Slashdot Mirror
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."
Intellectual property is a myth. You CANNOT and SHOULD not be able to own an idea. I am beginning to think that this may be a real turning point in civilization as we know it. Imagination and the associated innovation based off that imagination is what makes us able to do so many amazing things. Now, you can imagine building something to change the world, you can even imagine how to build it, but if someone has previously thought of it, you are in for a losing legal battle. This may be an extreme statment with regard to software patents, but the premise is frightening in either scenario. This is a legal restriction on free thought and development. Software patents are just one piece of the larger takeover.
But of course you should be able have the right to call an idea your own and have it recognized as such. As a scientist I will jealously guard my research and results up to practical applications as my own property. I have patents and will defend those if necessary.
Completely restricting the use of an idea is a completely different thing, though. That's not what patents were invented for - it's only today that the big corporations have begun to see copyright and patents as tools for hoarding and hiding information.
The owls are not what they seem
But of course you should be able have the right to call an idea your own and have it recognized as such.
But if I should come up with the same idea through my own research whilst being completely unaware of yours, I shouldn't have the right to call my idea my own and have it recognised as such?
It should cut both ways or not at all.
Assuming there is a patent for CSS and 321 Studios is not licensing it, I say fuck em, its their own damn fault.
Although, as usual, there is no information as to what patent DVDCCA is claiming infringment on, or what components of DVD Copy and DVD X COPY DVDCCA claims infringe upon that patent. So, until we get more information about this case I suspect the large portion of discussion here will be needless bitching and moaning about patents, lawyers and law in general, with the occasional bad joke about someone patenting suing people and how they are going to sue DVDCCA.
Wait until more facts come in before you assume that DVDCCA is wrong in this case.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
This is not necessarily a contradiction. The CSS algorithm (or business model!) could be patented and published, and the player keys could still be a trade secret.
But of course you should be able have the right to call an idea your own and have it recognized as such.
And why "should you"?
As a scientist I will jealously guard my research and results up to practical applications as my own property. I have patents and will defend those if necessary.
Yes, I have no doubt that you will be "jealous" and display all sorts of other annoying behaviors so common of academics.
However, what you are completely overlooking is that "your" research and "your" results are based on centuries of tradition and thought by others. Your work has only been possible because others shared their ideas freely.
Furthermore, your patents keep other people from using the idea even if they themselves came up with it independently. It is just an accident that you happened to have filed the patent on "your" idea first. Chances are, in fact, that others had the same idea before but didn't patent it or did publish it.
Let me repeat that: your patent keeps other people from using their ideas that they themselves came up with independently. How do you justify that?
Completely restricting the use of an idea is a completely different thing, though.
That's what patents do: for about 20 years, the patent holder gets nearly full control of the invention. Patents don't even have academic or research exemptions.
That's not what patents were invented for
That is exactly what patents were created for: to give inventors exclusive use of an idea for a limited amount of time. And, at least since the times of Edison and Watson, corporate patent portfolios have been a big thing. It's just that barriers to entry into many markets were so strong for other reasons that they didn't have to use their patent portfolios much until now.
This is an interesting claim, because since patents are published, something can not be both patented and a trade secret.
Copyright
Trademark
Trade secret
Patents
Methods
Designs
"Intellectual Property" without further elaboration
Companies would like to try "all of the above". They want all of the protections, while giving nothing in return. What's even worse, is that I think many politicans and such actually believe that they're doing the right thing to "promote the science and arts" by doing so.
Unfortunately, in the capitalistic society money is equated with results - i.e. the more IP protections, the more revenue generated from IP, and thus the more invested in IP, and the higher the investments, the further the science and arts are promoted.
The flaw in the argument is that progress is equated with profit. In that context, the Linux kernel would be "worthless", the only value would be what value IBM, Red Hat, Tivo et al manage to add, not in the kernel itself, since that isn't what generates profit. And yet it's beyond a doubt a great scientific achievement.
In the same way, that music that simply makes your heart tremble with pure joy, is "worthless" unless it generates profit. Or that beautiful painting or statue or carving or any other object made for the art's sake, not for the money's sake.
