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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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.