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VLC & European Patents
CaptScarlet22 writes " VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the
numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened
are the many libraries and projects which
VLC is built upon, like
FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software
multimedia players, which include
MPlayer,
xine,
Freevo,
MythTV,
gstreamer."
In the interest of stimulating more discussion, some more information about this subject can be found here
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You should only use MS media player. Then you wont run into these problems.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I remember reading somewhere that MS hold many many patents of code/methodologies used in Open Source. If this is true then I guess Open Source exists only because MS defends the patents passively.
fuvoo: watch something
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather we just do away with patents entirely, but it's a fact that Europe will buy into this system sooner or later. Maybe now's the time to clean up any potentially infringing code or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
Actually, isn't Europe implementing *some* sort of grandfathering system? If they aren't, then do they realize that they may be causing massive liabilities for their constituants? Forget VideoLAN, this may be a much larger problem.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
Actually, considering the nature of software patents, I should think we're looking for a place that is more legally forward-thinking...
On a sidenote, mplayer has the same message on its website. have a look: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/index.html
shouldn't they have checked all these patents and licenses before implementing them?
would charging their users a small fee pay for all the licenses? I use VLC on windows and OS X, and there must surely be a linux version too. so they've cornered all major markets.
who wouldn't pay US$5-10 for such a useful program?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
...in Europe? I thought that this is possible only in America.
I am not being ironic, could someone clarify this?
OSS Developers will have to start migrating to the US to develop free software????
I'm sure they were aware of it, but if the compression algorithm used in a certain video format is patented, how are you supposed to encode or decode a compatible file without infringing on the patent?
It should be legal to reverse engineer/use patented techniques when it is used to enable integration and compatibility in a non-commerical manner. Using patents to stiffle integration and compatibility should be considered a violation of fair use.
Patents which exist solely for the sake of preventing compatibility aren't "innovation."
One modern video codec is as good as any other. They're just all different implementations of the same basic mathematics. They all produce similar quality from similar file sizes. Businesses do the same stupid thing every time: patent one particular method (which is not necessarily better than any other method) of encoding, distribute EITHER the decoder to recipients or the encoder to content producers, whichever is easier for your business, and thereby bully the other group into paying for the use of your amazing "technology."
Gah. It's all bullshit.
The general concencious is that software patents are mainly stiffling the ability for new software to be produced. Here's an interesting tid bit about problems with software patents. It's a really interesting read I suggest it. Here it is http://perens.com/Articles/PatentFarming.html
During their implementation (which started years ago), they were aware that there were no software patents in Europe.
Given the number and scope of multimedia patents, the only way to clean up any potentially infringing code would involve rm -rf...
Let us get the names of those entities that are threatening with software patents. I will be very willing to join the effort to turn these companies the SCO route. My fear though, is that VideoLAN and other OSS companies will simply shift production to Asia where patents are not that well respected. This will mean that the US will be left behind. We are not doing that well in cell phone technology already. Asians and Europeans seem to be very advanced. We all know that the cell phone technology we are now getting as Americans is kin-of old if one compares it with what the Asians are doing now.
Programmers are generally recommended NOT to investigate patents at all. If they knowingly offend, they pay triple damages when taken to task over it in the US (holy mecca of patent litigation)
The generally accepted practice in the business world is build it without having any awareness that it was previously discovered or patented, then have your lawyers look for infringement and negotiate a deal. The developers, engineers, etc are generally prohibited from going anywhere near patents.
Consciously avoid being exposed to other ppls ideas, reinvent the wheel, employ a bunch of people who could be doing something productive to find out after the fact if anyone has invented this before, and then hope that there's enough revenue for your new idea left after you pay to license the patents.
Kind of puts the lie to the whole "in the interests of progress" thing, doesn't it?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
If this project disappears then it will be a huge step backwards for digital multimedia. On every system I use this is one of the first packages I install. One cannot trust quicktime or windows media players.
it is semi odd that Europe is anti media players in Windows, and then they are threatening to slay free media players. Seams like a double standard.
Given that Microsoft is firmly entrenched in the media and content industries, as are Apple, Dolby, Fraunhofer and others, is it really any surprise these days that a lot of patents are being trodden on these days? Hell, even foobar2000 must be stepping on a few peoples' toes.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
They aren't, strictly speaking, allowed at the moment. The issue is that they may well soon be allowed (legislation is going back and forth in the EU on the matter at the moment) and if that happens then, due to international agreements, existing software patents granted in the US (and other places too I guess) will suddenly apply in the EU too...
I think thats just the point. They don't want you encoding/decoding that file. They want to lock you in to their software.
Imagine if the only MP3 encoder/decoder combination was the Fraunhofer one? How popular would MP3 be? Would Vorbis or something similar be the de facto standard?
if i see a video stream, and decide to write a program that takes any chuncks of "000000000" and replace it with a "01", and so forth, and that is my way of compressing a file, but someone else programed that before me and filed a patent, does that mean i can't use that kind of code?
it is stupid to me to have patents on things that anyone can think up. what happens if a professor at a university thinks up something, but does not patent it. he teaches it to students, and they are free to use it. 2 years later a start up company in california has an employee who thinks up the same simple idea, and has it patented. what does that mean? that the original professor can no longer use it? that his students who might have used that idea in projects now have to remove it?
what is the purpose of patents. it seems to be very anti-competitive, and creates monopolies.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
1) Only play unpatented formats. 2) Make sure utilities are available to translate to those unpatented formats but don't own them. Just release them free out into the wilds of the internet where they will never entirely disappear despite efforts to squash them. 3) Encourage all encoders to only use open formats. --- Within the next 5-10 years, you will not be able to get content short of video taping it off a screen. They are going to have it completely locked down. It won't be because of technology per se but technology combined with severe legal penalties for circumventing that technology. They will send encoded audio and video streams that will be decoded as close as possible to the point where it becomes audeo and video. Picture a solid state combination speaker code and decoding device impossible to separate or patch into.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
just when they start to get used in the corporate world, the corporate world is killing them through patents ...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
here you go, Microsoft Media Player for Mac
r pr oducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/othe
OMGWTFBBQ an AC posted an imformative post WITH a link!!!
Why can't all these software packages just be hosted in outer mongolia (or somewhere where the patents don't apply that actually has hosting)?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
We need it ASAP. This foolishness has to stop.
You just threaten that it breaks one of your patents, it ties up the developers into looking at the code and the patents. Development will be slower because of tied up resources, and you can attempt to kill it off. Even if the claim is bunk, you still make them lose much development time.