Yes, money is a means to promote science and arts, scientists and artists need to put food on the table as well. But it is hardly the source of scientific interest or artistic inspiration. Money is simply one part of many - like education, culture, status, access to related works of past and present - in order to realize those desires.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I guess when the whole trade secret thing stops working, it's time to patent!
I use Gordian Knot to encode DVDs (uncopyrighted religious movies that just happen to be CSS 'protected' ;), and it takes more effort then I'd like. I have to make decisions, for crying out loud!
The only effective way to stymie the illegal copying of DVDs is to make the purchase price attractive enough that they'd rather just buy it. In my opinion, if you appeal to the lazy in people, you win.
When first looking at the story title write up, I was aghast to see that someone would try to claim that they had patented Cascading Style Sheets.
/. should give up on story titles and descriptions and just post raw HTML links. When submitting a story, at least try to imagine that people aren't as obsessed over the whole DVD thing (or whatever you're reporting on) as you and might not automatically know or care what "DVDCCA" is. It would have taken one well-written sentence to provide the context.
Aside: Perhaps it would help if these story write ups contained slightly more than zero information? If we have to read the article to figure out what the story is even about, perhaps
The patent system awards the first to invent (or, outside of the US, the first to file), and it's just tough luck if someone beats you to it. That's life in a competitive system. If you don't like it, change society or live in a commune where another resource allocation method is used.
Read the US constitution and find that the patent system is there for the people too - that includes you and I as creative individuals. The bargain is a _limited_ monopoly for 20 years. 20 years if not a bad payoff for the time and effort and risks involved in pursuing inventions.
Because those people have such vast resources, they patent as much as they can---even things that seem obvious. The average person does not stand a chance against them.
Yeah, right.
First off, the Eolas patent is a terrible example of a patent. Mentioning it alone shows how broken the system is. The number of bad patents issued in recent years is more then a bit scary.
But, let us ignore the merits of the Eolas paten itself. Instead let us examine what Microsoft has done and can do. MS has enough lawyers to comfortably fight any patent is chooses. If they see a patent they don't like (and can't buy) the can challenge it. Can you afford to challenge a patent? What about 10? What about 1000? MS can.
They can also afford to ignore a patent. They can do whatever they want, ignoring what the patent holder wants now, and pay for it later. If I thought I would have to pay a multi-million dollar settlement for ignoring a patent I wouldn't do it - I can't afford it. MS can.
Money DOES equal power and pretending it doesn't in a civil arena is disingenuous. Nobody "Rules the world" but corporations of MS's size can afford to abuse the system - almost anywhere they want.
Many anti-corporation people are just "wacko" - they will make claims that make no sense. However with size comes privilege and if there is one thing Microsoft has it is Size.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
Sweeping statements that people should not be allowed to own ideas seem very short sighted in a number of applications
Well, I made no such statement, I challenged someone to justify their position because they thought it was obvious that people should be able to.
The idea behind protecting ideas through a system of intellectual property is merely a balancing act.
That's the idea, indeed.
Without it, many of the best aspects of capitalism will be eliminated.
That's your assertion. And, in fact, there is ample historical evidence to the contrary.
For example, without patents, companies that develop new drugs would quickly disappear (unless someone can offer a reason why anyone would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug knowing you would never be able to recoup your costs).
Well, a large fraction of drug development is paid for by public money anyway, and most drugs are paid for by public money in a market that can hardly be called "free". In fact, quite a number of economists believe that we'd be saving a lot of money if all drug development was paid for by the government and we did away with drug patents altogether. Furthermore, a free market tends to develop the wrong drugs: drugs that make money are not the drugs that we have the greatest need for.
So, your drug example is actually an example where patents don't work.
As for the problem of screwing people who thought of ideas independently, that is just another balancing act. Sure, it would be great if we could come up with some certain way of proving that someone developed an idea independently from others. But do you have any idea how difficult this would be to implement? The problem is with burdens of proof.
