Slashdot Mirror
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."
It would seem, that in light of recent IT events, a business model build around patent litigation isn't as stupid as it sounds....
Patents are stupid. Get over it. Any patent-based lawsuit like this one it just going to shed some light on the fact that patents are stupid. Patents are stupid.
Oh, and patents are stupid.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
And if this didn't somehow affect Linux nobody would even care...
It took Optima 5+ years to figure out that all CDR Software/Hardware infringed upon their patent?
Just another happy case of
1) Patent some tech
2) Wait for tech to become standard
3) Collect the underware
4) Sue for profit!
Apple free since 1990!
Patents aren't stupid -- the patent office is. It seems to me that they're taking the approach that if the applicant can hold a reasonable argument for a process they don't understand, they issue the patent under the assumption that the courts will sort out the garbage fromt the useful patents.
I say that it's time for an examination of the whole patent application/approval process.
It seems to me that copmanyies very often sit on a patent until their 'invention' becomes very popular before enforcing the patent. Perhaps patents should be more trademarks, either enforece it, or lose it. As it stands, each copmany that wants to bring a product to market would have to do a thorough (and costly) patent search to avoid litigation. This seems counter-intuitive for ideas that have established themselves, or even become standards, such a packet writing. After all, if countless other companies are producing it, why should I expect to have any trouble myself? But then, boom, the company holding the obscure patent comes out of nowhere.
It's unfair of a company to keep quiet about patent infringement until their invention has become a standard, and then try to leverage their way into a monopoly with patent litigation. If they had been forthcoming about their patent in the first place, perhaps other (better?) standards would be invented. Or, if the idea behind the patent really is that good, the original copmany would en up with most of the market share, and come by it honestly.
In conclusion, patents should be more like trademarks. Use 'em or lose 'em.
Stupid like a fox!
it covers a specific method of creating the image
In which case it should be moot under US Patent law since it is neither inobvious nor novel.
Or are you trying to tell me that other programmers have not preformatted data in memory or on disk prior to writing it out -- whether out is a pipe, a socket, a floppy disk, a hard disk, shared memory, or (gasp) an optical disk?
Whoever approved this patent was not an expert in the field, as the PTO is supposed to utilize while vetting patents.
I haven't read the patent. Maybe there's some twists in there that The Register didn't cover (yeah, I'd be shocked at poor "news" out of The Register). But I doubt it.
Applying a well known technique to a new media is not a patentable idea. Please.
I am starting to think that this sue-crazy atmosphere that just gets thicker and thicker with lawyers will be the downfall of Western Civilization. Sure, we have to protect intellectual property and all, but sheesh...this is just downright predatory. It's dangling bait out in front of an industry until they all adopt it, then biting down on them with litigative teeth. At this rate, someone will come up with a patent on breathing...and we'll all have to pay up or desist.
Is the Optima Technology patent the ONLY way to write to CDs? If not, then somebody else can innovate around the patent. The nice thing about patents is that they fully disclose the invention so that others might create even better inventions.
Aside from the stealthy nature of the patent application process, I would think that most technologists would think patents irrelevant. After all, a patent assumes fairly slow moving rates of innovation -- that the patent wil be valuable for tens of years. Yet I would think that the rapid pace of innovation would make any patent useless after a few years.
Its time for innovation.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It actually takes longer now to burn a CD at 2x, because x hasn't changed, but average disc capacity has increased.
Actually, patent laws are pretty stupid as well.
The whole reason for having patents is that protection from competition for 20 years is supposed to make more products possible.
In spite of this, the law protects companies that have no intention at all to create any products with their patent, and punishes companies that does something useful. That's just plain stupid.
No, if you're dumb you'll short it. For that to work effectively, you not only have to know that it will go down, but when. And you don't.
And the amount of money you could lose is limited only by your imagination.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
yeah we can, make software and business method patents illegal like they should be. There goes most of the load on the patent office.
If this is true, what's all the hubbub, bub?? I have never used this function of my Adaptec software, and have no desire to. I prefer to build a list of files, and burn my CDs once.
While the arguments about taking too long to sue for infrignment have merit, I think the actual impact to most users will be minimal.
Why that is so difficult (as the patent claims) I don't know. Probably a PEBKAC issue.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
In my drive, and every other CD-RW wrive that I have used, you can blank a CDRW in a few different ways, the 'fast' way taking less than a minute (at 4x): (from cdrecord - dupes removed)
I've been testing an SVCD here just now and have blanked a single disc over 10 times in the last hour (using fast blanking). The last time I used packet writing on a CDRW, I remember it taking a long time to format the disc. I would think that you would only have to do that once, though, if you intended to keep the disc in a packet-writing format.If you're writing data to a CD at 12x and it's taking you 45 minutes, then you're dealing with some pretty damn big CDs (45min x 12 = 540min = 4.7GB).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Taxpayers don't fund the PTO. The PTO is a revenue generator for the government.
"If we live is a so-called capitalistic or free market society why do we even have rules like this?"