While it's probably not what DTS is after, they really don't compete with MPlayer, perhaps other companies will try it.
I'm just surprised DTS would even bother. After all, if your decoding capabilities are built-in to the most commonly used players, wouldn't that give prospective clients more incentive to use DTS? *shrug*
Vip
Their dream is that you can't play or create content without a properly blessed (read: licensed) encoder/decoder...
I have not RTFA, but I'm sure almost all of the codecs and the patents that are being discussed are owned by the MPEG group (being they are using MPEG-2 encoding/decoding without a license).
LAME is already illegal in the U.S. because it did MP3, and I suspect the rest of these projects will be killed off for similar reasons.
I'm not suprised - when you look for "free mpeg-2 decoders" you don't find much. Well, you don't find anything that is gratis. After careful research you find that open source projects are doing a lot of mpeg-2 work, but they usually don't advertise that fact.
I didn't say it was "right", but it's not suprising. Really, you can't do anything with SVCD or DVD on Windows without owning a MPEG-2 decoder. If I was someone who made money on selling MPEG-2 codecs, I'd go after VideoLAN too. It's a lucrative business.
Get your Unix fortune now!
why not have a law that says stealing technology or reverse engineering is illegal, but not having a thought which is useful because someone else had it before you.
this is going to get ugly. every useful thing will have a patent and we'll have only one option, buy from the patent holder or live without.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Brazil would probably be a good choice.
Well you don't.
Not trying to be a prick, but you don't work with it. DVD? Gone! SVCD? Gone! MP3? Gone!
Widespread adoption is what makes it hard huh? Well develop a new codec with brand new methods and you won't have to worry so much. Go help the vorbis project.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Kopete has a warning message on its site as well.
In other words, unless your company is so big that you can use your huge patent portfolio against all equal-sized or smaller companies, you're hosed. This is a game that only multinationals can win - and that's why IBM and HP lobby for Software patenting in Europe despite their affiliation with Open Source. It's more important to them to be able to dominate the entire computer software industry than it is to work with us.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Quite a few opensource projects are carrying the same message but non of them have been threatened by anybody yet. Last year other opensource projects like Knoppix were carrying the same message. I think the messages on their websites are a shock tactic to make people in Europe oppose the introcduction of software patents.
That is a difficult question. Where do your rights end and mine start? If you have an idea first, does that mean you are the only one who can benifit from that idea? At the same time, should I be able to steal your idea? The anwser is to protect companies or people from stealing ideas others developed, yet at the same time not stopping people from using their own spontaneous ideas.
When it comes to media players, I can only ask the question, if a compression is made by microsoft, is it so obvious that in the next decade someone else would have saw the same pattern and made their own compression format? Or is the idea so unlikely to have been concieved without theft that we can assume it was reverse engineered or hacked?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Not too often do you hear about the rights of the patent holders, or the rights of the inventors, or the creators... do they have no rights?
Regarding software patents? No they have no rights, AFAIK.
Oh, how can it be that all of these innovative products and applications be threatened by software patents? Patents stimulate innovation, not crush it! Patents are good, for if patents crush these innovative products and applications, that will stimulate competition!
Yeah. What bullshit software patents are. Companies with them will cheerfully sit on their collective patents, and not do a damn thing with them till someone comes along and tries to innovate. BANG! Pay up or die! Uh, yeah, that *really* stimulates competition. Techno-terrified lawyers *really* innovate by sitting on their collective arses and doing nothing with technology they don't understand, but because they don't know their collective arses from the ground, doesn't mean that they will sue yours off if you try to innovate (reguardless of whether they came up with the idea first, or stole it out of a book they found at the computer store). Software patents are evil, evil evil. Collectively those doleing out software patents, as well as those recieving them should be rounded up, and shot! Legislators who think they are a good idea can join them also.
Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.
That really is a mischaracterization of what the truth is. It should read:
Multimedia is a patent minefield. All invented formats are covered by patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.
It's not that the simple things are patented, it's the complex things like MPEG-2. Not that someone can't come up with their own decoder - it's just not okay with the MPEG group. (Which I know is redundant)
It isn't that you can't write your own codecs, not at all. It's that you can't decode their formats without paying a license.
If it was debian this software wouldn't be included in the US distributions (although it is).
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have a right to use knowledge inside my head in any way I choose, and nobody has a right to restrict me. If you don't want me to use your invention, keep it secret from me. Any alternatives are dangerously close to slavery and will have similar results as use if information becomes more important in daily lives.
Doesn't anyone find it odd that open source software seems to be so threatened by software patents and closed source products seem fine? Why are open source projects so reliant on patented techniques, and if they are infringing what are they bringing new to the table anyway?
So whilst writing a letter to my local MEP, I did a little research around the subject - and stubled upon this speech.
"Before concluding, I would like to say a few words on the substance of the proposal, since Parliament will now need to turn its attention to this. The Commission proposed to clarify the legal rules on patentability for software-related inventions. This does not include computer programs or other software as such. It means inventions that make a technical contribution and that are truly novel. Such inventions are present in a number of everyday consumer goods such as cars, mobile telephones and domestic appliances. The Commission's intention in making its proposal was to avoid the patenting of pure software and make a clear distinction between the European Union and the United States. Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive.
The current rules in the European Patent Convention leave patent examiners very wide decision-making powers. There can be different interpretations as to whether an invention can be patented. This leads to uncertainty for businesses. Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are negatively affected by the lack of clarity in the existing rules.
I would like to remind Members that, in the absence of a directive, patents will continue to be granted. If patent offices decide to grant patents for pure software, then expensive procedures before the Courts will be the only option for those who wish to object.
Those of you who have been directly involved in working on this proposal know as well as I do that this is a very complex area. Any modifications will need to be carefully examined. The directive cannot be turned on its head. We need to maintain a proper balance between stimulating innovation and making sure competition is not stifled."
I'm a little confused...
from that site:
The European parliament will now be taking the last stand against software patents in a voting for which an absolute majority is needed. Such a majority is hard to come by in a parliament with a low attendance level.
But not all is lost yet as long as you decide it is time to make a difference and take action. This is our last opportunity to fend off software patents worldwide, there will be no second chance for the foreseeable future.
Signing petitions will not suffice. Contact your local EU representatives and educate them why software patents are a bad idea in the first place and why they must attend that parliament session to vote against them. Make it clear that they need to stop the machinations of the EU council and reaffirm the power of the EU parliament, the only democratically elected EU institution. For in-depth information and starting points to get active visit the software patent page of the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) and NoSoftwarePatents.com.