Why are you stating the obvious? I was simply pointing out that the guy was wrong in his assumption that because he patented it, he somehow owned the idea in any moral sense.
As for the problem of screwing people who may have thought of the idea first but didn't patent it, Congress used a phrase most of us learned on the playground: "you snooze, you lose." That made sense to me when I was six and it still makes sense now.
Yes, and that's about the level of thoughtfullness you seem to have regarding patents: that of a six year old on the playground.
If I were an an admin I'd remove this post entirely.
Why? It seems more honest to me to openly show bias than to hide it behind rationalizations as is often done. I am glad you are not an admin.I completely disagree with the analysis given by the ex-employee, but it gives me insight into the company and situation not present in the many posts done by non-ex-employees. Speaking of honesty, are you perhaps an existing employee and that is why the post offended you? Moderation should clearly not be done on the basis of whether you like / agree with the position taken.
The laws as they stand today ignore this distinction and, as such, directly inhibit the creativity they are designed to protect. If the mouse trap were invented today, the inventor would not only be able to patent his design but the very idea of "catching mice". Than the world would have had to wait 20 years before someone could propse a better way.
We are in the very first dawn hours of modern technology and though our ideas may seem extremely special to us today they'll be nothing but the the wheel of tomorrow.
Don't be a dope. He didn't say that property should be free, he said that "intellectual property" isn't property. He's also quite correct. The term itself was concocted in the 19th century to make the ownership of ideas sound less absurd. Ideas can't be property, as their very nature fails the definitions of property. First and foremost, they cannot be scarce; i.e. if I you express your idea to me, we both have the idea-- sharing doesn't diminish it. What we have currently is a system of [patents/copyright/etc] that allows intangible things like ideas, music, and stories to be treated as if they were property. This is provably true: when one buys song from its writer, what you're transferring is the copyright-- you likely already have the song. Same thing with patents. This isn't about capitalism vs. communism. It's about free market vs. gov't granted monopolies. There has to be a balance and currently the USPTO isn't doing a good job.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"For example, without patents, companies that develop new drugs would quickly disappear."
Heh. They already have. The remaining ones arent developing any new drugs, they're developing new proprietary versions of aspirins that arent better than the old ones except they're patented. Then they send the doctors on golfing trips so they'll prescribe new expensive versions of the same old shit instead of cheap generics.
Well, except the ones that are developing various organ enlargment pills.
I'd place a bet that we'd get more useful medical research done if we scrapped the patent system, kicked the pharmaceutical corps out and relied on public and charity funding for research.
No, what I said was that it fails the definition of property because sharing doesn't diminish it. If I share a kilo of flour with 9 other people, I only have 10% of what I had before. If I share my idea for a better fireplace with 9 other people, we all have the idea. I'm not reduced to making a "10% better fireplace", or only making "10% of a fireplace" because I shared the idea.
Also, scarcity doesn't diminish the fact that something is property. I don't know where you get your strange assumptions from.
And I don't know where you got the idea that I said scarcity diminishes property status. What I said was that ideas, unlike real property, cannot suffer from scarcity in that they are infinitely replicable using no physical resources.
Now, we're also not talking about government granted monopolies: if you look at your dear US constitution, you'll find that patents and copyrights are provided by the people for the people for the purposes of advancement of technology and science.
You do know that patents and copyrights are monopolies (albeit for limited times) granted by the government, don't you. A monopoly need not be perpetual. If no one else can copy my invention for 20 years, I have a 20 year monopoly on that invention. I'm not saying that they should be abolished, only that they should be reasonable.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
So I looked up the patent:
METHOD FOR MINIMIZING PIRATING AND/OR UNAUTHORIZED COPYING AND/OR UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS OF/TO DATA ON/FROM DATA MEDIA INCLUDING COMPACT DISCS AND DIGITAL VERSATILE DISCS, AND SYSTEM AND DATA MEDIA FOR SAME, #6,684,199
and here is the method they claim:
(a) reading the mixed data from said media;
(b) detecting the predetermined errors from the mixed data;
(c) comparing the predetermined errors to the at least one authentication key or component thereof;
(d) authenticating the at least one of the media and the data in the mixed data responsive to the comparing step;
(e) removing the predetermined errors from the mixed data via a decoding operation resulting in substantially the data; and
(f) outputting the data as at least one of audio, video, audio data, video data and digital data substantially free of the predetermined errors.
