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TVI to Sue Over MS Autoplay Feature
scubacuda links to this Infoworld article, which reads in part "TVI charges Microsoft's autoplay feature infringes on four of its U.S. patents. TV Interactive Data Corp. (TVI) of Los Gatos, California, claims that Microsoft infringes on four of its U.S. patents, three entitled 'host device equipped with means for starting a process in response to detecting insertion of a storage media' and one entitled 'method for starting up a process automatically on insertion of a storage media into a host device.", writing "I hope no one has a patent on the shift key, because that's what I hit when I insert a CD. (That is, when I haven't already edited the registry)" Wouldn't automount / autofs fall under the same shadow?
The Mac has a 'detect on auto insert' for as long as it's had a floppy drive! (IIRC, the Amiga did too.)
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I had 4DOS batch files do things when the floppy drive was accessed.
Bootable floppies.
Take that!
wouldn't the Mac be considered prior art since it has been auto responding for quite a while
Patents are supposed to be "novel" and unique. I don't see anything special about auto playing or mounting media when it is inserted.
How about your car CD player, home console, digital camera, DVD player, etc etc etc? What's next, someone claiming a patent on reading magnetic or optical storage?
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The patent numbers are 5,597,307; 5,795,156; 6,249,863 and 6,418,532.
My Amiga would detect when a floppy was inserted and start automaticaly and this was back in 1988.
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slashdot needs an asinine tag, like fark.
this is ridiculous.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
I really would love to see a Slashdot interview with someone in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office that can explain the process and how things like this happen. They probably cannot comment on a specific case like this, but typically we get two of these ridiculous patent claims a week mentioned on slashdot.
Are they overworked and understaffed and forced to just rubberstamp things?
Are they untrained in technology to recognize things like this?
Are they in need of being hit over the head with a clue by four?
Something is seriously wrong at the USPTO (now more then ever seemingly).
The Commodore Amiga had this from atleast the Amiga 500, possibly earlier and that was in 1986.
IIRC, Autoplay has been shipped in MS operating systems since 1996. TVI has been sitting on this for eight years. Which means, of course, that if the statute of limitations hasn't expired, they will be severely limited in the remedies they are allowed to seek. It's not like this escaped their attention for 8 years.
Of course, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that even if TVI wins the case, they won't be able to collect damages for past infringement because they clearly did not demonstrate "due diligence" in protecting their patent. They might end up with a compulsory license agreement; or to avoid infringement, Microsoft OS's may end up simply popping up a dialog box ("Would you like to play this CD?") when a disk is inserted.
Yeah, I'd put TVI at net loss on this one. Their lawyers are going to make more money than they will.
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is that it's growing among companies. Companies litigating the little guy out of business over patents is relatively straightforward.
Hopefully when enough 800, 1200 and 1600 pound gorillas start beating up on each other then there will be some reform. (Hopefully)
(Okay, they just output analog stuff from tape, but they do have microcontrollers, and some can even digitize the signal eg. for better pause and slow motion image quality.)
Automount and autofs trigger filesystem mounts on directory traversals, not on media insertion.
Maybe you were thinking about vold or some other similar project.
...about these recent patent cases is I find myself on the side of Microsoft.. yuck! I need to shower!
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Evidently the new idea is that even the product your suing shouldn't be considered prior art. The first patent, 5,597,307, was filed in May 1995. The last Beta of Windows 95 was in March 1995 and the Microsoft DRG people were talking about it in 1994 (Auto-play was evangelized to ISVs - "Mr ISV you need to make sure that your application uses Auto-play"). What it looks like here is that the current patent strategy is to wait until someone releases a product then patent the features that aren't covered. Hopefully this is yet another nail in the stuipidity of patent issuing.
"...detecting insertion of a storage media..."
I suspect it's only a matter of time until someone draws up a patent claim of the nature:
Patent 3,012,238,021...(ad infinitum) --- A method of inserting and pumping a large tubular or cylindrical item into a foes rectum, with the assistance of well studied lawyers...
Just watch, man, I'm telling the day is well nigh!
Wouldn't automount / autofs fall under the same shadow?
No, autofs/ automount automatically mount media (be that an NFS share or whatever) when they detect it is needed (so the process is demand driven rather than media driven).
Perhaps you're thinking of supermount
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My 8-Track player would automatically start playing music upon insertion of the audio storage media. I guess that either qualifies as prior art, or 70's electronic manufacturers better start ponying up their licensing fees.
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I did a quick search on the patent numbers in the Patent Office database. The earliest patents was filed in November 1995, and others were filed in 1999 and 2001. Strangely, the wording on all of them seemed to be very similar. (5,597,307; 5,795,156; 6,249,863 and 6,418,532)
November 1995 was around the time Windows 95 was released IIRC. It almost seems opportunistic. Maybe the patent holder quickly came up with a patent after seeing Win95, and filed it hoping that with a long enough gap he would be able to sue for patent infringement.