HD Trailers
What I think should be done is patents should be modified to include a "Fair Use" like clause. Under this idea, F/OSS software, as long as its for "personal use" can use patented technology without having to pay licensing fees, but if its sold or used commercially, or if said program is a commercial application, then said program (or the user of it) requires a license. Now excuse me while I go patent this concept....
I'm friends with the youngest daughter of the former head of the PowerPC division of IBM you insensitive clod!
I know that IBM and Sun have made much of their patents available for use in to OSS projects. I would like to see them take the next step and start using their patents to defend OSS projects from other patent holders. "OK, you have a prolem with VLC infringing on your patent? Well don't you use techology XYZ in on of your products? We have a patent relating to that. Surely we could work something out to avoid any... complications."
Yes, projects and software that have been around for years suddenly become illegal. That is exactly how intellectual property laws work. And that in turn is why they are unpopular here on slashdot.
IP law (and economies that suffer under it) is an utterly broken system, which is why a lot of talented people refuse to do creative technical work any more. Creative tech work simply doesn't pay.
The most recent version of WMP for Mac only plays .wmv and possiblly .asf files. It doesn't work to play .avi files with the video encoded as wmv3 (WMP video). There is no way at all to play these files on a mac.
we are busy pushing our definition of patents on the world, and they are buying it. I think that when EU falls into line, is when we will see MS pull out the BFGs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
From what I understand you can't write ANY software without violating many patents. I bet hello world in c probably violates at least 10 patents and in python or ruby you probably violate at least a hundred.
These people are patenting basic ideas and you can't design around them. No matter how much you try you can not avoid violating patents in any realistic software product probably in the thousands of patents. That is one reason why lawyers will tell you that programmers should NEVER EVER look at software patents. If you know and infringe you are liable for triple damages. If you know nothing then you have to license it, stop infringing (often not possible) or prove that the idea is not novel and get it thrown out.
Until you start writing software yourself it is really hard to understand. I can have programmers all around the planet implement something in the same language and never talk to each other and it is amazing that often that code is almost identical. Code should be protected by copyright and not patents.
How would you feel if ideas in books where patented? There are what about 18 plots that we as a species have ever come up? Well have fun reading if patents covered books. The expression is what needs to be protected and copyright already does that. The idea can not be protected since it is simply too general.
One way or another either software patents will go away or you can kiss goodbye any thought of actual working software. If free software did not exist and legally could not exist do you think microsoft would spend ANY time fixing their stuff? How about other companies? How many of the software products out there right now do you think will continue to be improved when no competition is allowed? You just have large companies with cross licensing and they get together to decide what software gets written and how good it will be and you get zip choice in that.
Something like 90% of software is custom written right now and you would basically wipe out that market except for large companies. Software patents and actually patents in general operate as a break on the system. They don't produce squat and neither do the lawyers. One way or another they will go away and I fear that it will be in a bloody way since that is usually the way these things historically happen.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
The way patents work is pathetic... they're only useful to have a couple of lawyers working all the day and getting rich based on the work of others.
The notice says that "The European commission has just passed its directive on software patents, violating democratic rules and procedures to the sole benefit of big non-European corporation and Ireland". As an Irish citizen, I'd like to know how the hell this benefits us.
There is myth that gets perpetuated by posts like these that treble damages can be avoided by not being aware of existing patents. Its flat out wrong. Willfulness normally includes willful ignorance.
It is not generally accepted practice in the business world to build without awareness of what was done previously. Patent searches cost in the thousands to tens of thousands of dolllars, litigation costs are in the millions, losing a product line could be hundreds of millions. Licenses are not a guarantee, especially not when dealing with competitors.
Also IP counsel typically interacts directly with inside counsel and the heads of marketing or product development. These are the people that down the line have to say they were provided reasons not to worry about specific patents and they understood and agreed. Without their involvement the lawyers' opinion doesn't protect the company because there is no reliance.
This is OTOH not they way damages are decided in most parts of Europe.
1) Damages are not used as penalties like in the US. In most european countries (at least in Scandinavia and Germany), damages are decided to compensate for the plaintiffs losses, not to punish the other party (that's what fines are for, if you've commited a crime).
2) Also, failure to check if what you are doing is illegal, is usually not grounds for acquittal (like in the US I guess).
My other UID is 1337
The patent system is really, really, screwed!
In the long term there is NO WAY we can keep the EU or any other part of the world from approving patents on software, because politicians will always care about the interests of whom/what put and keep them in place, ie corporations not common people. The point is that we're slowly approaching the critical level where the concepts of doing "the right thing" and "the legal thing" take opposite directions and become mutually exclusive until we'll be forced to make THE choice.
The real question is not if, but when the moment arrives, are we ready to act as pirates? Because that's the point "they" are leading us to.
...our new FruitFly-Brain-Manipulating overlords.
/. yet
Oops, that story hasn't been posted on
Patent infringement isn't copyright infringement. Punitive damages are unusual in patent cases. I believe that the damages theories are pretty similar to Europe. Patent infringement also isn't illegal in the sense that its not viewed as a crime like piracy.
This website plastering is just scaremongering, FUD of the worst order, to
try and make people run off frightened and contact their local politicians
about it.
Nobody threatened VLC, MPlayer or FFMPEG with shit. If anyone wants to use
the code commercially they will no doubt buy a license to do so, the advantage
here is that there is a simple way to get some working code, which allows more
people to get to a point where they need to license.
It's a distinct advantage to patent holders (no requirement to maintain their
own source code base etc., and an entire market of willing customers which
would otherwise not exist) and the patent holders know it.
Neko
I think the reason people get so worked up over patents on /. is that many of them fall into the classes of inventors and creators. And the patent system abuses what they feel are their rights, namely to build, use, multiply, and sell their own inventions and creations. The patent system as it is now in the US only grants rights to the patent holders. And patent holders are, for the most part, rich mega-corporations that claim rights even if they don't really have them. But any attempt as a small inventor/creator to defend him/herself against such claims is doomed to end in financial ruin of said inventor/creator. So, while inventors/creators have moral rights, the patent system denies them their legal rights. And that is something to get annoyed about.
In that faq linked to from the main article, it doesn't discuss the fundamental problem between software patents and "normal" patents. Sure, patents patent an "idea" but not the actual process. Patents protect the idea to carry out a process, not the process. For example, James Dyson invented the duel cyclone vacuume cleaner, and patented the idea. He didn't come up with the idea (process) of sucking up dust from the ground and putting it into a recepticle.
