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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."
With recent price cuts to DVD writers, will anybody care in 18 months?
I may have the acronyms wrong, but isn't DirectCD
just an implementaiton of the DVD filesystem
(UDF or UFD?)
There could be more interesting lawsuits to come!
There really ought to be a statute of limitation with this stuff. Seriously, packet CD burning was new like 5 years ago.
1)Quietly Register Patent
2)Wait for some company to make lots of money totally legitimately
3)Sue until your stock price doubles!
Its becoming a more and more common trend in that software is allowed to develop freely - and then come out with a patent and start suing.
I agree that Roxio should have looked at this patent, but an interesting trend nonetheless.
Just look at their home page:
Their "accomplishments" consist mainly of suing the pants off everyone they meet!Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
In looking over the patent, it does seem to describe exactly what DirectCD does - allows the disc to be continually written upon and accessed by other computers with a DirectCD-like reader on it. So it looks like Roxio might be screwed.
But does this affect the general user? I've personally never used DirectCD for anything; around our office we just burn a CD once, close the disc, and ship it out wherever it needs to go. Is there really a need for a continually writable procedure on a CD when there are so many other mediums more suitable and with more capacity than a CD?
If, as it initially appears (I'm no expert in this area), this patent represented a useful step forward in CDROM technology at the time, and the technology was picked up and used by Roxio and others without license, then why shouldn't Optima get due credit and compensation?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
as long as the patent office continues not to do its job and simply rubber-stamps every patent that comes its way, then yes... a business model built around patent litigation is not a stupid idea.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Some people did. I remember a couple of my college friends got together to finance a $1,000 CD burner that they shared amongs each other. That was back in 1996.
Yes, actually.
It was an enormous external Phillips (I think) SCSI unit. It took up about as much desk space as a 500-watt home theater receiver. It burned CDs at 1x and consumed all of the resources of the 150mhz Pentium II that it was attached to. Don't remember what software I was using to burn the CDs, though...
Tons of people I know were.
The issue is PacketWriting though. In and of itself I personally think floppy disks fall under prior art for this though. Disk+random access, there you go, there are the key tennets of this patent. It's the same thing, who cares about the exact medium. I can't wait really for patents to go away. I really don't care if one company takes the idea from another company and uses it. If we live is a so-called capitalistic or free market society why do we even have rules like this? If one company can produce similar results at a better cost, why should it matter if they invented it or not. Why should I pay someone else for a product so that they don't have to pay license/patent fees on their own product AND get my money as well for a product related on an IDEA.
This company is amazing. If you read their corporate history, it's littered with stories of litigation. My favorite entry:
Feb. 2003: Optima partners with the Lava Group www.lavagroup.net to enforce Optima patents, trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property
Do they really think that their customers particuarlly care that they hired new lawyers?
Sounds like EOLAS 2: Electric Bugaloo, but the dates on the patent are gonna be hard to match.
That's EXACTLY what they do.
Later, when a lawsuit comes up, that's what sorts out whether or not the patent is idiotic or not. I think the patent office should have to refund 110% of the fee if a patent is overturned in court. Might make them actually THINK a little bit before they just grab the damn stamper and give it a stamp of approval.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I worked for a company that bought a "WORM" (Write Once Read Many) drive for backup purposes in 1987. We were amazed at a technology that could store over 650 megabytes on a single replacable CD-like platter! It cost something like $10,000.
The cake is a pie
Actually, I live in the DC area I know someone who works at the patent office and what you describe is actually pretty close to how it happens. Although, they do actually have people help them understand the processes described, they do no research on prior art what so ever. Apparrently there is not time. The validity of a patent is for the courts and ultimately the tax payers to figure out.
Actually, there is - a legal doctrine called "laches." Essentially, you can get bounced out of court if the delay in filing suit (1) is unreasonable, based on the totality of the circumstances, and (2) creates material prejudice (e.g., the company being sued has invested millions in marketing the product and has built a substantial customer base). Furthermore, a delay of 6+ years is presumptively unreasonable, shifting the burden to the plaintiff to show a legitimate excuse for the delay in filing suit.
Philips CDD521 Single speed burning and (WOW!!) 2x reading. SCSI interface. Used this before I even used the internet. Let see that was 1994. Replaced it in 1995 with a 4X Plextor internal.
The Philips was the size of a stereo receiver, 19"x10"x12". Just as big as the ALR 486DX66 powering it. We used two EISA 1742 SCSI cards, one for the burner and the other ran the 2 GB drive. Cost for the burner was $4500CDN. Paid for itself with the whole 68 CDs it made before croaking.
Came with Corel CD Creator 1.0. Still have a copy. This was sold to Adaptec and formed the basis of Easy Cd Creator. It was the first drop and burn software as previous systems require the image to be authored first than burnt on.
