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Microsoft Patents Interactive Entertainment
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded-Watch is carrying a story regarding the award of patent number 6,571,390 to Microsoft. The patent would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system that you (or at least I) can think of. Read for yourself to decide whether this patent either is not original work or is blatantly obvious to the most casual observer. The patent could certainly be invalidated by the courts on either point, but that'd take a fight in court that won't be cheap."
Two words:
"Prior Art".
I had "Video on Demand" working on my C64 sometime circa 1983 in conjunction with a couple of VCRs.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
the patentable feature in this patent is not VOD. check out class 725/87 for a number of VOD systems.
Read claim 1, the patentable feature is dealing with scroll rates and adding/removingfor a number of listings in a VOD environment. This is not a patent for VOD itself there are several hundred existing patents for that.
VOD by the way is streaming to a user on demmand imediatly after a program is selected, this is not a patent for just that function rather it builds on it to deal with entries/scrolling.
The patent isn't for Video on demand, in fact they stipulate the fact that vide on demand is common. The patent is for their system of categorizing and selecting items. I know it's fun to bash MS off the cuff, but cmon...
If this patent really does cover any and all media on demand stuff, it'll get shot down quick.
It doesn't. It doesn't even come close to trying to cover those things. It covers a very particular kind of media listing that is scrollable and where the scroll rate is user defined in a preference and where that media view is part of the UI of a VOD system.
Sailing over the event horizon
Here are the claims to the patent:
Oops, replying to my own post: For those that don't know, WIMP="Windows Icon Mouse Pointer", an acronym for windowing environments such as Macs and AmigaOS etc of the time.
I was under the impression that the BIG companies just cross-license all the stupid patents like this. That way it provides a nice barrier to entry for upcoming companies. A new company will have to develop a product, find a market, and fight it's way through 300 obvious, stupid patents...or they can just sell out to the big boys.
Amazon's One-Click patent was never invalidated. Faced with a certain defeat in court, Amazon licensed the patent to Barnes and Noble, and as a result if YOU want to compete with Amazon YOU will have to shell out for a legal team to prove the patent is bullshit.
porn websites have been doing that years and years before Micro$haft ever thought of it or filed the patent.
Repeal the DMCA!
Both the writer of the article and most of the respondants here seem to be confused about how patents work. If you read the actual patent, the things MicroSoft is attempting to patent are spelled in the "claims" section. They are claiming the actual interface and the interface box as the things they are protecting. They clearly are not attempting to patent all VOD. Hell, they even describe interactive television as the field of their patent. Clearly you can't claim to patent the entire field, the patent office would laugh at you and that is in no way what MicroSoft has done. The author almost gets it with "an astute legal observer might opine that Microsoft is merely attempting to patent a program guide for an on-line video system." But then rambles on about the secret meaning of the background and preferred embodiment as if all the important claims are hidden in the fine print. It don't work that way. All they really seem to claiming is the rights to a programmable automatic scrolling method in a VOD implementation. I'm as willing to argue MicroSoft is evil as the next guy, but it would be helpful to the cause if you didn't find conspiracies under every rock.
I think the difference is that MS patented a system with a roaming profile, while the tivo stores the profile locally on each box. Thats the huge difference. Not that I know whether or not it deserves patent but it is what MS is claiming and is probably why they got the patent.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
This is just stupid, and WILL be challenged by the other 500 pound gorilla in this space.
I'm pretty certain that any NDA i signed expired, and much of this is publically known anyway...
I worked at Time Inc. New Media in 1995. At the time, Time Warner had a fully functional video on demand system rolled out to a few neighborhoods in Orlando, Fl. It was both a source of pride and joy, but also seen as largely unworkable given the economics of the day.
It had features that included random access video, over fiber, distributed from a head-end, an electronic program guide, I believe, that showed either image or video previews, a remote control, pausing, ff/rw, the whole shebang.
The thing was run by an army of centrally located SGI Onyx servers, and the set top box was an SGI workstation, with a lot of stuff stripped out. It even included video games on demand, downloaded to an included Atari Jaguar. It had its own remote control design optimized for VOD. I think that they recycled the design for TW's current on-demand service; I'm guessing that a lot of Orlando tech and know-how is in there, too.
It should be mentioned that it featured an interface that was totally based on 3D imagery, and would appear advanced today. 8 years ago, it was just science fiction come to life.
This was not just pie-in-sky - it was completely functional. It just wasn't economically scaleable given the computational and compression limitations of the tme. Which is why I think that they mothballed it - to wait for cheaper servers, cheaper storage, cheaper bandwidth, better compression. And $200 set top boxes to display the video and interface.
Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Time-Warner, but they did, at least in the 90's, do some innovation.
Now, INAPE (not a patent examiner), but I'd say that Orlando pretty much invalidates this patent, from the EPG to the actual video-on-demand aspects. More importantly, the prior art has a muscle bound organization behind it to hopefully invalidate this straight away.
Jonathan
The validity of this patent is not really the issue here. Regardless of whether there is prior art the problem is that programmers cannot generally afford to fight invalid patents. M$ accomplishes its objective which is to prevent programmers from doing their jobs.
This patent is just another example of why WE NEED TO ORGANISE an OPEN SOURCE PATENT ASSOCIATION and each of us needs to throw in $100 bux or $1000 or whatever it takes to finance an organisation that can both patent and fight for us. As a member of an organzation like this we would have the right to use any patents that we hold and we _CAN_ prevent M$ and TI and IBM and everyone else from using these patents. If _our_ organisation simply picks the best ideas we come up with and patents them in very short order we'll have a rather mean shief of patents up our collective sleeves.
The entire patent is all about a user interface with selectable favorites, a user selectable scroll-rate and video previews.
That's it.
It's got absolutely NOTHING to do with XBox Live, EA's PS2 or Nintendo's games, or anything of the sort.
I am not a fan of M$ however I can't see the problem with this.
An interactive entertainment network system has a video-on-demand (VOD) application which allows viewers to create their own customized lists of preferred video content programs, such as movies, games, TV shows, and so forth. Viewers are permitted to select criteria for grouping various video content programs into manageable sets. Lists of programs are provided in one or more scrollable lists, the scrolling rates of which are programmable. Once grouped, previews for the set of programs are displayed. The VOD application allows the viewers to browse the previews at their own rate, skipping forward to the next preview or backward to the previous preview. During this automated browsing, the VOD application enables the viewer to add any of the programs of interest to a customized list. The viewer can retrieve the customized list at any time. If the viewer orders a program from the customized list, the program remains available to the viewer for a rental period (which is adjustable). Upon expiration of the rental period, however, the program is no longer readily accessible until ordered again.
This does not patent VOD. It patents "interactive entertainment network". It seems to be similar to payper view for your computer. This is a patent for the interface for that payper view network. It is TV and Movie programing on demand. This simply explains that it uses VOD. Did you guys even read this?
Prior Art
the odometer lives!
The word 'sun' wasn't in common use to describe mainframe Unix machines.
The word 'windows' WAS in common use to describe that particular style of GUI interface.
Happy to be of service.
novelty is important, but if there isn't prior art or its not ovbious the patent office has to issue the patent.
35 USC 102 says, something to the effect of, a person may have a patent unless it was described in a publication prior to invention.
As a result, a number of patents are given to things that may not be earth shattering, practical or even commerically sucessfull, but its not up to the examiner to decide that.
actually VOD goes back to the 70s/80s
the patent is for setting a scroll rate within a vod listings application, read claim 1.
yes you found prior art on VOD, but to invalidate the patent you need art on a VOD application that lets a user set how fast listings will scroll via a personal preference option.
Check out www.usvo.com for news releases about its (US Video Interactvive Corp) several suits recently brought agains the biggies in film distribution business.
From BusinessWeek Online:
"USA Video Technology, based in Delaware, Conn., filed suit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware against Movielink, a video-on-demand service that USA Video says violates its patent rights for an online movie delivery system.....
USA Video, a unit of USA Video Interactive, was awarded the patent, called "Store and Forward Video System," in July 1992; it broadly covers a method for Internet users to request and receive "a digitized video program for storage and viewing," according to the complaint. Movielink, which sells digital copies of films for download from its five partners including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Viacom's Paramount Pictures, violates this patent on the basis of its service, the complaint says."
EFF does not need to patent - they just need to disclose in an easily searchable way. The patent office should not issue patents for ideas that have been disclosed in the past (they are far from perfect), and disclosure is enough to cause a patent application to be rejected - it doesn't need to be a patent.
There is even plenty of prior art even for a limited interpretation of the two main patent claims. We KIT have been doing this for about 5 years and we where not the first.
In one application we have aggregated news clips, they are displayed down the screen in a list and are played from the top at normal speed. When pressing fast-forward >| jumps to the start of the next clip, each pressing of >> accelerates the stream by a factor of two (2x/4x/8x/16x/32x) for each press. Another version allowed the stream to accelerate the stream by a factor of two (2x/4x/8x/16x/32x) for each second the button was kept pressed.