This is what I feel is the main problem with software patents, they patent the actual process, NOT the way the process is actually carried out by the code. eg. method by which text is highlighted in a document by encasing the text in quotation marks... This is a process, the way it's implemnted is the patentable bit, the actual code use.
Obviously you'll need programmers to compare code to make sure people aren't simply copying it, but surely this isnt a problem in closed source anyway?
It's like Ford making the first car, and then Toyota making a car... "hey, you're infringing my patented idea of motorised transport!" Where the hell would we be now if this were the case? Ford would be very rich....
a Vagina Licking Contest with European Leather!
The section of the U.S. Constitution that authorizes Congress to establish patents and copyrights is not the Bill of Rights. So basically, no, they aren't rights. The People, for their own benefit, decided 200+ years ago that some limited restrictions on their own rights woule lead to nationwide benefits (Progress). It's less clear today whether the trade would still be worthwhile.
Because, of course, in the UK we have no fair use! That's right. The consumer has absolutely no rights to prevent greedy monopolies ripping them off. Which they do with great abandon - ever heard of Ripoff Britain?
And then they wonder why filesharing numbers go through the roof... Not that I'm bitter or anything.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I recognize that there aren't a great deal of resources available to the average Free Software programmer, but surely after the deal with GIF a little more dilligence has been put into patent research?
Um... Why?
Some will take this as a troll, but I mean it in all seriousness when I ask "So what?"
The current patent minefield leaves NO room for independant implementations of any software concept any of us have ever heard of that that didn't originate either with-or-before Turing, or directly from the Open Source world. And even for those, it wouldn't surprise me to hear about some astoundingly trivial and ancient technique suddenly under patent, by companies that have adopted "extortion racket" as their business model (small enough fish can't afford to fight back).
Software like VLC and MPlayer know perfectly well that they violate a countless number of patents, and the authors just don't care (and if you really think they all live in Europe, I'd like you to show me "Connecticut" on a map of Europe). Any legit project that makes use of their source code needs their head checked, but projects like VLC don't care about infringement. And users thereof don't, either.
The corporate world, and the governments that pander to it, needs to realize that a growing number of people simply don't care about copyright or intellectual property in general (or to extend this a bit, about drug laws, speed limits, Terri Schivo, the outcome of our quadrennial tweedledum-vs-tweedledee popularity contest, and so on). The more they buy laws that result in serious congnitive dissonance when compared with physical reality, the less people take all laws seriously.
Software patents in Europe will have absolutely no effect on "our" world. The CEOs can all fret about the impending end to their current business models, the congresses/parliaments can all pass laws as fast as they like, but we will win. This particular "setback" just means that we'll start seeing a LOT more projects coming out of the Vanuatu's newest territory, Michigan. And in a decade, we might well have a large volume of software written on Saturn's newest moon, California, despite not even having a lunar colony by then.
A good measure of a bad patent is when it is so broadly defined that a different approach can not be engineered. It is the time spent engineering the approach that a patent should protect.
Some of the most profitable companies in the world are pharmas. They control products that people literally can not live without. They have patents that allow this. They also tend to spend billions in research and development of their products. Those products are narrowly defined as a chemical A that targets receptor site B and causes effect C as well as the chemical itself being patented, not a process by which a vaguely referred to chemical causes another vaguely referred to chemical to start a reaction that winds up with a lower level of a vaguely referred to bad chemical in the body.
Unfortunately, most software patents seem to be defined that way. Not engineered and vague. The patent writers are not coming up with good engineering in most cases (which would be ok to patent), but are patenting things that are not feats of engineering or research. A similar problem exists in biotech with companies wanting to patent genes they discover and all of the obvious one offs.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Move your development to an Australian server!
:-)
That way you escape those nasty EU and US software patents. In Australia, it is much much harder to get a patent for software. Sometimes it is impossible.
I know this because I work for IP Australia
We reject a LOT of software patents. We tell applicants that copyright law protects their work enough and that they don't require a monopoly for something which is NOT an invention.
I'm writing a patent.
I discovered this new technology. I call it a comparitive statement. It works like this:
I have this statement, right? When we do a comparitive analysis of this statement, if it is honest it executes this truthful section of code. If it is lying it executes this blasphemous section of code over here.
Honestly, this has never been done before. I wanna patent. Gimme!
It is the becoming the only way to send a message.
/. and watch as sending a simple twelve sentence e-mail will require seven layers of encryption and six chained proxies before hitting the Nym and Mixmaster systems and the replies going encrypted to random groups on Usenet just to avoid some corporate or government dipstick from checking our prose to make sure we didn't accidentally use a sentence identical to one someone else copyrighted twelve years ago as part of a book no one found interesting enough to read in the first place.
Imagine if on a given day every last person who has a net connection started up hosting torrents of everything that was being threatened by this absurdity. Source, binaries, the works.
Same thing with music and video.
It's headed in the direction of Open Source being killed off and fair use being beheaded. And still we sit and twiddle our thumbs. Time for massive non-co-operation. Sooner or later, they'll be brought to their knees.
Or we can not do anything but sign each others' web petitions and post here on
I mean, I love sci-fi movies, but I do not need to live in a Blader Runner meets Johnny Mnemonic meets Ghost in the Shell future.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Not the best reference, but it's pretty commonly spread around.
http://pub.cyberlogic.net/news.php?NID=662
If you look in here, you can see a quote from Linus, who undoubtably has some good legal advice, stating that he does not encourage engineers to investigate patents, because finding patent infringement is the responsibility of the patent holders, patent infringement is subject to interpretation, and you get triple damages if you knew about it.
There are a multitude of sources that will confirm this, that's just one of the first ones I came across googling. Check for yourself.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Why ? Because GStreamer was designed *from the start* to be pluggable. The whole patent issue is one of the main reasons why GStreamer is designed the way it is. Sure, it took a lot longer to get to a point where stuff starts to Just Work, because we wanted to make sure we would be around when the shit hits the fan.
So while a lot of other projects chose to ignore the whole patent problem, and a lot of projects used the GPL as a license (which indeed is not compatible with patents), making it possible for any distro to ship them, we had the focus of making sure that the GStreamer platform is pluggable to the point where the libraries can be put in or taken out without breaking the applications. It's also one of the reasons why GStreamer, from the start, has been LGPL - because that allows distributors to ship a complete stack of GStreamer applications legally in places where software patents apply (like, say, the whole US). Fighting software patents is a great idea. Waving the problem away as if it's not there is not.
Also, with the arrival of Fluendo, a company building stuff on top of GStreamer, (and also a company I happily work for :)), people will be able to get codecs for the patented formats in a legal way, if they chose not to run the risk, or if they want to be legally safe.
