Slashdot Mirror
Liquid Audio Sues In Pitiful Attempt to Appear Relevant
Emily writes: "Another case
of patent abuse similar to the PanIP nonsense previously reported in Slashdot. This time, it's Liquid
Audio suing geotargeting company Infosplit
over patent infringement. I read their patent,
it's hilarious! Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK. More seriously, these lawsuits
represent a serious threat to innovation in this country."
Seems to be the name of the game these days. Still, and publicity is good publicity - isn't it?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Such abuse of the US patent system is going to continue until tough civil and criminal penalties (how bout fraud and raceteering?) are enacted to discourage this.
Also, the USPTO needs serious reform, training, and procedural improvement. They should be REVIEWING these things for relevance, prior art, etc, not just rubber stamping.
Left as it is, the US patent system is going to hurt innovation, DISCOURAGE invention, and make our economy fall behind.
The next great world power is going to be a country that has less stringent IP laws, and a reasonable patent system, one that encourages invention and improvement of invention. Not one like ours that has basically become a corporate blackmail and extortion tool.
Corporatism != Free Market
The only winners in these spurious suits are the lawyers.
Note similar detrimental effects on healthcare.
So we need reform. The real question: what political candidates have the required fortitude?
Daresay the political landscape of the US is not promising...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Cool, who would have ever thought of digging through DNS records to determine where someone may originate from? I know I wouldn't. I suggest you all stop using such patent infringing tools as nslint, dig, whois, nslookup, and even Arin immediately as you may inadvertantly (no excuse!) determine where a system may be. Heavan forbid that armed with such illecit knowledge you then try to distribute some content to them from a reasonable location.
A lot of people actually understand technology. They sort of see something wrong and think "hey, everyone's making money off the internet and computers, why can't I?" and they press charges, sue, or generally become another nuisance to those with enough intelligence to see what's going on.
Reminds me of homer simpson, "they have the internet on computers now?"
Territorial determination of remote computer location in a wide area network for conditional delivery of digitized products
Abstract
Digital products are delivered to a client computer through a wide area network such as the Internet only upon determination that the client computer is located in a geopolitical territory, such as a country or state, for which delivery of the digital product is authorized.
A server computer estimates the geopolitical location of the client computer from the client computer's network address through contact information in a network address allocation database.
Alternatively, the server computer estimates the geopolitical location of the client computer from the client computer's custom name, e.g., domain name. The domain name itself can specify a country within which the client computer is located. Such can be conventional or can be parse according to ad hoc patterns developed by large, international organizations identified by a root domain name. In addition, contact information for the domain name can be retrieved and geopolitical territory information parsed from the contact information. A super-classification of the domain name can indicate a geopolitical territory. Records associating geopolitical territories with network address ranges are stored in such a manner that maximizes resolution within a cache of such records, perhaps at the expense of reduce efficiency but so as to maximum currency and accuracy.
It almost sounds like they patented the use of somebody else's leg work
[sigh]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
WPIDalamar recently filed a patent that covers "Determining people's location from their postal address". No prior art was found on this, and he intends to charge royalties to anyout who uses an address to travel to, ship items to, or explain directions.
This is an on-going thread in Slashdot which appears to be uncovering important info. Any chance we could arrange a Slashdot interview with either the Head of the Patent Office (or their main P.R. guy) or with the Senator heading up the Patent Office Committee (whatever that is)?
until I read this, I always wondered why spammers send mail about crap that is only available in the USA to me, when any fool with half an ounce of intelligence can tell from my address that I'm in the UK. Thanks for clearing this one up, /.!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The United States of America claim, in the year, 1776, to patent a method for breaking ties with your mother country and establishing a new autonomous country. Methods include guns, cannons, and other secret strategies involving tea. Use of any of these methods require a NDA to be signed and notorized. Any other countries for the next 250 years must pay royalties and licensing fees if they wish to do the same. A list of basic human rights is also claimed, with the right to free speech only allowable with our low cost licensing scheme.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
I agree this is a stupid patent, but I don't think it is quite as simple as "co.uk means the computer's in the UK". There's an extra portion to the patent which goes one step further, which is determining whether or not the digital content can be transmitted to the computer in it's current geo-political location. In essence, it sounds like a method to allow the implementation of national data filtering. For example, if it's illegal to view adult materials in a country, this patent covers any method which is used to determine that the client computer is in that nation, and then goes on to prevent the data from getting there.