Maybe prior art? IANAL
According to the patent: "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."
Packet writing does not leave behind the old data and only make it "transparent" to the operating system....it in fact rewrites the sectors that are not allocated in directory entries (file allocation table??); I would also assume that this multi-session writing is already an ISO standard.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
I think this is more interesting. Is Roxio going to get StaXored?
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
3)Sue until your stock price doubles!
SCO stock didn't just double, it went up twenty-fold at one point. If you are as smart, you'll short the stock like some of the smarter geeks out there. The stock will eventually be sued into the ground and you'll have made 100 percent on your investment (minus comission and interest).
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Don't follow IP lawsuits much do you?
Here's the process:
1 - company discovers that they have IP that is actually work something! Wow! Fire up the lawyers!
2 - Identify the big targets (HP, MSFT, etc)
3 - Start with the small players. They'll either settle, in which case you have money for future lawsuits AND legal precedent or you'll go to court. If you win in court, you now have money and legal precedent. If you lose, you go try again on some other small company.
4 - Now you have some money and precedent so you go hit up the big players. Generally they'll just settle with you and give you some fixed amount or some fractional royalty.
5 - Put your feet up and watch the money roll in.
Refer to NTP and others.
How many of these lawsuits are on patents which would have to be many years old (or just stupid patents with truckloads of prior art), and only come up once the company being sued for the alleged infringement is successful? These patent holders never intend to make anything, they just let someone else do the actual work and then try and shake some money out of them.
Assuming the patent wasn't bullshit to begin with.
Of course, IANAL and this was gleaned from the web:
It's been mentioned here before, but a patent holder has to make reasonable efforts to secure their patent in the marketplace. If a patent holder neglects enforcement of their patent when an infringement occurs, the patent holder may be guilty of a "submarine patent", where the patent holder specifically withholds action on infringement to maximize allowable damages. The defense to such ocurrences is termed the doctrine of laches and was laid out in a Supreme Court ruling.
The doctrine of laches defense has two elements:
- The alleged infringer will suffer serious harm to their business if the patent were enforced or if the period of time before action was such that important evidence or witnesess were lost.
- The patent holder delayed action for an unreasonable and inexcusable period of time.
Typically, six years is held to be a reasonable amount of time before the doctrine of laches may be used as a defense. Note that the burden of proof rests with the infringer and that both elements must be proven on the proponderance of the evidence and any further infringement is actionable.
That's as much as I could find.
It's called a "submarine patent".
No point in suing poor people, is there?
Clear, Dark Skies
Software is not something you can patent because of fundamental differences in the nature of the end product and how it is manufactured.
Can you imagine someone patenting a device called "method for using a fork to emulate a comb" ? Well that is just what patenting software is mostly about. While when you patent a way to acheive a goal in real life patents you patent the goal in software patents. If i want to do A in software HAVE to use method B, very often because that is the obvious and right way. If i dont do it that way i have to take unessecary steps to get around the obvious solution, often by doing something different than i first set out to do (before i had even thought about how).
The patent becomes the gatekeeper to an end goal and not to one perticular way of acheiving this goal. It is all to evident that software patents is going to inhibit US development of software and give Asia and China etc an enourmous advantage.
I could swallow it if the patents wore carefully examined and very restrictive but the USPO seems to give patents out like the green card lottery.
HTTP/1.1 400
In order to address the issue with the patent system, the RIAA, SCO, the MPAA, and any other acronym you decide to dislike today, we have to figure out what it is the patent / copyright holders are requesting and what customers want (i.e., the reason innovation is Good).
Firstly, let's say I have just come up with a neat little gadget. Now if I'm a small operation, I don't want some giant company to come and use my idea to beat me out of business through mass production. I simply want to be able to make a living off my idea. If I'm an artist, or an author, I want to be able to make a living off my concepts / performance. There's a little difference between both these concepts, so I'll focus on the patent idea.
A patent, historically, applied to a new device or a new way of doing something (there are process patents, but typically they apply to things like "here's what you need to do to make chemical X"). Now, consider a patent to be something like an "implementation right". Basically a patent says that only the patent holder or the holder's approved agent may implement the said concept. This is similar to a copyright, which states that only the copyright holder or the holder's approved agent my copy a work. I don't have a problem with either of these concepts - with some caveats but I won't discuss those here.
Now, we can argue whether or not it is good for society to have a single entity or authorized group implementing some process. It is generally assumed that it is good for the person implementing it - assuming that the implementation yeilds something for which people are willing to pay. However, what about situations where the person holding the rights to implementation isn't really good at it, and someone knows they could do it better but aren't allowed to because the original holder won't give them approval. This would be a Bad Thing.