What does this mean in the end ?
Very few distros have taken the risk to ship one of the other projects, for legal reasons. (Apparently the mighty Debian ships Xine, and while on any other non-free subject lots of noise is made, this one seems to be left alone because it's a big deal).
It is no coincidence that projects like mplayer, vlc, and xine do not get shipped by most distributions. In fact, coincidentally, Fluendo did a press release on this very issue yesterday.
The European commission has just passed its directive on software patents, violating democratic rules and procedures to the sole benefit of big non-European corporation and Ireland
Just out of curiosity, can anyone explain why Ireland benefits from software patents?
My Solution to to put an end to all these corporations,and governments that think they own your ass and your computer.
solution #1 Take out microsoft -quit buying their fucking products.
Solution #2 Take out Riaa -quit buying their fucking products or downloading them.
Solution #3 If they can't sell what their patenting , they won't use patents anymore.
They want your dollar thats it,bottom line, and thats all they want, they don't give a flying fuck about you.
If we would all do this, in 6 months we would have nothing to discuss on slashdot.
Thank You
Gunillablue
ps:The real power is in your hands.
I'm not a business. I don't have any "counsel" or "head of marketing". Without patents, I can write whatever the fuck I want. With patents, I risk legal action from corporate whores. I"P" lawyers seem to think only businesses write software and/or people only write software for profit. Fuck 'em. I disregard ALL patents.
We also have a few hundred thousand penguins to assist in the defence of the continent, in the event of an invasion.
I have honestly thought that the most likely group to develop deep-space tcp/ip communications is the Free Software Community, as it would be next to impossible for any Earth-bound court to shut down a fileserver orbiting the moon. This offers the definite plus that it then doesn't matter who says what, unless they plan to ban satellite dishes, they'd have no possible way of cutting off communications. The distance also makes an FBI raid unlikely.
In the end, F/OSS proponents will be faced with two choices. Either see their subculture be slowly crushed before their eyes, OR pull together and put themselves beyond the reach of any Earthly court. I'm not sure there are any alternatives left. The very existance of F/OSS-style thinking has become an anathema to closed-thinking and in the end either you need a big enough gap to make conflict impossible, or the two cultures WILL fight until one or both are eliminated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The magic phrases are "Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive" and "software as such".
Firstly, patents for software are already being issued by many European patent offices. They are phrased as patents on a storage medium (a physical object) containing software with has a technical effect on the computer. In practice, this is a patent on the software.
Secondly, there is a blurry area for hardware controlled by software. An official has cited to me the example of an ABS system that might traditionally have been implemented from electrical components (patentable) being replaced by a microcontroller+software. He thought the replacement should still be patentable. The problem is that allowing this allows people to patent the combination of software+general purpose PC; the effect of that is that you can write equivalent software as long as you never run it on a computer.
You cannot decode MPEG-4 without a license without violating a patent(well, you can do the base level but that's it). There is no other algorithm to implement as merely following the spec causes problems. One of the many reasons I don't think 'standards bodies' should always be respected.
You're the one that allowed the one-klick patent of Amazone, aren't you?!
;-)
j/k!
(I think)
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I've writtent to my MEPs.
:-(
Conservative party are FOR patenting software. The letter was a disgusting patronising excuse, and tries to worm out at the end suggesting they want a 3-year 'review' clause.
(from Nirj Deva)
Green party are AGAINST patenting software. They also mention consulting with Alan Cox and Richard Stallman. A very well written response.
(from Dr Caroline Lucas)
The Liberal party are AGAINST patenting software. A short letter saying they've heard the fears of small businesses are will definately vote against the directive.
Labour never replied but that is because they are FOR the Directive. Especially since Mr Mandelson, kicked out multiple times from government for corruption, is our EU council representative and has the ear of Tony Blair.
No matter how you want to vote in the General Election, remember when voting for your MEP not to vote Labour or Conservative. Even if some of us HAVE voted for a certain party all our lives
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I'm Amer^H^oh sorry, Australian.
Our government is a few tiers below the US government wrt authority over Australian Law.
The Australian government has shown that, given the choice of protecting it's citizens or doing something in the US's interests, it will do what the US wants, even when an Australian's human rights are being violated.
The fact that we're not granting frivilous patents here is nice but it's irrelevant if our country is beholden to another country's IP laws. It effectively means that we will be left with fewer patents than other countries and they'll beat us down with their patent portfolios.
Right?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
America is not the world.
Oh, we *will* be, my soon-to-be-American friend. Once Bush is done, we *will* be.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
So this is what the patent office does: For every category under which your invention falls, the patent office has a number of "experts" to whom it might refer. These experts can really be anybody who can demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a field, perhaps by meeting certain criteria set by the patent office, through tests of sorts. These experts would be paid by the patent office and given access to resources needed to analyze and research a patent application, in addition to the current patent researching procedures. The experts would then have the opportunity to swing the outcome of the patent application into one of several directions, such as "no", "yes", "need to be more specific", etc.
There wouldn't be just one expert assigned to a particular patent application. There would actually be a number of them, all of whom would cast some sort of vote to determine the outcome of a patent application. How many experts will have access to a patent application will depend on how many experts are signed up to review applications for the affected fields, how many applications are being reviewed, etc. When you file an application, you never know who or how many will review it. None of the experts will know who any of the other experts working on an application are.
Many safety precautions will be put into effect to make sure that the system works. If you think that all experts will vote "no" on all patent applications because it's something they might want to do themselves, the patent office will require an explanation of why the patent application is being rejected. This will be reviewed by the office's normal staff, who currently do all the work of reviewing patent applications. If you worry that companies will file zillions of patents for the same thing in an effort to make one of them get through the process, this can be fixed by keeping track of applications filed by particular organizations, with the office's normal crew rejecting duplicates that are too similar. If you are worried that experts will not put enough effort into reviewing applications, you can throw applications at them that have already been rejected as if these are new applications, to see if you get the same outcome. In fact, patents would, in this way, undergo a certain moderation, kind of like comments posted here on /., and there would be a sort of meta-moderation system in effect.
Hopefully, this would allow lots of people to spend, say, a few hours a week--PAID hours, mind you, paid for by the applicant--researching new patent applications in addition to current office research efforts. This will act as a filter to prevent a lot of crud from getting through.
This means several bad things will happen: Patent application fees will go up for the "lone inventor" working in his garage, while big corporations don't give a flying darn, but this can be fixed by implementing several changes:
Why can't they just relocate the primary development servers to a country without silly software patents?
