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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."
..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.
If you disagree post, don't moderate.
for a second there i thought they had a patent on CSS
And I thought CSS was dead..
I mean how many times do they have to crack it before they realise that the cats already out of the bag?
Its been circumvented so many times, how can they hold a straight face while that file for legal action against 321studios?
*shakes head*
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
DVDCCA has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against 321 Studios
Wow, after seeing the MPAA issue hundreds of subpoenas, it somehow didn't occur to me that DVDCCA didn't actually sue 321 studios, but a company named 321 Studios.
Kudos to these guys for the choice of name. It's almost as if they expected to be sued and wanted to make a good joke out of it. Well done!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
Does my bum look big in this?
Holy panic attack, batman!
And I'd only just figured out how to do text shadows today!!
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...)
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.
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?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
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.
May we never see th
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.
What do you mean something cannot be patented and also be a trade secret?
Our store-bought legislators have allowed software to be patented, copyrighted, trademarked, and be a trade secret all at the same time!
The algorithms in a patent may not actually work as described, because there is no requirement to prove them for correctness or submit a working program. There may be subtle modifications required to get it to actually work. However, if you implement a working program that does the the same thing you can be sued for infringement.
Second, the patent language is usually so obfuscated with legalese, redundancy and excess verbosity that the patent is of little use to someone who wants to build a working program.
The lack of a requirement to publish source code, combined with the obfuscated patent language, allows software to effectively remain a trade secret even after it has been patented.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
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
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.
Less is more !
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.
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.
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)?