven by profit motives instead of actual technological necessity is draining the budgets of schools, businesses and individuals who have to keep up with this endless cycle. Something that would slow this cycle would be of enormous benefit to the vast majority of society - it would be harmful only to those companies like Microsoft that depend on perpetual upgrades for revenue. I can't say I'd weep for them.
This discussion is particularly timely now that Microsoft is trying to pioneer subscription software. If you can't buy the program outright, and a company can shut off your access to data you own at any time, the format should be open to allow people access to their data through other means. I can easily see a scenario with Microsoft holding businesses hostage and raising their subscription prices every six months.
Even 5 years is too long to wait to be able to get at your own data.
The "exclusivity" caused by copyright and applied to the actual product is sufficient to give the format creator sufficient advantage already -- what patents and trade secrets on formats (as opposed to code being copyrighted) do is giving an additional protection against competitors or even collaboration that was never the intention of copyright or even patent laws.
It's a side effect that benefits copyright owners, however this effect is accidental, unintentional (where were no file formats when law was written), and counterproductive, so the right way to remove this unnecessary additional protection is to strip it from all means that this protection can be achieved through. If it will be illegal to use patent protection against interoperable software products, or prosecute against trade secret disclosure made for interoperability purpose, copyright and patents will be still there, but interoperability will get a special protection against patents and trade secrets. It will be still illegal to copy someone's else code into a product without a permission, but, say, an employee disclosing a format that company is unwilling to publish will not be afraid of prosecution because trade secret won't even exist for that kind of information.
In fact most of companies will benefit from this "blanket" exemption of patents and trade secrets protection for interoperability purpose, they protect those things because other have them, but they also are stuck with unreasonable licenses that stem from this protection, so most of them will better off if this protection will be lifted. Ones that won't, are most likely not benefitting anyone else anyway, and it's not the copyright and patent law's purpose to encourage parasitic behavior.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Eventually, the market will demand open formats. In fact, there seems to be evidence (no, I can't cite, you'll just have to trust me or do your own research) that this is already happening.
Bullshit. When the company has a monopoly the market has no choice. The one thing most "free market" advocates fail to grasp is that the marked forces cease to work once monopoly is established. Proprietary file formats amount to an unlimited monopoly. At least with copyrights and patents the monopoly is limited in duration.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Yeah, but no one forces you to file for patents. You could keep your invention a trade secret instead (like Sorenson does).
Not true at this point. There are many alternative formats to Word, but you cannot exchange data with a company that uses Word reliably. Since Word has a virtual monopoly the only alternatives are for a huge sea change where a majority of companies, government offices and individuals who use Word to switch to a different format and/or abandon Word or to be stuck with Word. The same is true of Excel and a number of other programs.
Word comes with various data export formats, and you or anybody else can convert all of your Word files to plain text, HTML, or several other data formats *right now*.
I suppose this may be true if you're talking about text information only. You cannot reliably export tables, formatting and other information. Since I consider formatting part of my data, your argument fails. In fact, you really can't reliably export to any of these formats if your document is very complicated. Again, as I mentioned earlier, even this is moot if Microsoft successfully switches to a subscription model where Word won't even start up if you're not currently subscribing.
Even if you could reliably convert all your information to another format, if 80% of the market is using a proprietary format that you cannot access without Word, you're pretty much up shit creek if you don't use Word, aren't you? If you're a supplier that wants to sell to Chrysler, and they want your pricing in Excel format - guess what? You've got to buck up for Excel. If a government office standardizes on a proprietary format, every supplier has to have that program. For my home use, I'm not locked in to Word or any proprietary program at all - until I want to write a book for a company like Osborne/McGraw-Hill that requires Word docs, or submit a resume to recruiters that are requiring Word docs. The features in Word aren't what keep people locked in to it - it's the file formats. I haven't met many people who actually like Word or any of the Office programs, they use them because the file formats are dominant and because Microsoft obfuscates the formats so much that it's virtually impossible for any other company to completely decipher the format so their program can reliably import and export the program.
It's possible for patents to cover certain algorithms required by a file format. GIF files, for example, use LZW encryption, which was patented by Sperry-Univac. But this patent really was not on the file format itself, which was trivial. Rather, it covered a process used to compress data. The specification for the file format just happened to require that the data be compressed via that process. (Had it allowed different compression methods, as does TIFF, the patent wouldn't have been an issue.) When the unknown CompuServe programmer who created the GIF format wrote the original specification, he probably would have chosen a different compression algorithm if he had realized that the patented algorithm would cause so many problems both for CompuServe and for its users. Alas, like many programmers, he was concerned with results, not with legal or business issues. By the time Sperry-Univac (which by then had become Unisys) became litigious and began to enforce the patent, the standard was ubiquitous. But, again, the problem here was caused not by the nature of the file format but by the algorithm used to prepare data for storage and transmission in that format.
