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Company Claims Patent on CD Writing
rborek writes "According to CNet News.com, Roxio is being sued by Optima Technology over Patent 5,666,531 which covers 'Recordable CDROM accessing system'. It looks as though the patent describes DirectCD and its packet writing technique. Many different programs and operating systems use this - including Linux, which opens the door for widespread patent licensing issues if the suit is valid and the patent upheld."
Filed : April 7, 1995
Granted : September 9, 1997
This might be hard to beat. Anyone using a cd burner 8 years ago?
Roxio Response: /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Roxio
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 16
(Nasdaq: ROXI), The Digital Media Company(R), today responded to Optima
Technology's allegations of patent infringement.
We are aware of the Optima '531 patent and the claims within and believe
that any claim of infringement by Roxio's software products is utterly without
merit. At Roxio, we respect the legitimate intellectual property rights of
others but in this instance there is no colorable argument that the claims set
forth in the patent read on any Roxio products. We intend to aggressively
defend ourselves in this litigation.
http://www.petitiononline.com/pasp01/petition.html
I don't know if it will really do anything but any bit helps. Of course, getting someone into the patent office who actually has a clue as to how computer software/hardware works would be much more effective. These kinds of patents are akin to a rock band having a patent for a standard rock song chord progression and suing everybody who uses the same chords. Ridiculous.
-- tokengeekgrrl
>> Come on- people have been burning recordable
>> CD-ROMs on their PCs for about six years now.
More then 6 years good sir...
In one of the SCO articles I read about part of the law stopping companies from waiting for long periods of time to maximize damages.
However, the patent doesn't cover all CD burning, it covers a specific method of creating the image, best described by The Register:
Essentially, it describes the technique used by many CD burning apps and utilities of creating an image of the disc in memory or on the hard drive which appears to the user as a CD. The virtual CD's contents can be updated at will, until the user is ready to burn the contents onto the disc, at which point the information can no longer be changed.
Older versions of the software did not by default create a CD image and then burn it to the disc in the way some apps do now.
Consider supporting the following groups:
Free Software Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
... and read
The Danger of Software Patents
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
The Recording Technique provides a directory which indicates the location of only the last version of any stored information or modified entry of stored information, prior versions being transparent to the operating system. The Recording Technique further provides a directory recorded on the CDROM which is transportable to other computers having the Recording Technique installed thereon. As a result, the user of a computer with a CDROM reader will interface with the CDROM in the same manner as with a non-volatile memory device that is read only.
OK, so I'm not a CD engineer, but:
All these things existed well before September, 1997, AFAIK!!
Troil? Patents are required not to be obvious. This one is obvious - if you are writing a multisession CD, there is really only one way to present a uniform directory, and this is it. It should have been thrown out, but nobody at the PTO is qualified to determine what is and is not obvious, so they simply don't apply the obviousness test.
Sigh.
Why does their patent's number appear on this page at the USPTO website:m ?
http://www.uspto.gov/go/og/2001/week46/patexpi.ht
How can they enforce an expired patent?
As far as my own opinion of this debacle, I'm confident that prior art will be found to invalidate the patent, whether it's expired or not.
But if Roxio settles, this company is going to come after small companies. You bet they won't tangle with Microsoft or Dell or anyone like that.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith." --U.S. Supreme Court, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882
(Disclaimer: I wrote the UDF support in FreeBSD, but I have offer no other legal or technical advice)
/. headline is vague and misleading. This doesn't look like it applies to CD recording itself, or even packet writing. Instead it looks like it applies to the VAT in the UDF >= 1.5 spec. Basically, the VAT is a sector remapping table. Since CD-R media can only be recorded sequentially, and obviously cannot overwrite existing sectors/packats, the VAT makes this linear recording look like a normal random access filesystem. The VAT is not used on CD/DVD RW media so those are probably clear, and definitely is not used in iso9660 volumes. So at worst this means that the UDF spec becomes encumbered when using the VAT. I'm not clear on whether the OSTA, IEEE, and/or ECMA bodies knew about this patent when they ratified the various specs that contribute towards UDF, but this definitely looks to be an abuse by the patent holder.
As usual, the
Worst case scenario is that this patent is upheld and Roxio (and others like Nero) start paying royalties. The Linux distributors might have to remove VAT support from their kernels. Commercial OS vendors would have to decide on whether to license it or remove it. I'm not sure if DVD mastering software will be affected since the VAT is not part of the UDF 1.0 spec. mkisofs might be affected also if it impliments VAT. Whether the OSTA committee responds with an alternative remains to be seen. But, it's not the end of the world. Like I said, I don't think that this has any bearing on CD-R's that are recorded with traditional iso9660 filesystems. Supporting write-once media and VAT is a PITA anyways, so this gives me a good excuse to not care about it in my implimentation =-)
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
WORM file systems using such techniques have been around since at least the 1980's.
It is my understanding that the PTO is quite good at identifying prior art when it takes the form of previously granted patents. Unfortunately, when they started granting patents for software and business practices, which had not previously been patentable, all of the prior art was documented outside of the patent system. At a previous job, we got a software patent application back with some of the claims disallowed due to prior patents, so that much of the system seems to work. I'm not surprised that the PTO can't deal with the outside documentation of prior art; imagine the size of the job to catalog (as a start) all of the ACM journals, the IEEE computer journals, and the software textbooks that have been published since the 1960s so that you can tell if a particular algorithm used for a particular application has already appeared.
Interestingly enough, Optima waited pretty much exactly 6 years after the Sep 1997 grant date to file the suit, obviously to let the industry get as big as possible. BTW, my reading of laches (IANAL) would indicate the industry might be be protected by laches for the period before the suit but not after; if Optima prevails then they'd have to get licences to continue operating.