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DVDCCA Claims Patent on CSS
An anonymous reader writes "After dropping their suit against Andrew Bunner, DVDCCA has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against 321 Studios. This is an interesting claim, because since patents are published, something can not be both patented and a trade secret."
We have seen this before, and it was seen before that... Good points, but at least attribute them to the original author, or be original yourself.
Of course the same thing cannot be both patented and a trade secret, but the method that CSS uses to "protect" content can be patented, while the actual keys used can be trade secrets. RSA used to be patented, but the secret keys people used were secret anyway.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
As an Ex-Employee, I can say this: They are fully expecting to get shut down. Many of their internal business practices are "Profit before perfection" and it shows. They plan on getting as much buck as possible before any bad rulings shut them down. looking for the basis of XCopy? check out IfoEdit (freeware!!!). GamesXCopy? look for GameJack (gamejack.org) combined with Daemontools! Step 1: release barely-functional software. Step 2: Step 3: Profit! Nearly everything they have is un-original. Only the transcoder for re-compressing MPEG2 is original. Burning system? why, that is CopyToDVD. Reading? BlindRead, with CSS hacks. They claim that they are fighting for the users, but fire an AVERAGE of 30 people per month. This is from a total of around 180! Fellow Slashdotters, beware! This is NOT a company to feel sorry for. Instead, we need to rally behind the idea that open-source versions being legal. my 2-cents... btw: anon so that old friends don't get the boot too.
I'm not sure whether that's suposed to be funny or not, but dvdcp isn't listed on freshmeat, and there is no such Debian package.
In fact, the open source world has been fairly conservative when it comes to such features; for example, Debian does not include CSS as part of its package system (but it does include a package that will download a CSS decoder from somewhere else).
Don't try to advance, whether deliberately or in jest, the incorrect perception that open source is somehow a hotbet of illegality.
IANAL, but as far as I know you would be fine if the company does not have a patent in your country, or does not have an application pending in your country which covers the same thing.
There currently aren't any laws which recognize patents from other countries as being valid in any other country (at least to my knowledge). However, there is such a thing as a world patent filing through WIPO that files patents under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. The WIPO does not grant any rights to a filer of the patent other than the right to re-file the patent as a national stage application in each of the countries that are selected during the filing of the PCT application while retaining the original filing date of the PCT application as a priority date. Basically this just allows for an easier way to file a patent application in multiple countries at the same time.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
ok... now for the FACTS: the XCopy series is ONLY for MPEG2, and Royalties ARE BEING PAID. The recompression that is used in the XCopy programs is a technique known as Trans-coding. This process removes extra MPEG video information that lessens the quality slightly, but does not change keyframes or time. This is actually abusing some of the transport streams damage recovery, and dropping "less important" video information. This, applied in correct amounts at the right times, can shrink a DVD video to the required 4.36 gigs needed for writing to modern DVD R / RW discs. This DOES NOT change the format, as very few players support anything other than MPEG1/2, and the re-encoding process would take forever and a day! Currently, the only program of theirs even using Mpeg4 is CopyPlus5, which does scaled-down AVI files for palm pilots. This feature is broken in current versions of DivX by the way... look elsewhere if you want to do that. chances of an update to DCP5 = slim to none. oh, by the way, MPEG2 is owned by the MotionPictureExpertsGroup I believe, NOT DVDCCA. DVDCCA was created specifically for handling CSS and related tech, and licensing to the various technology companies. Later...
Mod up the parent to this post. It deserves more than being ignored.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
There's a difference between an idea and the implementation of that idea - IP laws were created to protect *implementations*. If I have an idea, my own implementation of it is almost certainly going to differ, more than likely in non-trivial ways, from someone else's implementation, and I should have the right for some reasonable length to have enough control over that implementation to make some money off it, so long as I don't harm anyone else by doing so. That doesn't mean it's always right to *use* that right - but that right should be there.
http://www.stealthmunchkin.com - Stealth Munchkin, The World's Greatest Band (URL currently down)
Yes, this is correct. If you live in the EU, for example, you can safely ignore US patents and vice versa, since the patent offices are limited in their jurisdiction.