They elaborate on a number of those points, but they don't on "detecting the predetermined errors from the mixed media."
I tried but failed to include a snip in here from libdvdcss-1.2.8, css.c (distributed under the GPL) , but here's the general idea:
int _dvdcss_unscramble( dvd_key_t p_key, uint8_t *p_sec )
{
if (p_sec[0x14] & 0x30)
{
some funky math involving pluses, minuses, and bitwise operations
while (p_sec != p_end)
{ do a lot more funky math to determined the correct data, incriment P_sec }
}
return
}
Now, the question I have is this: If they computed the decryption for the entire block, for every block (whether or not it has errors), and not just blocks that had that 0x30 bit on in 0x14, and then decided which of the two blocks was a valid block, the encrypted one or the decrypted one, would they in fact be 'detecting predetermined errors' (as is not very well described in the patent)?
> If I patent it, then gadget-X will not be widely available nor available at a reasonable price until
> the patent expires. Nor will Gagdet-X ever be improved, because I'm the only person allowed to
> work on it.
Hmm, recordable CDs did get cheaper after some patents expired, but were already easily and relatively cheaply available waaaaay before that.
Also, noone is stopped from working on your idea, but everyone is blocked from usign their work withotu also contributing to you who did the original work.
Now don't get me wrong, I strongly dislike the patent system as it is, but your arguments are simply not true.
Why I dislike patents?
- They are a form of levy for entering a market, even more so in the USA where it seems it is very possible to patent utterly and completely obvious things, and where patents seem to have a scope way beyond their original intention.
- They are an alternative form of currency among companies, effectively a means to circumvent the tax office when trying to get some technology from another company, for which society pays the bill.
I understand the original purpose of patents, and can agree with the intention behind them, but matter of fact is that current use of patents is doing a lot of damage to society without it getting society something that is anywhere close to compensating that.
I wouldn't be so smug in dismissing the danger of corporations yet by invoking Eolas as a counterexample, since it is highly unlikely that Eolas' patent will be allowed to stand after it is reexamined -- something which almost certainly would not have happened were one of those corporations not involved.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
This is why everyone needs to defend an end-to-end Internet with anonymity, which is not able to be censored. It is also why we need to abolish or ignore so called intellectual property laws, which are an attack on the right to exchange knowledge. Further it is why everyone needs to guard against such people putting despots forward to be elected as presidents and prime ministers, as wolves in sheepskins.
Should it be? Or should it be determined by need?
There is no place in the world more AIDS-ridden than Africa. However, Africa is a poor continent, and can't pay up full price. Nevermind it has the world biggest market for these drugs.
Guess what, patents are being used to make sure they don't get any medicine at all.
Admit it. Drugs is a bad example to prove your point.
In fact, I think the drugs angle on patenting shows that patent-law now is as equally corrupted as copyright-law, when compared to the original intents of these laws.
We'll just have to bow down and kiss boot for our corporate-overlords one day or another anytime soon now. What? That's a problem?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
You rely on the fact that "ideas can be duplicated without effort": please remember that while duplication of ideas costs near zero, the development of those ideas can cost quite a lot. In fact, you are making the argument for the patent system: it recognises that ideas take time/effort/cost to produce, yet can be stolen in an instant: hence the 20 year protection.
case-by-case would be too unworkable: the system is not perfect because it tries to accomodate the entire swathe of inventions with a single brush, of course some are less deserving than others. If there are systemic problems (e.g. a whole field looks like it isn't working in the system properly) then perhaps some adjustments are necessary: this happens with pharamaceutical inventions that can obtain a few extra years.
next, you need to look at how the system works: there are other patent systems in other countries that have _no_ examination of the patent for substantive content, or the examination occurs many years later: it's not just about what patents are granted, it's about what ones stand up in the test of time.