Granted, that's my interpretation and I'm not a patent lawyer. On the flip side, I don't see how this patent could ever be used by someone, because I think it could be circumvented too easily. If you go solely on hostname, you could probably fake that out. If you're depending on the computer to verify this information via hardware or software, someone could get around this (like region-free DVD players).
I am looking at the patent, and it looks like the patent really and honestly is exactly as the slashdot submitter represents it, and contains nothing more than obvious ramifications of open, globally developed network infrastructure..
:)
But good Lord! 23 pages for this patent? How did they do that? Just look at that language, they must have been purposefully trying to write something so incredibly verbose they knew the patent office wouldn't bother reading all the way through.
So, just for fun, because i like Perl golf, here's a little Civil Disobedience Challenge for the slashdot populace: Who can create the smallest implementation of this patent possible? I'll bet you could fit the entire thing in half a page to a page of perl without even trying.
Post your entries as replies to this comment. Posters of the winning entries get absolutely nothing, except maybe a cease and disist order if you attach your actual account to the comment. C'mon, it'll be fun
Holy shit.
Yet another patent invented by millions of programmers around the world at various times with nary a second thought.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well, it looks they'll have plenty of people to sue if this is possible. Analog also extracts the server's likely country of origin by parsing a resolved IP address, as do hundreds of other applications.
It's hardly a big deal to equate a TLD to a country, and whilst it may take a little longer to map IP addresses to geographic locations, this data is already in the public domain!
Last names are now officially patented by me, also known as surnames. I declare the use of a last name to identify a person, his living relatives, phone number, or any other source to be exclusively my Intellectual property. Anyone who decides to use this method of identification will now have to pay me royalties based on an agreed upon rate. Use of a last name without my express permission is a violation of my intellectual property rights and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
:-)
(J/k, in case you couldn't tell.
~ kjrose
How, what happends when someone connects to your megastore ? You do a DNS lookup of his/her IP address. And that is supposed to be a trustworthy way to determine the location of said IP address ??
Would someone with in-addr.arpa access please say something like D.C.B.A IN PTR whatever.co.uk.
99% of webd don't do a reverse lookup .. ...
That should teach'em
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
That headline sounds like it came from the Onion....Nice editing, you wouldn't want to sound biased or bitter.
I new this patent stuff reminded me of somthing....
"My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims, like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy - the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament"
-- Dr. Evil
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Their problems aren't entirely their own fault. Read all about it here
Basically, it seems that congress has been using the patent office as a source of income, draining off millions of dollars that would be spend reviewing applications- seems like a good 15-20% of the fees that companies pay aren't used for reviewing applications at all.
I'm not completely relieving the PO of blame, but it's something to think about anyway.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
A-FUCKING MEN.
Nonexclusive rights to copyright is absolutely REQUIRED if copyright is to serve the interest of the artistic community ever again.
People seem to have forgotten that copyright was written to combat exclusive publishing deals given to the publishers in the 1600s. Now that copyright is again a commodity, and can be licenced exclusively, it is no different than the pre-copyright age which the current copyright proponants are selling as the dystopic vision of a world without _modern_ copyright law.
Language is a powerful tool - its important to work around it and understand the actual workings of a system rather than how stuff supposedly plays out in its formed language and terminology.
And yes, same with patents. They should all be non-discriminatory. Somewhere along the line, it became more profitable to create scarcity rather than to profit off equal-access to ones work.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Unfortunately, I think this is becoming the new business model.
Instead of:
1. Great new product
2. ???
3. Success!
We're seeing:
1. Can't think up great new product.
2. Get patent for something completely rediculous.
3. Sue everyone in town.
4. Success!
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I in fact own the the Patent#696969: Procreational Coitus and its Derivatives
Please send me all relevant materials such as videos and pictures for review and to ensure that you are not infriging on this patent.
sorry....I just had too...
incidently I also own the Token Sex On Slashdot Idiot Post Patent...