Btw, I live in Sweden. In my country, you are allowed to build a patented device for your own use or research (on the device itself). Specifically, the law says that non-professional use is exempt. (section 3.3.1)
As another poster pointed out, CCA will not license it 321. In fact, the conditions CCA imposes on the software makers are much more restrictive. The software maker cannot, for instance, provide and option to skip over the ads and trailers in the DVD.
The EU patent system is a broken as the American system, we have to put more pressure on the lawyers and their interest groups.
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure will start it's second Free Information Infrastructure Conference in Bruxelles in April 13/14 2004. Please come to Bruxelles. Last year's participants included Lessing, RMS, Mozelle W. Thompsson, Opera, MySQL and many others. The FFII Alliance campaign was very succesfull in 2003.
*sigh* It's posts like this that cause me to loose my faith (if one could call it that) in Slashdot and the moderator system. At best, this post should be mod'ed Funny. At worst it's an anti-OSS troll.
There is no such package as annoydvdcca_utils on Debian or any other Linux distro. Not even Google can find it, as another reply points out. And the only mention of "dvdcp" on Google is some Coupon Program from Netflix.
A patent provides the exclusive right to make, use, and sell the invention listed in the claims section of the patent. Generally, claims are drafted so that theyy encompass functions - HOW the software works. The goal of claim drafting is to describe the invention broadly enogh to get the most possible coverage, but not so broadly as to describe prior art.
It is possible for the same claim to cover several (or many) different implementations. Take for example an automotive rearview mirror. If my claim says the following:
I claim a mirror for use in an automobile, the mirror being generally rectangular in shape and mounted in a central position at the top of an automobile windshield.
then everyone knows that if they make a generally rectangular mirror and mount it in the position decribed, they infringe. BUT - if someone makes a ROUND mirror and/or mounts it on the car door (side view mirror), they do NOT infringe.
With software, if you describe functionality that no one has done before, you can get the exclusive right to implement that functionality in your patent. You MUST disclose the BEST WAY KNOWN TO YOU AT THE TIME YOU FILE YOUR APPLICATION of achieving that functionality. There is no way to claim the implementation you disclose as a trade secret.
HOWEVER - let's say that after your patent issues, you develop a new implementation that still performs the same function. You have patent protection for the function itself. You ALSO have the right to protect the NEW implementation (not disclosed in the patent) as a trade secret.
I am not going to argue the policy of whether this is a good or bad thing. I am just here to tell you that this is the current state of the law in the United States. Save your flames for the SCO threads please.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Understood. Patents are to protect your investment in R&D. Now, if some kid in Helsinki can replicate your invention in a weekend, precisely how much of an investment could their have been in the protected R&D? The point is(was) that if you had invested a year of your life developing some product, some bigger company with 100 times the resources wouldn't be allowed to reverse engineer it in 1/100th the time and begin competing against you. Unfortunately, this scenario has become inverted. My take - the pantent process should documenting the research that led to the invention more fully. Specifically, the man hours required. Then any challengers would be required to do the same. And there would be a minimum amount of time required for a pantentable invention. In the event that the challenger came up with the same invention independently and in 1/100th the time of the original patent, the patent is preserved for posterity, but its status is changed(modded) to 'unenforcable/now obvious'. I think this would this would end up protecting medical patents, while opening things like one-click-shopping the moment some marketing b0rk said 'There's too many screens in out ordering process', and the tech replied 'Well, we could tie users' billing and shipping profiles to thier cookie and just create teh orderz when they make the selection'. Not only would one-click-shopping not meet the minimum requirement for R&D man hours, but any challengers could show through their documentation that it was obvious.
How quickly we forget the history. I guess we remember what we want to believe rather than the truth.
First, the truth is that CSS was not reverse engineered, rediscovered, or reimplemented in a legal way. It was leaked. The Xing DVD player failed to implement its contractual obligation to obfuscate the CSS algorithm and key. This failure played a crucial role in the public discovery and publication of this information. It was Xing's failure to guard the trade secret information that allowed it to leak out and led to DeCSS.
Second, the algorithm was not broken by a teenager. Rather, once it was extracted from Xing's software, professional cryptographers were able to identify weaknesses in CSS that let disks be played even without a player key. Some cryptographers have opined that it might have been possible to break the algorithm even without access to the trade-secret source code. But this opinion comes with 20-20 hindsight. It is absolutely the case that no one broke CSS before the source code was published, despite claims that it was absurdly weak.