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
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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!
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.
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!
"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!
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.
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 : )
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?
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
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.
They aren't psuedo-perpetual like copyright, they expire in 7 years, and they're more easily fought and defended.
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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.
...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?
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.
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.