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Patent the idea of ridiculous patents.
Sue anyone who then tries to claim a ridiculous patent idea like this.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
And how could it? If a company has its own international private net with one gateway to the internet behind a proxy, then any user, no matter what their location, would appear to come from the internic record location of the registrant or, if they did a traceroute (which they said they don't cause it's too time consuming) you might be able to determine where the proxy is located.
Such utter bullshit.
There are similar freeware/government/.edu developed tools floating around since the mid-90's, too. I seem to recall one from one of the national labs, LLNL or LBL? Many are mentioned in this Google Search.
It's been years since I monitored them, but UUCP Maps were common in the 80's. These generally are not IP, but they do show that folks were relating geographic locations to addresses a couple of decades ago.
Related Link: NetWorldMap, a n interesting project to map IP addresses and physical locations (within 3-4 hours drive).
Yes, this one may indeed be "obvious" (and therefore invalid). It would have be well known to anyone who knew anything in this field in 1998 (when this patent was filed) that some URLs contain at least nominal indicators of geographic origin (like, doh). And it would have been obvious, I would say, to take advantage of this in order to qualify people on the Web (to an approximation) based on their location.
On the other hand, how much clout does this patent have, anyway? On a (very) quick reading, the claims of the patent all seem to be limited to making a go/no go determination based on parsing the "custom" (domain) name or retrieving registrar data on it and making some sort of classification or probablistic determination based on the retrieved information. This seems like a pretty weak test to me - it would seem to me that one could do a little better, perhaps, by analyzing the network address itself, which this patent doesn't seem to cover (i.e., analyzing the network address based on IANA assignments and database info as opposed to retrieving and working with the "custom name").
Does anyone know what the state of the art is these days in determining the true geographic location for someone accessing information over the Web? It seems to me that companies like Oracle (which provides downloads of software having export control issues) must have figured out a more reliable means than what is in this patent in order to verify a recipient's geographic location.
It seems to me also that the probabilistic techniques disclosed here would be more suitable for analysis (e.g., marketing analysis) than for deciding who to allow to download content. But the patent seems only to cover the go/no go stuff. Maybe it would have been TOO brazen to have attempted to get a patent merely on reading one's logs!
Nonexclusive rights to copyright is absolutely REQUIRED if copyright is to serve the interest of the artistic community ever again.
Or maybe a system which only addresses copying of actual works. Rather than arbitrary parts of works such as characters and settings. Which would also eliminate the whole "Micky Mouse" problem. Indeed this is the way copyright used to work in the UK...
People seem to have forgotten that copyright was written to combat exclusive publishing deals given to the publishers in the 1600s. Now that copyright is again a commodity, and can be licenced exclusively,
Not only that a large amount of copyright is in the hands of publishers. Especially, music and motion pictures.
it is no different than the pre-copyright age which the current copyright proponants are selling as the dystopic vision of a world without _modern_ copyright law.
Modern copyright law is different from that of even a few decades ago, let alone that of 3 centuries.
There also tends to be the false dicotomy of either no copyright or the kind of copyright we have now.
Like many of you, I'm a (lifetime) student, a CS Major and a hobbyist. I love computer science, physics and math (in that order). I write software for grocery money (independent of some corporate entity..), do network administration and high-level training (i.e. teaching an IT department how to use samba.. etc). I'm also into hobby electronics, amateur robotocs, etc. As an individual inventor/hobbyist it is hard to see the US patent system as a means of anything but reinforcing corporate interest. There are only four possibilities, really:
1. Hobbyist has patent, Company has patent. This one plays out in court. Likely, who has the most money wins. At the very most for the hobbyist, I'll bet you the ruling says the hobbist and the company developed the same thing independently.
2. Hobbyist has patent, company doesn't but is granted patent. Again, this one will probably play out in court. The hobbyist is more favored, but legal representation matters.
3. Hobbyist has no patent, Company has broad umbrella patent. Again, it plays out in court. What are the chances the court would decide that the hobbyist independently invented?