R.B. Boyer
It would be nice to hear a professional opinion: Were those patent decisions correct at the time they were made, and can one really defend their continuing existence now?
Someone probably already patented it. ;) The sad thing is that it probably really is patented. :(
Some of these people I want to teach how to do things with the brick of obvious truth.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Failure to check if what you are doing is not grounds for acquittal in the US. What not checking does is allow you to avoid triple the normal damages for willfully doing something illegal. Since the patent system is so complicated it is safer not to check because if you check and miss something you have to pay three times what you would have paid had you remained ignorant. Because of the triple damages rule the risk is much higher to check because you might miss something.
It's not the code. The code copyrights can be worked around by developing a distinct, unique implementation from the specifactions of the protocols.
The problem is patents for things like MP3, which are used extensively by music players and audio playing software and websites for the material. "Removing infringing code" doesn't help a patent violation, and the open source folks don't have the finances to implement a new protocol to replace that used by Ipods and other proprietary players.
Ok, so software patents suck big time. What do we do about it? Why not start a Free Patent Foundation (FPF). All patents owned by the FPF are freely licensed to anyone with the following restriction: Any party that makes use of a FPF patent library is required by the license to cross license their entire patent library with the FPF. Using a FPF patent constitutes acceptance of the license. Corporations would simply be blind sided because they are advised to NOT research patents or face triple damages. Now, when they violate our patents, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! ;-) Either that, or they have to stop shipping their product. If these companies really do patent 'defensively' as many say they do, then they shouldn't mind a bit now, should they? Once they are in the fold, all patents created by them are added to the FPF. Of course, I'm not a patent lawyer, so feel free to inform me that I'm a clueless moron...
...is just ignore patents, carry on regardless and make great software.
I know it all seems terribly seriously and gloomy, but when you have bad laws the only way they are killed or rendered impotent is if a large chunk of people reject it in everyday life and that's what people need to (carry on) doing. The FOSS community needs to harden it's resolve, stop flipflopping around and whining and just stay true to it's goals.
The 'law' has failed many many people throughout history and delivered incredible injustices and attrocities on humanity. It is not an absolute righteousness handed down by God or whatever creator you believe or don't belive in. It has certainely failed the FOSS movement, which needs to start looking beyond whatever the current law is now.
I suspect VLC and MPlayer are trying to drum up some sympathy and are shooting themselves in the foot a little bit with their "it will all end soon" messages (great software though they both are). And remember it was always pointed out to Slashdot by some here that Europe would not be the bastion of justice and morality some in the US thought it would be when it came to patents etc. Unfortunately the EU is riddled with corruption.
Just go forth and continue to make your software and distribute it by whatever means necessary. Because if you really believe in your heart you would let nothing or no one stop you.
What multimedia patents are we talking about?
Some people are saying "don't investigate patents, or you'll be liable for triple damages if you're found to be infringing". But this makes patents sound more like a boogeyman (or FUD) than a real threat. So let's hear EXACTLY what it is we're infringing on. Maybe the EFF or someone with money can try to get these patents invalidated.
JPEG = RGB-to-YUV conversion, optional decimation of the color channels, 8x8 blocking, 2D DCT, quantization, delta coding of the DC component, run-length compression of zero AC components, Huffman compression. Nothing worthy of patenting, IMHO.
MPEG-1 = JPEG for the I frames plus motion estimation (details unknown to me) for the P and B frames. I haven't heard about patent threats against free MPEG-1 code. Is MPEG-1 patented? How about the accompanying MP2 audio?
MPEG-2 = MPEG-1 plus support for interlaced video. If MPEG-1 isn't patented and MPEG-2 is, what is the difference? The support for interlace? The AC3 audio that usually goes with MPEG-2?
I don't know enough about MPEG-4 to say anything about whether it's technology is or should be patented.
MP3 audio is patented by Fraunhofer, who have stated that they don't have a problem with people writing free MP3 decoders.
Some implementations of arithmetic coding (e.g. Q-coding) are patented. I think H.263 video uses arithmetic coding. Patented or not?
What else?
As usual, they waited until everyone used it before starting to really turn the screws. Indeed, had Vorbis existed sooner or The MP3 patent crusade started sooner, things might have been very different indeed.
it uses the phrases "may infringe" and "up to" iirc. this is the situation for all software now.
god bless software patents =(
sum.zero
When I hear stories about legal battles, I am usually happy to say that Brazil does not have those kind of problems for two reasons. The first has to do with the fact that our court system is so incredibly slow and the second has to do with our laws being so ancient that new technologies are not usually covered by them.
To those developers that want keep working on their projects, I suggest learning Portuguese, saving a little money, and head over to our beloved country. Besides not worrying about being sued, I should say that people love foreigners (as opposed to the EU and US that hates them), and in Sao Paulo were I am from, the temperature is around 80F for a good part of the year and our economy did grow around 4% last year.
Come to Brazil my friends, I am sure you will love it.
PS: Did I mentioned Mandriva?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
The generally accepted practice in the business world is build it without having any awareness that it was previously discovered or patented, then have your lawyers look for infringement and negotiate a deal.
But weren't patents supposedly a legal bargain between the public and patent holders? The deal was that the patent holder would have exclusive limited-term use of their invention (allowing them to earn compensation now), while the public would have free access to how the invention works (allowing the public to gain compensation later).
Re-inventing the wheel, indeed. How backwards we fall when we attempt to reach so far...
I think you are thinking about trademarks, not patents. Hence why submarine patents are such a big problem.
It may have been in the past, but the practice of "submarining" patents in the US should now no longer be possible because they've adopted the same practices as the rest of the world. I.E. a patent application automatically becomes public after (IIRC) 18months. Previously, (AFAIAA) it only became public when granted, hence the ability to leave it in limbo.
Yes, we should cry out loud about how wrong they are in our industry. But, in the end, the problem has been already thoroughly explained to anyone that cares, and, behold, noone with money and power cares. Big deal, what else is new? It's ok for those in power to give no shit about what's happening to those below them. It's always been so, and it will always be. So what?
I say: ignore the stupid patents, it's impossible to create any single program without violating some patent (at least in the US, but maybe also soon here, in Europe), so just go ahead and get your job done. Get your paycheck, and let the company worry about these issues. If your company gets bombed out of business with patent lawsuits, go to another company. Eventually, things will settle one way or the other. Maybe the creation of big monopolies will prevail. Maybe GPL version 3 will defeat all software patents everywhere once and for all. Maybe things will always remain muddy and we will never be sure.
