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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.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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).
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!
-- Is it a right to remain ignorant? -- Calvin
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.
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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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.
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 ?
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.
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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Actually, Microsoft didn't *violate* a patent, they *stole* Stac's code. That was why DOS 6.2 went on to become DOS 6.22 so quickly. You could even scan the executables for DriveSpace (I believe that's what it was called) and see Stac's name all over it. And actually, Stac got quite a hefty settlement out of it ($50M+). What really killed Stac was that drive space became so cheap, no one really needed to use realtime compression anymore (at least not at the filesystem level).
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
Microsoft blatantly and fragrantly violated the patent when they build filesystem compression into thier products
So what exactly does a violated patent smell like?