4. No one has patents. This one is tough, though usually the company in question applies for a patent then initiates legal action with the hope that by the time it comes to trial, they will have been issued a patent. (findlaw)
See a recurring theme? As a hobbyist, I worry about being brought into court, for no good reason, based on some good idea I have. I can't afford that. Its a drain on the soul as well as the coffer. I also get the feeling that I have to prove I'm innocent of alleged patent violations. It tends to make me bitter, and no longer a jubilant inventor. Whats worse, I'm told that if I invent something independently and realease it to the community I can be held accountable for abitrary amounts that represent "losses" in revenue of the patent holder if they make a strong enough case. Review the Ogg vs. Mp3 initial corporate statements that were tantamount to "Yeah, they may have worked independently, but this mathmusic thing is so complex, they must have ripped us off. No one would think of that!" Fortunately, I'm still a poor student and have nothing anyone could take.
Baubles to you and I, in the hobbyist electronics/software algorithm sense, are incomprehensible to the court, and just about any argument can be made as to what they are, how complex they are, and how reasonable it would be to argue that a particular patent is a logical conclusion of other thoughts or a completely original thought.
but I do have an argument that RECREATIONAL coitus is a derivative of procreational coitus....
after all there is no prior art!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Because that's not how it works, and your suggestion will accomplish nothing.
A patent, once granted, must be subjected to due process in order to challenge it. You would have to be (or represent) a damaged party, and you would have to bring a case into the judicial system.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
RMBS if you are a shareholder....and if you are a shareholder you've seen what excessive litigation does to the bottom line. Rambus shareholders may have started to realize that the way to profitable technology is not via litigation, it is via great technology.
Liquid Audio has not figured this out...it is only a matter of time before the attorneys suck every last dime out of Liquid Audio. We can only hope.
-ted
The patent cannot be found invalid unless they decide to sue someone for infringement.
Oh, wait.... they are.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
an idea/innovation existed prior to the creation of a patent, has just been filed by yours truly. I can't believe they fell for it!
You people can't expect the patent examiners to have degrees in micro biology, genetic engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, etc... So they can't truly examine a patent. I think the better solution would be to allow a company that's supposedly infringing on a patent, have a "grace period" where it's allowed to find prior art or show that the patented thing is a common idea. If it finds prior art/common idea, the patent has to be thrown out.
Maybe there should be a penalty too for the company that files the bad patent. This would deter companies from filing patents, but if a company does file a patent and takes it to court, it will give them a stronger reason to fight so they don't get penalized.
Of course this doesn't solve the problem of the multibillion dollar corp defending their patent against Joe Bobs startup company. But that's another whole issue...
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
We all know that .com/.net/.org aren't restricted to the United States anymore, but even ccTLDs aren't necessarily geographically restricted. Years ago, there was a poster in one newsgroup I followed. I don't remember his name, but I recall that even though he was here in the US, since he worked for Ericsson, his email address ended in .se (this would've been before they snagged a .com address).
There's also the little matter of ccTLDs (.to, .tv, .nu, etc.) that have been opened up to everybody. If for some strange reason I decided to register alfter.tv and associated that with my home server, I would be disappointed with a geolocation system that concluded from my domain name that I was on a tiny island in the south Pacific.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK.
M-x what-domain
Domain: uk
UK: The United Kingdom of Great Britain
Richard's gonna love this..
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Okay.
So.
Let me get this straight.
You are saying that if someone has a patent on something, they should not enforce it? Or is it only some patent holders who should not be allowed to try to exercise the rights granted to them by the people, by way of a patent?
Which patents are they? ones that you yourself determine are 'lame' ? Who decides?
The USPTO is handing out patents. That means those who get them have the right to try to enforce them. IF you want change, attack the USPTO, not the people applying for them.
What is pitiful about enforcing your patent?
But there are also things you can do to protect yourself. Anyone with a patent will already know this, but most of us don't have patents. In any patent dispute, your best asset is documentation. Accordingly, the best thing to do is keep a bound lab notebook (not looseleaf) and sign and date every page. Get a witness to sign the page too, when it is appropriate. Write all your inventions or work towards inventions down. If there is stuff that can be printed out rather that written, glue it into your notebook pages, describe it and sign it.