I also say: use that program, mind the license, but use it despite the patents (yeah, it's easy to be brave in a country where software patents aren't valid yet). Who will sue you, the individual home user? That's crazy. Just keep a low profile. Those are the strategies of survival in a system where everyone is guilty. The important thing is what happens to you in a free-for-all system. Some will get fried, but that's the game, sadly and obviously.
So you do a search, and decide that your implementation is different than what you find.
You still get sued, and if they win, you get triple damages. What you may have decided was not infringing, may not hold up in court anyways.
Of course, a quick search may be useful, just to be sure there's no big mines in the water.
However, who in the world has the power to search for all patents anyways? Even IBM has declared that it can't possibly manage to find all relevant patents to a prototype.
What you may question about patents is: If nobody can read, or get anything useful out of patents, what benefit is this for society?
A way on how to tell ppl to go drown themselves.
htop(top on stereoids): http://htop.sf.net
This is why I have so much respect for the people at xiph. All my music is in ogg format and I know some scum sucking leach of a patent holder cant extort money from the creators of ogg players. I seriously hope that Xiph will patent their algorithms before anyone else does. Just like copyleft protects, so should another form of patenting.
Yes, patents are a rich man's game. That's part of the cost of doing business in the US.
So how is patents good for small business?
The "It's just the way it is."-mentality is just the way India grew into an overpopulated, third-world nation after the English retreated. How to break Karma is to DO something about it, not justify it or make lame excuses.
CChhaapptteerr 11
..eerrrr.. yyoouurr nneeww bbooookk uunnlleessss yyoouu bbuuyy mmyy ddeeccooddeerr aallssoo. HHaa HHaa.
HHeerree iiss mmyy nneeww ccooddeecc. YYoouu aarree nnoott aalloowweedd ttoo rread mmyy
So you own my new book. Why did I sell you my book unless I wanted you to read this? Do you think you have a right to do whatever you want with your own property?
Why sell anything encoded with DTS unless you also want us to read that encoding? I think I have that right if I am able to do the reading. You shouldn't want to stop me.
Anybody who doesn't think I should read what you sell or give away is probably a judge or a crook. That is the real problem.
Real world:
We have a winner! The judge picked the most highly paid lawyer again. We are the loser! This is the real problem.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Although Microsoft owns MANY patents, of which some may be used (unintentionally or otherwise) in open source, i very much doubt Microsoft would blatently litigate against the software projects themselves for most cases.
In many cases it may be a lost case for MS to pursue it, and it will generate a lot of ill will to go after a project with no cash, and often run by individuals trying to help out Free Software in their spare time. They are not going to get damages, and considering they are a convicted monopoly, it woudl be unwise to pursue it.
What Miscrosoft will do however, is deploy their arsenal on companies USING open source. Any former company who was a MS shop, and thinking of switchign to OPen source, will be given the "facts", maybe under NDA, regarding the use of patents in the opensource software, and liabilities. That would scare the adoption of Open Source by companies.
Who knows, it may have alredy happend.
Have a nice day!
I work for a subsidiary of a large US company. As an engineer, we are strongly discouraged from researching patents. A product spec is passed to the patent attorneys who go through and do a search. If they find potentially infringing material in the product, we engineers are involved in accessing its relevance and applicability to the product, and its importance in the product (can we do things a different way).
Whether it is trivial or not, worth licensing or not, or what to do about it is then back in the hands of the lawyers.
Maybe then it would be necessary to create a Free Mathematics Foundations and whatever is implied by creating complex algorithms like those of the mp3; I don't really think that opensource software developpers would to the needed mathematics research work because it is not in their known skills !
In twenty years when all the patents expire no more software patents will be allowed as everything has already been patented. SO just wait 20 years and we can produce everything we wish without worry. (Yes patents suck but will we be able to get rid of them!)
To Slashdot or not to Slashdot. That is the question (that will cause me to fail an interview)
DTS Inc. holds a patent in Europe on that. It is no secret that, for now, official VLC releases no longer support DTS sound decompression.
It is true that VLC violates many many patents that are valid in the United States. It is no wonder why we have no download mirrors in the United States. We did have offers, but we denied them for fear that the people hosting the mirrors might get themselves into trouble.
We DO care. It doesn't mean we make sure not to infringe any patents, but we still do care, because we have had problems, and we expect to have a lot more if the EU directive is passed.
Who knows, we might have to remove MPEG2, MPEG4, H264, etc etc. Who would want a VLC media player that can only read Vorbis and Theora ? (that's not to say these codecs aren't good)
The original aim of the VideoLAN project was to stream TV channels over IP. It turns out all digital TV channels use MPEG2 (or more recently MPEG4 or H264). We couldn't even access these...
Whether we care or not, we have been a target, and we are much weaker than big companies to defend ourselves. We'd be fools not to care.
Remi Denis
Whether we care or not, we have been a target, and we are much weaker than big companies to defend ourselves. We'd be fools not to care.
Okay, fine, you "care", I agree that you need to use extreme caution to protect yourself from the mess of legal BS inherent in the type of code you produce (ie, anything that lessens the corporate hegemony over content and the distribution thereof). But from your own description, you do exactly as much as it takes to avoid legal trouble, and go out of your way to make adding on to the core project very, very easy.
You don't "care" about the law or the patents, beyond the danger they pose to your personal freedom and finances. I may give a mugger my wallet, but only because he has a gun, not because I consider him in the right.
You use phrases such as "official and liable structure" and "official VLC releases", knowing perfectly well that, although you have a damn fine core app, 90% of its actual usefulness comes from third-party developers supporting various patented formats and that no one actually runs just your official builds, but rather, ones that support things like DTS, MPEG4, and the like.
Don't get me wrong, I greatly respect what you do, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping the rest of us make use of the so-called "right" of interoperability that the corporate world would deny us be exploiting technicalities. I fully understand the need to CYA, and don't hold your need to denounce what you "really" do in public forums against you.
Thank you.
Of course, I would hate to put words in your mouth, and perhaps you really do vehemently disagree with all of what I've written above. In which case, why bother continuing? As you say yourself, if you wanted to stay strictly legal rather than skirting the edges and hoping no one (with a legal team) notices, you would basically just have another Vorbis and Theora player.
The solution seems easy to me...
1) I am allowed to implement any patent (for educational purposes) as long as I keep the solution to my self.
2) your share of damages to a limited liability company are limited to the ammount you invested in that company.
Implement any patent you like, and set up a limited liability distribution company. If anyone sues you, well you are not liable because you do not distribute infinging code - you only wrote it which is perfectly legal.