Now, what we see here is that independent of what is being implemented we can have unintended consequences with any "exclusive rights" kind of philosophy. What it is saying, though, is that such philosophies only work for "the greater good" if people are inherently altruistic, which history continually demonstrates is not the case.
On top of the above idea, there is also the question of "what constitues an idea for which the implementation authority should be limited?" This is the current hot-topic with IP, specifically patents. What implementable ideas should be protected? What are the costs and benefits of both? Who benefits from the choice? Rarely do we see some small company which is unable to manufacture many things, with small market presence, and some company comes and stomps on them by "copying" their idea. Typically we see one guy with a patent, no ability to produce it, not trying to produce it, but only waiting for someone to copy it. From time to time we may see a small entity with a patent and license (i.e., authorize) some company to produce the product. That is the intended purpose of a patent - to allow the authorized to get started. We also see large corporations, with no real risk of losing their "livelihood", with large portfolios of patents - typically they use these to keep other people out of their industry by requiring large licensing fees, which is opposite the desired effect of patents - they prop up artificial barriers to market entry.
As an aside, I have some issues with performance copyrights. For instance, people might be paying to see a particular person perform a song, not hear the particular song performed. For instance, me performing Beethoven's 9th on a kazoo is hardly the same as the London Symphony Orchestra playing it. So performance pieces, oddly, have a weird effect of there is the thing that is being performed i
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Here is an idea to thwart these pirate lawsuits. I call them pirate lawsuits because I see companies using a deliberate strategy of waiting for others to do the hard work of developing businesses around a technology, then swooping in, with government backing, to steal the profits. It's like the days when piracy on the high seas was sometimes sanctioned by kings.
One solution would be a statue of limitation for infringement. If patent holders had a one- or two-year time limit for filing infringement suits, they wouldn't be able to wait for billion dollar industries to develop before asserting their rights. People with technology they consider worthwhile would have to protect it in a timely fashion.
An actual lawsuit shouldn't be necessary as a first step, as the cost of litigation might be prohibitive to fledgling innovators. But a patent holder should have to lodge a complaint within the time period. There would be no injunction against the party using the technology. The complaint would be like a building permit, and would have its own expiration date of a year or two before the holder would have to take legal action or drop the complaint.
If you read the claims in the patent, simple multi-session CDs are covered as well. The patent was filed April 7, 1995. I'm fairly certain multisession technology was implemented on CD-ROMS before then.
Also, the patent only applies to "CDROM"s. It does not apply to DVD-based media.
I also think the patent is invalid because they had to limit their patent to applying to CDROMs. Meaning it was already in use for other types of media (other filesystems, whatever.). Meaning it is one of the "logical next steps" the patent office isn't supposed to approve.
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While most agree that an inventor should get credit for his invention, and be able to sue anyone that tries to steal it, this technique of 'stealth patents' need to be abolished.
If it can be proven you intentionally sat on your patent while it became embedded into a large part of society before you stood up, you should be denied the claim to your patent.
If it can be proven you didnt know.. then all bets are off and sue the pants off the offenders...
THis is pretty much how trademark law works now... why should patents be any different?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe the patent office should have only grant patents conditionally. Then whenever somebody shows up with prior art, the patent can be withdrawn by the examiners without some big court battle to get it overturned. Then the folks who filed the patent can sue to get the withdrawl overturned, but at least this adds a second, non-litigative step to the process.
How can it take seven times longer to research an application and write a letter citing existing patents or prior art, than to research an application and write a letter granting a patent?
Oh, our poor, poor PTO.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
OK, we all know this is patent thing is out of hand, and the odds of getting rid of software patents are now approximately nil, thanks to the $$$$ that some folks are making or hope to make from them. However, there might be an alternative way to handle this...
Create a new type of submission to the Patent Office, called a Documentation Of Art. Unlike a patent it doesn't have to go through the $$$ process of evaluation, since it would grant no rights to the person filing and wouldn't have to be checked extensively. What would happen, however, would be that the idea is filed in the archives of the patent office, to be checked whenever anyone files a new patent on something related to the DOA as a possible example of prior art.
This would allow the open source community and other companies to return some sanity to this game. If a DOA is filed, then the assumption is the idea must have been trivial enough that someone didn't expect to make $$$$ off of it. Or, alternately, the original inventor chose to give up his monopoly on the idea freely. Open Source groups and companies tired of patent wars could file very large numbers of well organized DOA forms and make sure it's at least harder for the patent office to characterize something obvious to the tech industry as non-obvious.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
An example: A few years ago, British Telecom claimed to have invented and patented hyperlinks on the web, and were going to start charging ISP's for using their technology.
http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/06 /26/000626hnbtpatent.xml
You'll have to cut-n-paste - I didn't want BT to sue me. :^)
I never heard what happened with that case, and everything I found via Google is old news. If anyone has a URL with an update, I'd like to know about it.