Well, first, nobody lives in a "perfectly" capitalist society. All systems currently in place are some blend of capitalism and socialism. Thank God.
But second, the reason rules like this are in place is that it encourages people to *share* ideas. In a world without patents, breakthrough ideas would be jeallously gaurded, because others would steal the idea and use it themselves. Patents allow inventors to publicize their ideas, safe in the knowledge that they have a (limited-time) legal protection. And the patent document forces them to completely explain it, so that other people can use the idea to create newer, better ideas, which they can then patent. This is all set out in the U.S. Constitution, but that was not the first instance of such things.
Now, as for whether *software* should be patentable.....that's a lot harder question. I like to say it shouldn't, because ultimately these patents aren't protecting the idea (implementation) so much as the ability to perform some task. In other words, if you had a patent on a bicycle, I could build a bike using something other than a chain drive system and be clear. But if you obtain patent on a "shopping-cart" app, my cart may be implemented completely differently, but since it *does* the same thing, I can't use it.
In other words, this is like a patent filed by the guy who invented the bicycle, but which is said to cover all "two-wheeled people movers."
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Perhaps if the law were changed so that the patent office had to pay the plaintiff's expenses when a patent is successfully challanged, the patent office's behavior would improve.
Its beginning to sink in, that the current system imposes a lot of costs on society without a justifing benefit.
Businesses will adapt to the profit making models available to them. Innovation and manufacturing are no longer profit making models in the USA, but sueing each other out of existance is, even though its bad for the nation as a whole.
Blame the politicians, they created the economic incentive to move out of the USA, to manufacture outside of the USA and to do nothing but sue people in the USA.
Better yet get them to fix it.
Sounds like a very practical approach by the patent office to me.
If the Patent Office don't understand a patent (and the limited resources of the Patent Office coupled with the complexity of many patents means this can be expected to happen sometimes) then the best approach would be to allow a patent.
It would only become contentious if there is a problem with it, where it will be examined by much more qualified experts before deciding its validity. Uncontentious patents would be granted without the time and expense of having to thoroughly research them.
Refusing patents on the grounds of 'not understanding them' would be a massive blow to many industries by preventing all the valid but complex patents (which are often the most important) from being allowed.
The greatest problem with patents at the moment is not necessarily how the work or are administered, but the length of time they are valid. 20 years is an especially inappropiate length of time for a patent in IT and other rapidly developing areas. A much reduced length of time (1 to 2 years) would solve many of these problems - i.e. provide enough incentive to get a head start in a market, yet the information would enter the public domain to prevent many of the crazy and disproportionate actions that keep popping up.
Which is why they should return to the requirement of having a working example in order for it to be patented.
Well, not everything, but most everything we use on a daily basis and take for granted.
We need to find a way to deal with this fact, instead of running around with blinders on and hoping the patent holder is benelovant.
Also might be good to start collecting ALL source you can find, before its taken out due to the patent holders down the road.. And i dont just mean software source, but also books, formulas, etc..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem with that is, now you're holding the responsiblity of discovering these infringing activities on the patent holders. This would lead to companies purposely infringing on a product and doing it in such a way as to avoid detection for a period of time, say selling only 1 piece of the product in some remote town.
eTrade SUCKS
Somebody else here can give a better discription, but here are the very basics. In standard iso burining the first thing (and last thing incidentily) on the disk is the index for the entire disk. It includes such information as the last sector with readable data (i think). On a CD-ROM (read only memory!) this is fine and very efficient. However, on a rewritable medium you might want to change the contents of the cd at some time (say, add one file to an almost-full cd). With the ISO filesystem you would have to reburn the ENTIRE disk, as the index file is already written, and cannot be added to because the first bit of data is immediatly after the index. This, I think all will agree, sucks. Packet writing is much more like a traditional FS because instead of burning the entire CD as a single image, it breaks it down into self-contained packets, the CD drive has to spend more time scanning the disk to get drive contents than it would with a CD-ROM index, but you can just plop another packet at the end of the cdrom without problem. Again, I'm not an expert, I'm sure some of my details are wrong, but that is the basic idea.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Logically, it would even be the other way - once you find one existing patent or example of prior art, you could stop looking, which would usually be before you exhausted the entire database. To grant one, you would have to search the entire database, which would take longer.
But hey, it means nothing anyway - the courts decide everything.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Something like 49% of all litigated patents are deemed invalid by the courts.
That number doesn't surprise me. After all, anyone sued for patent infringement will not actually let the case go to litigation unless they are pretty sure they can win. If 49% ("something like" is + or - how much?), that means that slightly more often than not, the defendant in patent litigation is defeated. That is, they erred in judging that they could win.
However, whether 49% is accurate or not, it's not a useful figure. It only tells us what percentage of litigated patent cases go against the patent holder. A useful number would be the percentage of patent cases that are litigated, from which we could determine what percentage of patents are invalidated, not what percentage of litigated patents are invalidated, which is to us a fairly useless statistic.