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Cisco Applies For Patents To Secured TCP
An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent excitement over a potential vulnerability in TCP, Cisco's "Worldwide Patent Counsel", Robert Barr, has let it be known that they have pending patent applications for one or more of the IETF recommendations for improving TCP's security. KernelTrap has the full details."
and you use it illegally, you're in trouble.
only the criminals will have network connections
They better hope their applications are dated before the recommendations.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I can't stand those ads either. It is not possible to defend against humans from the inside. That's liek trying to build a car that is intentionally-driving-over-a-cliff proof.
Help! I'm being repressed!
Historically, the IETF has been neutral about using patents in the Standards process, and its position is summed up best in the charter of the IPR Working Group (http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ipr-charter.htm l):
Last year, there was an attempt to make the IETF change their policy, but it failed miserably (http://news.com.com/2100-1013-996351.html?tag=fd_ top).
So you can have more secure communications, but only if you pay Cisco.
Bastards.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
The reason is that this is basically a patch to a protocol. The TCP protocol itself was a novel invention. But most patches to protocols, or to code to fix a particular problem, are fairly obvious to someone skilled in the requisite arts. Generally, the nature of the bug is what determines the solution, and often the solution is obvious to someone who is familiar with the protocol (or code) and the problem in question.
If this gets through then you can expect a lot of patents to be filed on patches to many things, including open source projects. And that means that unless the code is protected by something like the GPL (which requires a patent license grant as a condition of redistribution), the projects (and those who maintain and use them) will be vulnerable to patent infringement suits.
This is going to get nasty. But I think most of us who have been keeping track of this nonsense already know that.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Unless Cisco licenses the technology and other companies bite, I don't see this getting very far on the Internet. Too much of the backbone is comprised of equipment from multiple vendors. I work for a large Tier 1 ISP. Most of the edge routers are Cisco, but the core routers are Juniper. Things get even messier in a Co-location data center, where customers can be using who knows what brand of equipment to connect to the data center's network.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Phb: "Oh, SELF PROTECTING NETWORK! Oooo! We need one of those!"
Such crap. It's like those blatantly false microsoft ads where they show microsoft office as a wonderful beautiful thing. I've worked with office for years, and the only time I danced through my office with a newly printed office document involved a printer incompatibility, a long project, and way too much coffee.
Show me an ad that says, "Hey this works okay most of the time," or "this router can detect and contain unusual network activity, so viri spread slower" and that's a product that I can trust. Promising pie in the sky only works for idiots.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Bollocks. They are there to protect investors not innovators. They are there to maintain a monopoly for a limited time, and come from an age that moved far slower than ours does. They are regularly abused, and they hamper progress more often than they promote it. Go ask anyone with a technical or science perspective rather than a business perspective.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
well, if it makes you feel any better, we just made a purchasing decision against cisco in favor of two simple linux boxes running a combination of shorewall and heartbeat. The cost savings versus the cheapest cisco firewall that does failover was worth the effort of installing the open source software. I also highly recommend m0n0wall for a SOHO cisco replacement. I'd chose m0n0wall over a cheaper watchguard or sonicwall box any day.
I can and have thought up a number of ways to use our IP laws to discourage innovation.
...
...
:] For irony's sake, one could then patent that nonsense generating algorithm (though proving it useful in commerce might be another hurdle... I wonder if they would buy the thought that putting it on a page with ads and making a grand total of $0.38 from the ads would be enough? :)
For example, there's some stupid precident where something like 5 notes were supposedly "subconciously copied." I remember that, from the way they decided things, someone calculated that there were only 5,000 some odd different types of music that would be legally recognized under that precident.
Therefore, if you simply make a CD with each variation (and to comply with other wacky precidents and laws, make it a "dramatic" work--e.g. put some kind of story in there with your music, as well as mixing up the order so as to make your creation more creative than a mere listing of all the possible note combinations), and file a copyright on it.
Voila, you've copyrighted all the music. But you probably don't dare distribute any of it, lest you infringe on every pre-existing work, so you play SCO. Manage to get in the media with some wacky press release (Slashdot would be a good target), and spout off about how you intend to use this to stifle musical innovation "because it's clearly not profitable."
Ramble on a bit about how the industry knows what is best for us--"only unoriginal crap sells! so long as they're just rehashing their old works, we feel that they're not deriving anything from ours, and we simply want the music producers to make money, something you cannot do unless you force-feed the public unoriginal music." Thus you're never under obligation to actually sue anyone, though you can make a show of menacing anyone whose music might be original, telling them that it doesn't seem to derive enough from all their old records, so they must have stolen it from you...
Yes, I realize that this is incredibly contorted logic (I must have been reading too many SCO stories here...), but the upshot of it is that you would be using such a copyright registration to (at least attempt) to stifle innovation.
Now then, as for patents? It's harder to find an example of a bottleneck, as above, and these will cost you over $1,000 each in filing fees alone. Still, you seem to be able to patent the most rediculous things. You could always file some nonsense like "n-click shopping, for n greater than one" (note that you can make "shopping" into any other activity, though you might get hillarious results like "3-click bowling") or just "___ over the internet"
I can even imagine being bored enough to write an "absurd patent generator" in Perl, if I could just think of more such patterns to feed into it
Of course, if you really did invent something wonderful, and you could patent up all the possible ways of using it (so that others couldn't just tweak it and get around your patent), you could always just publicize it and say that you have absolutely no intention of ever letting anyone use your invention until the patent expires. If it was software, you might then make it available via your website for *only* those people where your patent doesn't apply...
Rather than guess, I asked Robert Barr himself if I could get a license for the Linux Kernel Project, and this is what he said:
Hi Nathan There is no patent and there is no standard, so it's a bit premature.
But if a patent does issue and a standard is approved, this is our policy
Cisco will not assert any patents owned or controlled by Cisco against any party for making, using, selling, importing or offering for sale a product that implements IETF RFCXXXX, provided, however that: Cisco retains the right to assert its patents (including the right to claim past royalties) against any party that asserts a patent it owns or controls (either directly or indirectly) against Cisco or any of Cisco's affiliates or successors in title; and Cisco retains the right to assert its patents against any product or portion thereof that is not necessary for compliance with RFC XXXX.
Royalty bearing licenses will also be available as an option.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Robert Barr
Europe on the other hand (well, the PCT) has no grace period. Once the invention is disclosed, your rights are out the window. Adopting a policy like this would make it much harder for companies to troll newsgroups/web/discussion boards, get ideas, and file an application based on an implementation. It's not a total solution, but it would be a good start.
As someone that was trying to invalidate an obvious patent filed on date X for a client, let me tell you that finding stuff on the web published over 1 year beforehand was a bitch. Plenty of stuff in the 6 month range, but the web wasn't full blown back in mid 90's like it is now...
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Okay, I got this back:
On May 12, 2004, at 12:46 PM, Robert Barr wrote:
> Okay, I get that point now, but is there anything stopping Cisco from
> asserting its patents just for the hell of it?
Yes, my written statement above would stop us. I can turn it into a contract if that is necessary, but I don't think it is. Anybody who relies on that statement is protected, but I guess they should consult their own lawyer.
> You say that Cisco will only assert its patent against someone who
> tries to assert a patent against Cisco, but what is stopping
> Cisco from just doing it anyway?
see above.
> ie, the methods are integrated into the Linux Kernel TCP/IP stack and
> gain wide acceptance, and Cisco then sees value in trying to claim that
> all users of Linux need to pay Cisco a licensing fee of $200 per CPU to
> use the proprietary, patented methods included in Linux.
>
> I know its far-fetched, but 3 years ago, anyone saying that SCO would
> try to claim ownership of Linux would be laughed at.
SCO never made a statement like I did
> What agreement can open source projects enter into with Cisco to ensure
> that the above is legally impossible?
I'll execute an agreement with those terms if necessary
> Lastly, the GPL states:
>
> "Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software
> patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
> program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
> program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
> patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at
> all."
Prof Eben Moglen says this about GPL, I think it applie
"Section 7 prohibits distribution under GPL if you cannot fulfill the requirements of the license because of other conditions *imposed* on you by, among other things, a judgment of patent infringement, interim measures short of judgment, such as a preliminary injunction, or contractual limitations such as non-disclosure agreements or patent licenses. But you are not unable to distribute under GPL unless those requirements have been *imposed*. Until a particular party distributing GPL'd code has either accepted a license whose requirements are incompatible with GPL or has been ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction to do or refrain from doing in a fashion incompatible with GPL, there is no direct conflict with the requirements of the license, and no requirement to refrain from distribution. With regard to patents, in particular, no one *ever* has an obligation to refrain from making, using or selling technology that *may* practice patent claims solely because someone somewhere has taken a patent, claims to have a patent, or even publishes a license. Only the demand that you in particular take a license or cease infringing triggers theoretical liability under US patent law. Whether there can be liability for damages for the period before such notification is another question, legitimately of importance to those who commercially distribute free software, but not ordinarily of significance to those who develop only, or who distribute non-commercially.
Moreover, patents are not global, only local. To say that we cannot *develop* under GPL because a patent exists in country X, and a license has been published there to which those making, using, or selling in country X *might* be asked to subscribe would go much too far. That situation certainly does not prevent development elsewhere, and distribution under GPL can certainly proceed."
***
> So, for any GPL software use Cisco's methods, Cisco will need to
> provide a guarantee that under the GPL, any future patent for these
> methods will be free for use by that GPL software.
>
> Just taking your word for it that Cisco won't assert it's patent in the
> future isn't goo