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Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents
devil_doll writes "I saw over on p2pnet that Altnet is trying to 'mug' a number of P2P companies with seemingly bogus patents. One of them is titled 'Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers,' and appears to be nothing more than a simple hash table."
But that hash table is patented. It's a hell of a fight to get around a government-granted monopoly.
Then again, this is P2P we're talking about, so it's not like we're expecting them to close up shop because they are violating some ambiguous law.
P2P is here to stay. It's doubtful that this company will win in the long term because the technology is already out there used by millions of users. The genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle.
If it's not a real patent, wouldn't they get accused of fraud and fraud with the intent to extort, or whatever?
Or do you mean it's a real patent, but one that should be indefensible? That's a different matter.
If this is the case, maybe they're doing the standard trick of going after people too small to challenge the patent in court, who will settle quickly.
I use Steam :)
I try not to, and have an itchy uncomfortable feeling after playing hl2, but I think thats more life mirroring art than anything else.
liqbase
...why patent it? ...while the lawsuit will be thrown out of court as soon as the P2P company will show: "We use MD5 which expired even before this patent was granted, and this patent covers exactly the same thing as MD5 only without technical details how to accomplish the task." And even if not, sooner or later some company WILL start a lawsuit, and once the obvious result makes the patent invalid, all companies that actually paid, may counter-sue for damages.
I mean, they HAD to know the patent is bogus. They hoped it will pass through USPTO, and they hoped right. But how can they hope anyone will agree to pay them money for that?
If I wanted to sell Eiffel Tower, I don't think I'd avoid jail. Why people who try to sell (force!) idea they don't own could go free?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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Customers who bought this patent also purchased Dynamic interoperability contract for web services
Nice. Your disustingly obscene fees are just giving the fatcats yet another statistic - "We had to spent xxx thousands of dollars per hour to defend against these criminals!"
Maybe you should try actually talking to your esteemed clients, and suggesting to them that if, quoting the music industry as an example, they didn't want to make $8 of PURE PROFIT on a CD, whilst giving artists a 50 cents share that they may be able to reduce prices, and make the cost of a CD lower to the point that it becomes less attractive to download music than to buy an inexpensive plastic disc. But then you might be actually making a difference and changing things for the better, and I guess if you wanted to do that, you wouldn't be an attorney.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
/ incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.
Software code is subject to copyright, physical inventions are not. Physical inventions therefore require patents, software code does not. Mark
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
It seems that my purchase of An Introduction to Algorithms has borne fruit. I actually understood the patent application, although it's probably the worst description of a hash table ever. It's worth reading the patent, BTW, it has an unintentionally silly background history for its case.
Insofar as it's a specialized implementation of a hash table, how altnet thinks it has a case is beyond me. Code containing the word TrueName would be a dead giveaway, otherwise this is just harrassment litigation.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
If one claim simply covers using hashes to determine whether two files are equal, then they did receive a state-mandated monopoly on that (regardless of how likely it is enforceable in court).
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With some patented hydraulic invention, I am still free to come up with a better way of doing the same thing.
With these software patents, I'm prohibited from making anything that accomplishes X, even if I have a novel method, because company Y has a patent on software that does that.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
So far, I've heard: the "copyright" argument-- that software is like the plot of a novel. Bullshiat, says I. Copyright covers only the specific instantiation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you spent 10 years coming up with a novel software algorithm that could, say, accurately detect a person's diseases from a facial photograph, then by the copyright explanation, i'd only be covered in m specific code. anybody else could reverse engineer this in a week and sell their own clone version. The idea of this discourages you from investing the 10 years of work.
then of course there's the "economic" arugment that says that people are developing useful stuff without the help of patents and that patents deter from innovation. but this is really an unfairly directed argument. the argument should not be that all software patents are bad, but that they are currnetly being granted too liberally and for obvious evolutionary things that the law explicitly says they should not be. this is a problem with the implementation of software patents - the basic idea is still valid.
I dont at all disagree that many granted software / bm patents have been bullshiat. however, my argument is baby/bathwater - there are many good reasons for keeping patents for legitimatly patentable software ideas. Software is protected by copyright. This argument is bullshiat.
Picture how the world would have been if IBM patented the BIOS? Brother patented the Word Processor?
You say that patents are "overall an economic good and a necessity" but what innovation has come out of Microsoft since 1998's State Street decision establishing "Business Process" patents? Just years before that they radically changed the look and feel their operating systems. Of course, according to you that must have been trivial, since NOBODY would have invested any work in software if it couldn't be patented. People wrote whole operating systems with nothing more than copyright protection, and made money off of it!
The purpose of a patent is twofold: protect a temporary monopoly, with the people of this country (or in this day and age, the world) receiving the benefit of that creation when the patent expires. How about we call for all patented software to be opensourced when the patent expires? As it is, even after the patent expires the code is still protected by copyright. If you don't like that plan, don't patent it. Thats why the government created copyright and trade secret classes of intellectual property.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Patents work really good for protecting mature industries where true innovation is both revolutionary and rare. Incidently, these are also the industries where small players are the least likely to be able to make a dent - you're going to have a tough time selling a new car even if you have some nifty new engine that has all the performance of a V8 but 100x the gas mileage. Patents work really poorly in rapidly evolving new industries (and there's never been an industry that's moved as fast as software is).
Further, patents are supposed to be on an INVENTION, not a PROCESS. That's why you can't patent mathematical theorems.
Well, as a demonstration that the idea is fundamentally sound, can you point to any currently-in-force software patents that are "good" in some sense? We have enough examples on the bad side of the fence - perhaps if we had examples on both sides it would be easier to tell where the line is.
If, on the other hand, there are no current software patents that are easily defineable as good, then I'd doubt your premise that the idea is fundamentally sound.