This is of course a huge burden, and requires a completely different way of doing things to be effective. But it is cheaper than lawyers. And it is pretty much the only way to convince a judge that you really did develop an idea yourself, and before the other patent was disclosed.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Some of the other patents mentioned as references are either a good laugh or a sad commentary on our patent system, depending on what mood you're in:
5366276 - delivering music over the Internet.
5944790 - localization.
5930474 - using clickable maps as a UI.
Patents like the above are free money for bottom-third-of-their-class lawyers. Patent searches used to mean something, but obviously a software patent search is almost wasted effort nowadays. I wonder why the software industry as a body hasn't raised hell by this time? If a few of the bigger companies kicked in the missing $33 million or whatever with no strings attached, they would probably save themselves many times that in nuisance litigation.
Or, how about funding the Patent Office with a royalty system? Say the gubmint gets a 1% royalty on every patent they grant? Sure, more big brother, but it would give the Patent Office itself financial incentive to investigate and determine infringement, and to become more capable at determining which patents are enforceable. Both things would automatically benefit legitimate patent holders.
Excuse me for laughing derisively. The more to the patent is using the result of the geographic locality check to decide whether or not certain content should be sent? Perhaps you're not a programmer, but that boils down to a hash table lookup and an if statement. That's something your average second-year computer science undergrad should be able to come up with. Patents are awarded for innovations "not obvious to someone skilled in the art". The "more" that you are suggesting is patent-worthy is obvious to someone JUST BEGINNING TO LEARN THE ART.
In general, what you are saying is that given a method to determine some critical piece of information X, you should be able to patent using X to make a simple yes-or-no decision. That's ridiculous. Humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. "I am hungry. There is a fruit-bearing plant in front of me. Is the fruit poisonous or harmful to me in any way? If no, then eat it; if yes, then don't. Oh wait, I can't make a decision based on derived information because that's a patented process." With as little faith as I have in the USPTO, I think even they would reject that one.
-----Chaz
Wouldn't it be funny if they went chapter 7 and the attorneys didn't get paid?
-ted
I think there might be prior art on this, but I'm not sure. We should grant it for now, just to safe.
Patent Granted
- sigs are for wimps.
Which simply can't be done....if it could be, there'd be only one white pages, not the dozen or so that are available here in LA.
This results in two possible cases, neither good.
- A department in desperate need of expanding has it's revenue siphoned off and is unable to properly do its job.
- A department becomes bloated when it is needed, but does not reduce itself when it's services are no longer relevant. Ever hear of the Rural Electrification Administration?
Fixing this problem would require an act of Congress - which would really require an act of god since they aren't about to cut off their money machines or favourite pork-barrel projects.-- Will program for bandwidth
It doesn't really matter whose fault it is. The patent office has gotten so bad we'd be better off without it.
Mind you, even with a careful and efficient patent office I wouldn't support software patents. That's just a bad idea. But the patent handling process in general is so bad that we'd be better off without it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's not just domain name based.
From my reading of the patent, it's not just the domain name in use; they also parse out the whois information for the owner information from the relevent whois information, and they support the concept of zoning by delegation (e.g. "freebsd.org" is in the U.S., but "uk.FreeBSD.org" is in the U.K., etc.).
Basically, they have an entire process based on the information that was generally available at the time the patent was filed, and the information that was expected to be available, based on geographic information draft RFC's published around the time, and the ratified-but-seldom-implemented RFCs for inclusion of missle coordinates in your DNS, in case you wanted to inte an ICBM to land in your swimming pool.
So it's technically patentable as a process patent, though I would certainly argue that it was obvious to a skilled practitioner in the arts.
-- Terry
I wonder if these people ever read any of the stuff at the XTraceroute page http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d3august/xt/ or whether they read the RFCs mentioned http://rfc.net/rfc1712.html and http://rfc.net/rfc1876.html
Seems like they are just reinventing the wheel but calling it seomthing new and marketable. Typical.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
In the non-computer world, you can generally only patent specific tools, not concepts of tools. For example, if a pharmaceutical company comes up with a medicine that cures cancer, they can patent that particular medicine. They can't patent the concept of using medicines to cure cancer. Thus someone else could develop a different medicine to cure cancer without infringing on their patent.
In the computer world this doesn't seem to be enforced.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10