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prior art...
a man and a women have intercourse. data is transfered from the man to the woman. womans host process upon recieving data begins the process of creating life. details left out for as excercise for the student
yada yada.
However, in compensation for your cooperation, you will be allowed to keep 19 trinkets.
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Seems every lawyer I meet these days is into IP law and living in downtown SF, I meet quite a few every week. Most of these lawyers also tells me with a very satisfied smile on their face what a complete and utter scam it all is. None of them want to see it changed. Hell, I can't blame them, it's like one big swollen tit from which to feed.
And no, it's not cases like this that will cause anything to change. For that will need to be done by tax paying citizens taking up torches and pitchforks and decending upon Washington in an orgy of blood lust. Then maybe we might see Congress decide to "review" the patent application process.
Actually, Windows (and DOS) always assumes that a disk is inserted whenever the drive is mounted. It does check to be sure that it's the SAME disk, and it only does this on an access attempt. The only hardware that can autodetect mounting of a floppy disk is the Mac, and it's done it since 1984.
Here are the dates on the patents:
5,597,307: January 28, 1997 (filed May 11, 1995)
5,795,156: August 18, 1998 (filed November 1, 1995)
6,249,863: June 19, 2001 (filed May 3, 1999)
6,418,532: July 9, 2002 (filed March 22, 2001)
Also, here's the date on the Microsoft Autorun patent:
6,366,966: April 2, 2002 (filed December 13, 1994)
So, while three of the TVI patents are OLDER than the Autorun patent, the Autorun patent was filed six months earlier than the first TVI patent.
5,795,156 is a 1995 filed patent claiming to have invented using a hardware based "output lead" on a peripheral in a computer to detect media. I a, confused here. Assuming they were not developing a computer from scratch(and had never seen a removable media before 1995). I am not sure how they can patent a feature of components they did not develop themselves.
6,249,863 is a claim modified from the above patent of checking for a specific file (ie. like reading a VCD or IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM as in old MSDOS) to make sure the correct or specific media is inserted.
6,418,532 filed in 2001, claims to have invented the play button.
The USPTO is not mandated to verify the novelty of patents. However, patent law must be changed so that the burden of prior art falls on plaintiff in these cases(ie. pay for third party patent researchers).
I would be ashamed to consider myself the inventor of these. They are obviously wanting a small payoff from MS. IANAL
1)Is a CD Rom "Storage Media" if it is read only?
2)What about a toilet that 'knows' to flush automatically when I insert 'media'?
3)My trash compactor will start up when I close the door, but only if there is a bag in it. Isn't this miracle of modern science 'prior art', thus invalidating that patent?
still think unix automounting FS's predates all of this. When a NFS system is initialized my system detects the mounted media and mounts it for me without any user interference or action. But I do remember the MAC chunking away on the floppy upon insertion as well. IBM Mainframe machines required the controller to let the machine know new media or devices had been attached as far back as 3081's, based on my admittedly flawed memory...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Does my toaster qualify as prior art? It's from the 70s, but it's smart enough to "start a process" (I.E. toasting) whenever I insert bread. My toaster is a fancy one (well, by 1970s standards), where I don't have to press down a lever to start it toasting.
I suppose the question is, does bread qualify as a storage media?
Fortunately my toaster toasts floppies and CDs equally well (although they are not nearly as tasty).
The worst part is that these patents keep being passed, over and over.. we need some technical people in the patent offices, not temps making $7 an hour.
No, we need to ban software patents. Software patents have done absolutely nothing for innovation. Everyone getting sued is not someone who saw the idea and said "Hey! Great idea! I think I'll integrate that with my product." They've all been developers who come up with the idea independently, and then years (and years) later the company who was successful in marketing the product gets sued. All it has done is increase the amount of patent barratry.
And software is already protected by an insane amount of IP laws anyway. Not only is it protected for 90 years by copyright (if owned by a corp.) but trade secret law, and still for some unfathomable reason, you can patent it as well.
Oh well. Sucks to be us, I guess.
If microsoft wouldn't pay licensing fees for a patent which was clearly legitimate, why would they pay out for one as dubious as this one?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I'm fairly sure the IBM mainframe I used back in 1975 would auto-load and execute a deck of punched cards if you just dumped them into the input hopper.
Oh - wait...they're suing Microsoft. Ah. In that case:
Those evil Microsoft guys - always stealing other people's technology. Bastards!
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In... let me see... 1982? I dealt with a PDP-11/23 running RSX-11-M-PLUS which autostarted backups and things when you inserted media (e.g. 1600BPI magtape into a Cypher F880(?) tape drive). We also had monstrous great two megabyte removable hard disks the size of a sombrero, and the system would auto-start things when the correct one of those was inserted. It had been doing these things for many years before I arrived on the scene.
A local Fight'o'net BBS operator I know, back in the same era, had a process auto-start when you inserted a tape cartridge (snail-mailed from the 'states) full of downloadables in your '286.
So they're just being SCOlets, pump-n-dump barratrous assholes. It seems to be trendy these days.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing