Slashdot Mirror
Altnet Sues Record Industry Over File Hash Patents
robochan writes "In a charming twist of fate, CNET is reporting that Altnet, a company that sells music and other digital goods through file-swapping services, is suing the RIAA for alleged patent infringement. Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister stated, 'We cannot stand by and allow them to erode our business opportunity by the wholesale infringement of our rights.' Goodness, that sounds all too familiar..."
In the summer of 2003, it announced that it had purchased patent rights to the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file.
Altnet and Brilliant Digital Entertainment are joint venture partners with Sharman Networks, the Australian company that owns the Kazaa software.
So a network that is well known for trading files that probably shouldn't be traded for free buys a patent and tries to sell the services to a group that wants nothing to do with P2P. Then when the group that wants nothing to do with them ignores them they turn around and sue them. Sounds like another company that has been in tech-news recently.
Is a dish best served cold..
What goes around, comes around..
Oh to hell with this, Lets just get out some pitch forks and torches!
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
that patents are good now? today is thursday, so i'm not sure which way i'm supposed to go on that ...
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Patents - Bad.
But the recording industry also Bad.
Who do we support in this discussion?
both of them could lose...
At least someone is trying to make the RIAA feel the same way that a 14 year old kid does when he/she gets served with a subpoena.
gShares.net
-------
artlu.net
Altnet, a company that sells music and other digital goods through file-swapping services, sued the Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday for alleged patent infringement.
The company, a subsidiary of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, contends that the RIAA has been infringing on one of its patents in the course of copyright enforcement efforts inside peer-to-peer networks. Overpeer, a copyright company owned by Loudeye, and MediaDefender, also are named in the lawsuit.
"We've exhausted every means of trying to work with these defendants and those they represent to patiently encourage and positively develop the P2P distribution channel," said Altnet Chief Executive Officer Kevin Bermeister in a statement. "We cannot stand by and allow them to erode our business opportunity by the wholesale infringement of our rights."
He added, "Think about your breathing."
The patent infringement suit comes as one of the sideshows in an ongoing legal battle over peer-to-peer networks that has led to piracy charges against technology companies and antitrust claims against record companies, and that now appears to be headed ultimately to Congress for resolution.
Altnet and Brilliant Digital Entertainment are joint venture partners with Sharman Networks, the Australian company that owns the Kazaa software. The company has been trying for several years to persuade record labels and music studios to allow Altnet to sell authorized versions of their products through the Kazaa file-swapping network.
The big entertainment companies have unanimously said no, however. They've lost recent court battles that aimed to put companies like Sharman out of business, but are now seeking legislation that would revive their claims against file-swapping ventures.
Altnet has also been seeking other funding sources and ways to strike back at the record labels' efforts to undermine peer-to-peer networks.
In the summer of 2003, it announced that it had purchased patent rights to the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file.
Initially, Bermeister indicated the company would approach other file-swapping companies to sign them up for licenses. That proved controversial, but Altnet did send cease-and-desist letters last November to nine companies engaged in businesses related to peer-to-peer networks.
Some of these, such as data collection company Big Champagne, said they weren't using any technology that would infringe on the Altnet patent. An attorney for Altnet said the disputes with most of the nine had been resolved.
Altnet's lawsuit says that antipiracy companies Overpeer and MediaDefender are still on the hook, however. Overpeer is a "spoofing" company that posts millions of false or corrupted files on networks such as Kazaa, trying to make real files harder to find. Media Defender uses "interdiction" techniques, which essentially clog networks with requests that block real download efforts.
Both of these services use unauthorized versions of Kazaa and the underlying FastTrack peer-to-peer technology, and so are using Altnet's patent without permission,
This is an outrage! The RIAA is a great group of do-gooders and this company decides to sue them for patent infringement!? This patent system is getting out of ha...oh wait.
It is always sweet to see a scumbag (the RIAA) get abused with the same type of abuse that they do to others.
Fight Spammers!
Today is thursday, so dean is no longer running for President.
Anyone know what exactly they're patenting? I'm sure someone else had invented the concept of identifying a file by its hash before them.
And sometimes, it's just damn fun.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I don't think this is a matter of "buy patents then make money" as some may argue. They had their p2p network, and the RIAA was flooding them with bogus files to trick users. They purchased a technology that complimented their needs (e.g. weeding out the fake files and helping people find legit files), and now they're pulling the old "thou shalt not reverse engineer" argument.
If we replaced "Altnet" with "Microsoft" or another /. target, I imagine this discussion would get quite angry. I imagine we'll have a lot of "way to go!" comments this time around- we're all hypocrites!
The RIAA, much as everyone hates them, is totally in the right here. The group is suing them for a patent on FILE HASHING. Hello? Is anyone home? If they get precedent on this, say goodbye to things like, oh, security.
Live by lawsuits; die by lawsuits.
Or was that a sword?
I had the idea of hashing digital tv signals to remove commericals. I guess by saying this right now on this dated fourm that no one else can do that due to prior something.
A hash 'fingerprint to identify the file' sounds like a checksum to me.
"Altnet's lawsuit says that antipiracy companies Overpeer and MediaDefender are still on the hook, however. Overpeer is a "spoofing" company that posts millions of false or corrupted files on networks such as Kazaa, trying to make real files harder to find. Media Defender uses "interdiction" techniques, which essentially clog networks with requests that block real download efforts." The interdiction method they speak of... Is it essentially a DoS on the p2p networks? If so, that's a lot of crow the RIAA is going to have to force down if they lose their lawsuits...
Our IPR overloads can sue each other to oblivion for all I care. Maybe we are hypocrites, but when someone uses unpopular law X to attack evil corporation Y, well... one can't help but be amused.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Then Altnet could use the DMCA against the RIAA.
Now that would REAL sweet revenge.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
They will, only the lawyers will be the real winners.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Karma.
Altnet wins: RIAA loses. That's a win, and there's the potential of a double-win, if the IP Police respond by trying to put a finger-guard on the patent buzzsaw.
Altnet loses: legal precedents that blunt the software patent buzzsaw are all to the good.
The worst-case scenario is Altnet and tha RIAA coming to a settlement.
There is also historical info on this being licensed to Sharman Networks.
the problem is that we are granting patents on all sorts of ideas that have loads of prior arts. Until we up the pay in the patent office and address the real problems these will continue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I guess by saying this right now on this dated fourm that no one else can do that due to prior something.
You let us know when you've reduced that idea to practice. Otherwise it's nothing, not prior art, not even, really, much of an idea.
at least in this instance, patent is different from copyright?
Granted it all roots down to the same base concept, that of "intellectual property" (whatever that means....), but it seems that most of the people posting here seem to support patenting software constructs.... I thought that was a bad thing.
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
Hmmm, I wonder why they're running out of money...
Peer Pressure
Patents are really screwing up the world.
But wait... the music industry is a big overgrown evil empire.
Who's side should I be on... let's see... "the enemy of my enemy..."
Wait... I know:
I blame Microsoft!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Seems like the concept of karma is not just relevant on slashdot!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
is when are we going to move completely to a download - based delivery system for video/music? It is clear that the record companies are using media (physical cd/dvd/tapes) to justify the insane cost of entertainment. As soon as we take manufacturing out of the picture the consumers will realize that they are being ripped. I imagine it takes about 20 cents to stamp out a DVD when you do them in huge quantitities.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Great. :/
// The optimist
Now if this turns out to be of use to Altnet RIAA (or some other evil entity) will purchase the patent and the greedy people behind Altnet will go all bling-bling...
This holds promise of even greater suckage.
They can't ruin music. No one in their right mind would call that top40 pop40 pablum anything similar to music.
They can wall off their corporate music business, lock it up behind patents and copyright swindles, and music will flourish outside the walls.
The universe outside their little walled off corner is bigger than inside.
Infuriate left and right
On the opposite side of that coin, my regime (Were I in charge) would mandate that both the patent examiner and the applicant be forced to eat 1000 printed copies of any patents found to be blatantly obvious or to have prior art or both.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Patents are a tool.
Any tool used to combat evil is GOOD.
Are you really saying that we can't use evil's own tools to FIGHT evil? You're a fscking idiot.
"Hey, those Indians are using our own rifles against us! They're a bunch of hypocrites!"
Uh, no, they're just trying to WIN you idiot.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with consistency or hypocracy. Quit trying to muddy the waters in the good vs evil fight.
Fighting evil is good, period.
Using evil's own tools to fight evil is FUCKING GENIUS.
most of the people posting here seem to support patenting software constructs
I see that you haven't read the thread. Are you a freelance troll or are you one of those astroturfers?
[chuckle] Right. Of course, the patent system _is_ out of hand. This is just another example. As others have pointed out, badness is badness whether we agree with the ultimate objective or not. A patent on hashing file contents? Oh, please. Next we'll patent checksums and CRC's.
For example, you either believe in freedom or you do not. If you do, then you support the right of unreasonable people to air their views, just as you support the right of reasonable people to air theirs.
Similarly, you either think patenting software is reasonable, or you do not. As Andrew "Dice" Clay might say, "There's no middle ground."
Seems like a key question to me before we decide who we should hate more in this case.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
While I agree that the patent-and-sue business model is a bad thing, you must also agree that the Record Insustry business model of marketing and shiping pieces of plastic is someone archaic when faced with the new reality of the Internet. The rise of file-sharing is at least in part a response to the labels trying to ignore or fight the Internet instead of embracing it. There are plenty of people willing to pay for music downloads if the labels would really open up their archives and charge a reasonable price (25 cents per track maybe?).
The great thing about the on-demand Internet model of distribution is that low volume niche bands and older archived stuff is as easily and cheaply distributed as the big names. A physical CD needs to sell a sufficient volume to make the production costs worth it. Digital music does not suffer from the same ecomomies of scale.
Cheers,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
You wake up to find a bloodied hard drive under the covers.
You seem to be getting a lot of traffic from fbi_d00d.
That ain't the Publisher's Clearinghouse van in front of your house.
Lately the only music files you can find have names like You'reNextGeekBoy.mp3.
You try to download Send Lawyers, Guns and Money but all you get is I Fought the Law and the Law Won.
Amazon.com recommends you purchase an attorney to go along with the 100 GB hard drive you just ordered.
Maybe mp3.riaa.com wasn't really an anonymous server after all?
Metallica and Court TV are both camped out in your driveway.
Mystika
The RIAA, MPAA, music lables, and film studios et al...have being using the legal system as a cudgel to beat the market place and the consumer into submission for decades now. Now after many years of legally harassing the consumer they are getting a taste of their own medicine, they will receive no sympathy from me.
Well - patents *are* totally different to copyright, and you're correct to point out that there is not really such a thing as "intellectual property".
Have a look at Lawrence Lessig's fine book "Free Culture" - a fantastic book, and available free (as in beer and in speech) online at:
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
I'm sure you're all familiar with the arguments against software patents. But maybe you're not aware that while the US Constitution allows Congress to issue patents, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Patents could be eliminated tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to repeal the laws that authorize patents.
Patents are authorized in the same clause of the Constitution that authorizes copyrights. I discuss this, and what you can do to fix things, in Change the Law. The discussion there is about copyright, but everything I say applies equally to patents.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.
Thank you for your attention.
-- Mike
Request your free CD of my piano music.
If this patent is demonstrated to be enforceable (it shouldn't be based on the above - but who knows), then it will effectively give Altnet the (legal, not moral) right to sue almost any P2P network out there, since they all rely on this obivous technique.
Basically it looks like their strategy would be to use this patent to force every other P2P network to install the DRM technology they have been working on.
Attacking the RIAA seems more like a stunt than a real strategy, but hopefully the RIAA has the resources to invalidate this patent, if they do, then they will be doing the world of P2P a big favor.
Has anyone else here figured out how to play the CNet videos on anything besides Windows or Mac? I haven't been able to get real to do anything besides just sit there in embedded mode in Mozilla, Firefox or Konqueror. Real loads, but doesn't play or download any video, or generate any error message. The video filename isn't in the html either, as it seems that it comes from the loads of external javascript they reference.
Most people know the cost of making music, books, and other media-based software is much more than the cost of making and delivering the media.
Well, I say most people - I should say most people who stop to think about how much effort it takes to produce a creative work.
In the case of music, you have the songwriter, the singers, the producer, the sound engineer, and the recording studio or cost of GOOD recording equipment. You are already in the hole by some amount of money. If you sell it rather than give it away, you have the cost of running an e-store, which includes costs for bandwidth, storage, customer relations, banking fees, etc. etc. In other words, it may be literally cheaper to give a song away than to sell it for a penny per customer.
Garage bands are probably better off giving away their first few releases and asking for donations. More established musicians are probably better off giving away personal-use copies and selling commercial rights to radio stations, disc jockeys, and other users. Established bands can also make money off of things like t-shirts, documentary-videos, autographs, and the like.
The bottom line:
Everyone wants free, but most reasonable people will settle for a fair price or do without when it comes to non-essential things like their favorite music.
PS:
A GOOD electronic encyclopedia is still worth paying $tens for, but it's not worth the $hundreds or $thousands the 20-volume set that well-to-do Baby Boomers had growing up.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well done, mods. The parent is indeed "informative" since it cleanly answers the original question.
MOD PARENT TROLL! Sneaky, but not all that sneaky
With the first link, the chain is forged.
They aren't psuedo-perpetual like copyright, they expire in 7 years, and they're more easily fought and defended.
-----
No they aren't. I agree that they expire on a somewhat more reasonable time frame (of course, as far as technology & algorithms go, even seven years is an eternity), however, at least in the US, they're rubber stamped by the USPTO and then given a legal presumption of validity. The other side has to prove they didn't infringe.
Also, coming up with an original work is no defense--you can infringe upon a patent you have never heard of before. You might get some mileage out of independent creation, in that if you're an average practitioner skilled in the art, and it was obvious to you, it probably shouldn't have been patented, but I don't know that I'd bet on it. Don't forget the legal fees, too. I'm not sure you can recover them at all, even if the lawsuit is pretty baseless.
So yes, there are plenty of things which could be fixed. Also, IANAL, I just read about this stuff a lot, so the usual disclaimers against taking this as legal advice apply.
The HIPAA statute requires routine data transfers between insurance companies and hospitals to be validated. This is typically done with MD5 checksums... and since the most common error in such transfers is transferring yesterday's file, any robust transfer quality assurance method (such as required by HIPAA) will transgress this patent when the checksum is checked against all the prior month's saved checksums, to insure uniqueness.
How 'bout them apples.
I want the lawyers to lose too :-)
...and the other half are claiming that we're being hypocritical.
Actually, there is always humor in a (hated) champion outfoxed with his own techniques, but that's beside the point.
Patents have been used by the software industry to muscle out competition or to try and inflate profits by hobbling competition. The only way things are going to change is if the "big boys" are slapped hard by the rules they've created. Though the chance is slim, industry-led changes to laws (patent and DMCA-style) may open the door to real investigation into the impact of these laws. I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm saying that the only way it will happen is if the first move is made by those with money & power.
Oh, and if you haven't sent a five-spot to Congressman Rick Boucher http://http//www.house.gov/boucher/welcome.htm/, you might want to consider it. He's one of the few outspoken opponents of the DMCA (and PATRIOT, too, for you libertarians) and is doing something about it. HOWEVER, he's being challenged by a Republican carpetbagger with lots of GOP cash backing this fall.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"HA HA HA HA HAAAA HA HA HA HA." and also "HA HA HA HA, *sniff* HA HA HA."
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
It sounds too much like Iraqi Information Minister (Al-Sahaf) "We will win this war and we are winning!"
Here's all the prior art you will ever need to fight a generic file hashing patent from 1997:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm Published 1995 April 17 (FIPS 180 was published 1993 May 11)
Explanation: This Standard specifies a Secure Hash Algorithm, SHA-1, for computing a condensed representation of a message or a data file
Game over.
"You two! Fight to the death!"
granted, when I made my post to this article there were ~50 others, not 200, and a lot of them have been modded down. But still, witness:
c id =10201371
c id =10201536
t hr eshold=0&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=141&tid=123&tid =95&mode=flat&cid=10201496
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121178&
and
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121178&
and
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121178&
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act has nothing directly to do with patent law, other than that the act provides a model for the U.S. Congress to follow when providing consideration for drug companies' campaign contributions, as in the dystopic Cher Act proposal.
Yay a company that makes a business out of denial of service, or at least that's what it sounds like from that description....
Is it really hypocritical to be glad to see something like this happen?
It seems like making use of unjust laws is one of the best ways to bring to light their injustice. Think about the laws against blacks riding in the front of the bus. I'm sure many people were happy to hear about the first black person to get arrested for riding in the front a bus. They weren't happy because that person was in jail, but happy because it was a step in the direction of exposing the unjust law that jailed them.
I'm not "rooting for altnet" nor am I "on the side of the RIAA." Things just aren't that simple. But I'm happy that this happened, I hope the patent gets tossed out, and I hope (and I know this is stretching things) that maybe it's another step in the direction of industry (and the public) realizing that the patenting system as it is now is flawed.
And I'll consider any challenge to the RIAA's current behaviour a move in the right direction; even if I think that challenge is silly and hope that it gets tossed out. Maybe it'll inspire more, and more appropriate, challenges in the future.
If uber-expensive recording equipment are really mandatory to record a commercial music release, why does the RIAA give a hoot about your average lousy mp3 rip?
Don't be silly, when I hit this article there were less than 20 comments and it still wasn't true that "most of the people posting here seem to support patenting software constructs", let alone beg a question like "Am I the only one that dares point out that...." software patents are bad. Yes, I'm aware there's a lot who are purely cheering Altnet on, but hardly the majority, and even those who do seem ambivalent about it.
Warning: This post includes Cliche's. Jesus, another lame patent holder sues the devil. Is this another one of those times where we have to root for the evil company? I really hate having to root for IBM (I have a long memory), Microsoft, and now the RIAA. I feel so dirty.
Those bastards have been smoking my hash ...
... never mind
oops
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Allowing an inventor a limited period of exclusivity over his invention, so as to reward his inventiveness with control and potential profitibility, is a good thing.
That is the concept behind patents. Patents are a good thing.
Allowing someone to patent frivolous, trivial, non-creative processes that are already in use by others, is not a good thing.
Properly deserved patents = good.
Bogus bullshit patents = bad.
Now someone please develop a machine to distinguish properly deserving patents from bullshit bogus patents, and patent it, and license it for free to the USPTO.
Patents all went to hell when they started allowing algorythims and software to be patented. I'm not saying no piece of software an no algorythm is sufficiently inventive and genius as to be patentable, but they should have raised the bar as to the ability to patent such things.
They should also allow recovery of attorney fees and all other costs if a challenge to a petnt is successful on the groungs of "easily discovered" prior art. Ws we can spank people for filing bogus shit in the first place.
The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.
If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.
The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.
That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.
Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.
My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.
So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
Thanks for your help.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The DMCA only applies to copyrighted works, and hashes can't be copyrighted--they aren't "original." Something that is the only possible result of a mathematical process is, by definition, not creative, and copyright law only protects work that is the result of significant creativity.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem isn't that patents are bad, or that people are taking advantage of the system, it's that the system is currently misbalanced:
Agree.
1. Patents last too long. This is a general problem with IP law these days.
Agree when it comes to patents on things computer related - especially software. The pace of that industry is such that protection is only needed for a few years at most. (Product life cycles are about 6 years long - four of development, two of marketability before obsolescence.)
In particluar, it appears that software in particular doesn't require patent protection at all. By the time it can be reverse-engineered and cloned, the original product (if it was worthwhile at all) has typically made back its development costs and made a massive profit to more than adequately reward the developers and investors for their hard work and risk-taking. Further, at that point the originator is the dominant player in the self-created market, and it takes a major technological leap to displace him.
2. Patents are too easy to get. That is a particular problem with software. The nature of software in particular is such that any non-trivial program involves thousands of processes, any of which can be patented, and it's more-or-less impossible for a developer to even know if he's infringing when people can patent things like using the "tab" key to move between fields in a form.
An even bigger problem is that the prior art in software is not well known (especially to patent examiners, given that it wasn't patentable until recently so little of it is recorded as previous patents.) The Software Patent Institute is trying to solve that, by creating a searchable database of software prior art.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Incidentally: A database of prior art will also help show that a particular "software invention", though novel, is also obvious "to someone versed in the art".
This should help kill off such things as straightforward automation of well-known techniques and business practices.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How about a patent on "a method for accelerating convergence by using function derivatives". And I suppose that the mention of "derivatives" will make most libraries file it under "finances" and "markets".
However, the way patents and the whole intellectual property busienss is now, it's a gross distortion of the original idea. First of all, there should be *NO* protection at all on trade secrets. Secrecy is its own protection. The rule should be no copyrights on copy-protected stuff, no copyrights on binary files without source code, no copyrights on DVDs that depend on encryption, etc.
And, for patents, a stiff penalty for requesting a frivolus patent. Even if the patent office accepts the claim, if it can be demostrated that the requester had the knowledge of prior art, they should pay a large fine, let's say fifty times the expected profit from that patent.
"Using the hash of a file as a filename for the file" is really a much different concept than "calculating a hash of a file and using it to verify file integrity." It's also relatively orthogonal to the details of any particular hash function, except that some applications need a cryptographically strong hash (like MD5 or SHA1) for which it's difficult to generate collisions, while other applications can work fine with any reasonably well-distributed hash (like basic CRC checksums.) The question is whether the idea is sufficiently novel that it's not obvious to a skilled practitioner in the field, and whether there was prior art that was ignored. The primary patent, 5,978,791 , was filed in 1997, and seems to be a continuation of a patent filing begun in 1995, which implies it was based on work done by around 1993-1994. (Remember that something might seem obvious now, when everybody's been doing it for 10 years, but might not have been obvious back then.) My assumption is that the idea should have been obvious, because I know _I_ thought of it and several variations on it for stuff the cypherpunks community was discussing in the mid 90s, (and if I've thought of it, then it ought to be obvious to skilled professionals also), but I don't have specific documentation around that says exactly when or whether it was published on dead trees anywhere. (Professor Dave Farber of the EFF, who's not the same Dave Farber on the patent (:-), says that yes, this stuff was obvious well before then.)
Another popular patent abuse method is to patent a business method something like "Claim 1 - A system with _these_ parts. Claim 2 - The system described in Claim 1 with _this_ reasonably obvious thing done. Claims 3-10: The System described in Claims 1 and 2 with 7 different minor obfuscated variations. Claims 11: Providing the systems described in Claims 3-10 _on_the_Internet_ and _charging_money_for_it!" and then suing people for violating Claim 2 even though there's nothing novel or non-obvious until you get to claim 8 or 9 or even 11, and Claim 2 might even have lots of well-known prior art (as technology, though maybe not as a business method.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think you're going a bit overboard: a binary is like a developed photograph for which the negative is the source code, it's copyable, it should be subject to copyright just as a photograph is. A patent is rarely as detailed and complete as source code... it's like an openly documented interface: enough for someone trained in the art to duplicate, but you have to figure out the materials, the milling techniques, and so on.
But the idea of preventing people from double-dipping is a tempting one. I don't know how workable... if you have a patented technique, then create a copyrighted program that uses it but isn't dependant on it, you're not keeping third parties from duplicating that program. Should you not be able to use it?
Rick Boucher is one of the very few legislators that regularly lines up with common Slashdot concerns and while I don't know whether Boucher himself is technically adept, if he isn't he has someone in his office who is very much so, because he's very clueful on the issues he handles. I'd hate to see him lose office.
May we never see th
And while I'm at it, I found a link to his tech initiatives page.
On here, he mentions a lot of stuff. One notable thing on here is that he was pushing a *real* opt-in antispam act, not the one that actually passed and allows opt-out spam.
May we never see th
Yes, I'm very disappointed that both major party candidates are opposed to copyright reform.
I don't think my article will sway the election one way or the other, but my hope is that eventually copyright reform will become such a hot-button issue that all the candidates will have to address it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Haven't I already watched this movie?
Darnit, I've actually *got* mod points right now, but I've already posted in this thread! Aarrrrrgghhh!
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
No need to "up the pay" at the patent office, they already "upped their pay" tremendously. Ever wonder why the patent office gives out patents so freely on patents that have tons of prior art? The answer is: Because they get money for them. The real problem to be addressed is elsewhere, sitting on a mahagony chair with velvet cushoning and smoking $100 cigars.
He can afford to spend more than you and your friends and their neighbors make in a year just on patents. If they don't hold up in court, the patent office does not care, HE doesn't care either, he just gets new ones along with new and better lawyers.
Taking innovation out of the market (Innovation is killing the RIAA, remember?) and charging for access to the market is so old a business model, you could call it ancient. Back in the middle ages and probably even earlier people couldn't just bring their goods and skills to the market because they had something or could do something. They had to buy permission to do that such as by joining a guild or paying the local authorities extra (for the small peasant largely unaffordable) market taxes.
That's my take on the situation. As far as I'm concerned, software patents are a complete nonsense, have always been, and (unfortunately) will always be. Let them nasty large companies are suing each other over this nonsense. It's all for the better for me.
And hashing has only been described in scientific papers for what, a century or two? Just open any crypto textbook, and look up the bibliography at the end. And I'm not even touching CRC and checksums, which are essentially the same thing, except not useful against malicious attacks.