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DVDCCA Claims Patent on CSS

Posted by michael on from the patent-leather-shoes dept.

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."

11 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. What happens to the world... by czcxmag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

    Even foreign governments.

    Intellectual property in all of its various forms is being abused by the corporate world. The madness is the laws supporting this behavior continue to pass, bypassing the individual and wholeheartedly supporting the corporation.

    Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds? There is a balance to be maintained, and our rights are not unlimited, but more and more across the entire globe the individual is lost.

    Not to be funny but has anyone considered the implications of all these recent intellectual property rights and how it seems more and more that we're being pushed into the draconian future of Johnny Mnemonic and Shadowrun? The only way you get information is to steal it. The only way for another corporation to get information is to hire you to steal it.

    I grow more and more distressed at the world my son will grow up in, the conditions he will consider normal, the laws he will break just by trying to think.

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    If you disagree post, don't moderate.
    1. Re:What happens to the world... by Rich0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      I've always been annoyed by the academic "first to publish" game. How many grad students end up having to slave night and day in the lab to try to be the first to discover something novel, and being a week behind another group is the difference between getting your Ph.D. with lots of recognition and having to pick some other project and work a few more years. It also brought us such wonderful concepts as holding up the full publication of discoveries so that a scientist can publish just enough information initially to establish priority and get recognition, but hold up enough information so that only they can get additional publications on follow-up reasearch (for an example of this, look at the tradition where crystallographers would publish glossy photos of their proteins on the front page of Science and then only release their coordinates a year later - I believe that this is fortunately and finally falling out of favor (though I haven't been current in the crystallography field for a few years now)).

      Knowledge is furthered the most when people work together, and it should be recognized that all modern discoveres are merely the result of standing on the shoulders of those who went before us. Actaully, this is one thing that I like about the GPL - it basically says "I made my contribution to the world public, and if you're gonna stand on my shoulders you had better do the same".

      In a day and age where automation has made neither food nor labor scarce society shouldn't be running in a mode where everybody is compelled to try to be king-of-the-hill just to life a modest life. It seems like we've turned into a society where either you are one of the few people who reap the benefits of modern technology (ie you own the capital), or you are one of the people displaced by it (ie it you work at Walmart).

    2. Re:What happens to the world... by nathanh · · Score: 4, Interesting
      In a day and age where automation has made neither food nor labor scarce society shouldn't be running in a mode where everybody is compelled to try to be king-of-the-hill just to life a modest life. It seems like we've turned into a society where either you are one of the few people who reap the benefits of modern technology (ie you own the capital), or you are one of the people displaced by it (ie it you work at Walmart).

      You sound exactly like Karl Marx ;-)

      He argued that the master-slave society could only give way to communism once there were sufficient resources to sustain everybody's basic needs.

      He also said that the "haves" would fight to prevent the "have-nots" from sharing in the wealth. Looking at the world around us today, it is like Karl Marx had a window into the future.

      I disagree with a lot of what Karl Marx wrote - I think he ignores the fundamental problem of human greed, as well as the ever-increasing lower limit of our basic "needs" - but it's always a treat to read The Communist Manifesto and realise how right he was about so many things. Marx has a a better hit-rate for his predictions than Nostradamus!

  2. Doesn't have to be CSS. by kyz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You did realise that MPEG-2 is patented, right? Both encoding and decoding, yeah? DVD X Copy decodes the MPEG-2 and re-encodes with DivX (MPEG-4). Both are patented and must be licensed.

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    Does my bum look big in this?
  3. No. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    1. The story doesn't say anything about MPEG, so what you are saying is pure conjecture.
    2. The MPEG licenseholders and the DVD forum are different entities.
    3. MPEG must be *licensed* but due to the nature of the patent sharing agreement that allows MPEG to exist, it is impossible for an MPEG format to be discriminatorily licensed. That is to say, everyone has to *PAY* to use MPEG in commercial products, but everyone has to pay equally-- they can't jack up the prices for people who the MPEG committee doesn't like, or vice versa, and they certainly can't deny use of the MPEG codecs to 321 studios if 321 studios is willing to play.
  4. Devil's Advocate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is an interesting claim, because since patents are published, something can not be both patented and a trade secret.

    It is not generally possible for idea A to be both a patent and a trade secret. But it is possible for one part of program B to infringe on patent C, and for another part to violate trade secret D.

    Or it could be that DVDCCA is admitting that their earlier suit was wrong.

    (Or it could be that they're full of s**t...)

  5. Unrecognized Patents by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a question I hope someone here can answer. Suppose a company is assigned a patent by the USPTO, but not by the patent office in my country. In order for the patent to be assigned to the company, they have to publish their invention. This means that I can find out what their invention is (since it's public), but since the patent doesn't apply in my country, I would not be infringing on the patent by using that information. Is this correct? Why or why not?

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    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  6. Patent approach not surprising by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IANAL.

    The trade secret approach would be dead in the water. Trade secrets provide protection against leaks, where employees disclose information that they shouldn't, but not protection against people reverse engineering, rediscovering, or reimplementing something.

    The only thing left is patents.

    It would be interesting to see if this approach works. If the case is won by the DVD CCA, it provides a strong argument against the DMCA -- patents alone would provide sufficient protection for at least some copy control technologies. If it's lost, then they've lost one more layer of protection.

    I'd have to see the patents, but I'm a little doubtful that they really have CSS patented. The mechanisms involved are not revolutionary. Patents don't protect an end product -- just a particular process that yields that end product -- so I'd be suspicious that a patent would either not cover the work being done or would not be valid.

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    May we never see th
    1. Re:Patent approach not surprising by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I wonder if CSS even meets the criteria for patentabilty. Donesn't a technology have to be both novel and useful to be eligible for patents?

      I'd argue that an encryption system which was already broken half a decade ago by a teenager is NOT useful. CSS's only application is legal - to invoke the DMCA. However, the protection to copyrighted works already applies to movies under regular copyright law - they didn't need CSS to get legal protection for their works.

      If CSS really were useful it would have been unbreakable - and then they wouldn't need all these lawsuits to prevent DVD copying - since their technical control would be enough. Of course, making an unbreakable encryption system where the decryption keys are embedded in millions of devices that cost under $100 to buy is impossible. The best they could hope for is digital sigs - so they could at least control the authoring of content (as is done with game consoles) - then only the public key is in the open and susceptible to hacking. It doesn't prevent modding, but in the DVD market modding is not going to be significant.

  7. don't sue each othe - sue USPTO by axxackall · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They all should stop filing suits againsta each other. Instead they should file the suit against USPTO, blaming it for the unfixable stupidity, for using the broken law system. USPTO bad business practices is a danger to strategic interests of USA in general.

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    Less is more !
  8. Patenting software by smallfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Here is an interesting article I found about copyright and patents and the patenting of software:

    DISTINGUISHING PATENT AND COPYRIGHT SUBJECT MATTER

    Not sure I agree on the hardware equivalent of software test for patents, things are not that cut and dry most times.