The only situation I know of in which a company has attempted to patent the file format itself is when Coda Music Software patented certain aspects of the file formats used by its music software. No one knows whether these patents were very strong, because there was never a test case. Coda's software never dominated the market, and so competitors did not find a compelling need to support their file formats. The patent was never challenged, so we can only speculate as to its strength.
TO THE EDITOR:
With the Microsoft antitrust case so much in the news lately, and since Iowa is one of the nine states opting out of the DOJ settlement, I find it curious that all this media attention has missed one simple point: the government could end Microsoft's monopoly tommorow, with the stroke of a pen.
Governor Vilsack could simply sign an executive order that, henceforth all digital communication with the Sate of Iowa must be transmitted and stored in "open" (publicy documented, royalty free) file formats. Since Microsoft's popular Office file formats (.DOC, .XLS, .PPT) are propretary, they would be unacceptable under the new rule. Any email sent to any government agency with a DOC or XLS file attachment would be automatically returned, with a request to re-send the content in an open file format.
The downstream repercussions would be massive. It would eliminate the need for businesses and individuals to purchase Microsoft software, at least as far as State business is concerned, and would popularize the notion that "not everyone uses Microsoft." Within weeks, it would be common knowledge among computer users, that some people can't read DOC files, and you can easily get around this problem with Save-As.
The single biggest obstacle to Microsoft's competition is not its illegal business practices, but simple inertia -- everyone else uses Microsoft. And no business that hopes to stay in business would risk "turning off" a potential customer by requesting a different file format.
The State, however, can and should make that request. Transparency in government is a hallmark of modern democracy. When I am forced to purchase Microsoft products in order to view "public" documents, then the term "Microsoft Tax" is not just a metaphor, it's a disgrace.
--jrd
PS: Still no reply from Vilsack... :-/
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Do what I've done. Install OpenOffice 1.0 on your corporate machine. Set it to save in Microsoft file formats by default (I know, but bear with me). Use it to create, read and write Microsoft Office files for a couple of months. Invite your coworkers to use it. See if they even notice that it's not Microsoft Office. Document everything you do with it.
When you have a big healthy list of Microsoft format files that you've touched with it, confront your IS department and demand to know why they are wasting money on Microsoft Office. Tell them that you've already removed it from your machine (that's a $300 saving to the company right there) with - demonstrably - no effect on your or anyone else's productivity. CC people in accounting or cost control. Invite them to try it, to inspect the files (using Microsoft Office, naturally) and to ask your coworkers what they think of it. Request a specific answer about why it can't be used across the enterprise, or at least trialled on a larger scale, in parallel with the existing Microsoft Office if need be. If they bitch that it's unsupported, suggest that they pay for StarOffice. If they whine that it's not guaranteed to create usable Microsoft binary format files, point out that it is creating them, and that Microsoft Office doesn't guarantee it either!
That's step 1, and it's a big step: get your company using Star/OpenOffice. Don't even bring up the issue of file formats until you've achieved this (I made that mistake). This might take years. It might never happen, because your IS guys are idiots or cowards working on the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft" principle. But try for it.
Once you've got everyone using Star/OpenOffice then you can launch stage two. Switch to creating documents in the default XML format. Any Microsoft binary format documents that you touch as part of your normal work should be saved as XML. Make a nice big list of all the documents that you've changed, because (this is the good bit) nobody else should even notice. Then after a few months, back you go to IS with your list, and demand to know why everyone else is still using Microsoft binary formats as the default. At this point there simply no reason to stick with them. Point out that a default Star/OpenOffice document (zipped XML) is significantly smaller than the Microsoft binary equivelant, which should keep the beancounters happy. And that should they ever go back to a proprietary suite (gods forbid) that it's far easier to convert from XML to anything than from Microsoft binaries to anything.
It will be a long and painful process, but OpenOffice 1.0 and StarOffice 6.0 have made it possible to start it now. If you haven't tried these products, do so now. It's your first step into a larger universe. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Why? It's my forking data! I wrote this paper, not Microsoft/Sun/whoever. This is my image, not Adobe's, Microsoft's, Quark's, or whoever. It's my intellectual property. I do not want to be bound to one company to access MY OWN STUFF. Imagine if to open the door to your own house, you needed a key from a company that went out of business. If you ever break the key, if the company isn't selling that key anymore, tough. You can't get into your house. (And calling a locksmith to "reverse engineer" the lock is violating the builder's intellectual property on their lock design.)
So should there be a time limit on propretary file formats? Yes. The day the program is released, I want full documentation of the format available for free and an agreement that I can't be sued for using the documentation. It's my data, not the company's and I do not want to be locked to that one company for MY data. If I choose to edit the file with a commercial, closed source program, that is my choice. If I choose to edit the file with a Free Software program, so be it. I should never, ever be beholden to a 3rd party for my own intellectual property.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?