If someone sues the company, fold it and start a new one... You are not personally liable for patent royalties from the distribution and as the assets of the company are zero, nobody will ever bother to sue it anyway.
just let me say that i use VideoLAN player and
i just want to congratulate the people involved
for having made such a super-duper mega kick ass
media player!!!
i love the streaming feature, especially the one
where you can stream from the capture device!
amazingly cool software! (maybe they should put
that videoLAN thing on some lowly usb pen drives
and start giving them away free to those eu
parliment dudes?"
Well, yes. The point is, said danger is likely to become much much bigger with the EU software patentability directive, as we're based in Europe.
Unfortunately, that's well how it may end up. At the very moment, the only extension that I do honestly know exists, and that is not in the official builds is DTS decoding. And I don't know anyone providing DTS-enabled builds, except Linux distributions - which always provide their own build of software anyway.
If that becomes so, there are reasons to believe however that the overall popularity of open-source software among average users will fade compared with proprietary, patent-licensed software.
(Actually, I'd add we don't include emule partial file stuff either, but that's not for legal reasons)
Remi Denis
Its an undeniable fact of nature. If Congress put some research into the abolition of patents in general I bet we'd find out the implementation would sink the global economy as we know it instantly. More important factors would then govern business, the unimportant stuff like the environment, labour practices, fair wages, etc. You know, the stuff that rules the lives of the little guy.
That is not generally accepted practice. It is bush league practice. It's like having a slash-and-burn document destruction policy, look how much that helps MS. The ethics issues aside, any blind-eye policy to liability leads to a field day in open court. People will be deposed, e-mails will be found, and eventually it will be found out why a blind eye was turned, and who ordered it. Willful ignorance *is* bad faith. That kind of policy could win a battle, but will lose the war. Duhhhh.
Great. You're an examiner. Please refrain from speculating as to what might happen in court or what kind of patents companies want. That's not your area of expertise. An examiner's area of expertise is examiner-style validity, not patent strategy, infringement, liability, or validity before a district court or the fed circuit. It's not even validity on appeal or re-exam at the PTO.
Brucey has as many valid points as you do, and his are more important. For example, right or wrong, NOBODY wants to pay a pack of lawyers millions to test a vague patent in court. Especially since courts *hate* to invalidate a patent, especially on obviousness, and triple especially under "35 USC 112". His point is about the money, it's not about whether it actually is valid or not.
Here's a point you could have made - CS patents aren't vague by intention. They are vague because the art is vague - known terminology is rejected if it is not exactly right, new terminology is thrown in just for fun, lots of guys use their own made-up jargon, and the whole thing is necessarily full of arbitrary abstractions and distinctions. It's like patenting literary criticism, nobody can tell what the hell you are talking about.
As only patent attorneys are capable of determining wether or not a specific program might or might not infringe on a patent you will never be helped by reading them, nor can you be 'willfully ignorant' by not reading them as you're not qualified to judge your infringement anyway. The only possible outcome of non-lawyers reading patents is that the patent holder can claim you knowingly took their idea straight out of the patent database.
"It is not generally accepted practice in the business world to build without awareness of what was done previously."
Mmm, you havent been doing much software development, have you?
"Patent searches cost in the thousands to tens of thousands of dolllars, litigation costs are in the millions, losing a product line could be hundreds of millions."
Good. Now multiply those thousands of dollars with those thousands of procedures in an application. In fact, to be reasonably safe you'd need an entirely new form of programming, Extreme Legal Programming, where you have a team of two programmers working with a team of two lawyers who'll vet every step the programmers take.
Try that and I'll bet you'll never even get your product to market, not even if you could spend every dollar Microsoft has in the bank, because you couldnt crank out more than a line or two of code per day. But of course you'd be safe from any patent litigation. There's so little profit in suing bankrupt companies anyway.
Oh, dont worry, the USPTO allows you to patent something even when it is patented. LZW has been patented by both Unisys and IBM.
It's so heartwarming to see the level of competence displayed by shaved apes these days.
Hi Thomas,
:))
First of all I would like to thank you for bringing to my attention the fact that Fluendo are working hard to support proprietary plugins. Hopefully this will work out and will have a happier ending than other commercial forays into open source / commercial collabortion. Of course what will be interesting is what the eventual licence of these plugins will be (if I pay for a plugin on one distro and I migrated to a free solution do I have permission to copy my plugins across too?)
However I take issue with some of the points in your post:
It is no coincidence that projects like mplayer, vlc, and xine do not get shipped by most distributions...
Xine was shipped by SUSE (at least up to 9.2) and Mandrake/Mandriva (up to 10.2RC2) last time I checked. Red Hat are not the be all and end all.
GStreamer platform is pluggable to the point where the libraries can be put in or taken out without breaking the applications
Both SUSE and (old) Mandrake (watch out Mandriva) shipped Xine without potentially dubious plugins. A while ago I added Theora after the original install.
(If the BBC can do it [make content available in free formats], so can they
Are we thinking of the same BBC? The BBC I'm thinking of does not make much (Radio 1, Listen to 6Music) of its content available on free formats. Where are you getting this from? Last I saw the BBC had dropped its ogg trials never to return. This is surely a damning example of how Free media formats are doomed to failure. Nice to see Novell using those Free media formats too eh?
I concede that there is a slim chance such formats may become popular on devices like mobile phones but I think between patents and big media companies if they did get a toehold then they would eventually be squeezed out.
The basic problem though is that people (big or small) don't want to provide content in formats that most people can't already play (notice the shift away from RealPlayer towards Windows Media). Without DRM support and the promise that it won't be broken (whether those promises can be kept or not) there is no reason for big media to look at Free formats and almost no Free media format will have critical mass like MP3 did (which itself was not Free). Grassroots stuff is nice but most people aren't listening/watching it and don't really care to.
Brilliant! Thank you for that. ;-)
Creating software only takes time. Obtaining a single patent requires a small fortune in attorney's fees and filing costs. It's a very different situation.
No government would be capable to control websites out of its physical frontiers and, obviously, encrypted traffic would save the developers from tampering.
.
No one will be punished for using vlc, it's too hard to control. The only clear target a government (or a company) has is the developer (and the website where he publish his product).
I see "Data Center Paradises" in the near future, countries where the local laws ignore software patents and are big enough to be interensting markets. If a country has a 1100M potential customers, it's very difficult block IP traffic from/to it.
Let's fight hard and we will win or they will lose
Regards
In recent history, Europe had to deal with another interventionist government. In the particular situation I'm thinking of, 10 million of the governments own citizens were killed.
When are people going to realize that interventionist governments are destructive to their own citizens well being? The "EU" is no different.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics