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More Patent Worries for Mobile Phones
loekf writes "After the story about NTP suing Research In Motion over alleged patent infringement (do your homework, U.S. Patent Office!), there's another story on The Inquirer about a U.S. firm, Antor Media, suing a lot of companies over a 'Method and apparatus for transmitting information recorded on information storage means from a central server to subscribers via a high data rate digital telecommunications network,' see: U.S. Patent 5,734,961. When does the hurting stop!?"
I'm curious as to whether or not, if this patent is legitimate, it's likely to lead to lawsuits against the wireless carriers as well as the equipment manuacturers.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
>> Could it be any more vague? Sounds like a webserver to me.
The first thing that came to my mind was voice mail. Yeah, I know it's anything but "high speed" when it hits my ear, but the phone messages are stored digitally and transmited via fibre to subscribers, so I'd say the phone company is infringing...
I would LOVE to see them try enforcing against the phone companies.
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Patents need to expire more rapidly.
The emphasis should be on continuing innovation and increasing the velocity of discovery. Why? Because global competition has nearly zero respect for US intellectual property, but also very little capacity to match our pace of innovation.
If we want to preserve a world-class economy we've got to stop punishing those who can execute or pre-existing innovation and also shift our support to who can produce sustained innovation.
In other words, Amazon.com's one-click was a cheap one-trick pony, while IBM's R&D is an innovation factory in need of pressure to execute on its ideas more quickly.
My 2 cents.
Fortunately (for the rest of the world), that's only the case in the USA. Of course, unless the EU gets its act together and *really* gets to grip with patents (in general, but especially s/w patents) it's curtains for the rest of us as well.
... "most I'll give you is an extra year for that", etc.)
:-)
Perhaps a patent ought to have a natural lifetime specific to the patent, which has to be claimed for in the patent application. Give the patent-examiners the right to barter the lifetime of the patent vs the generality, taking novelty into account.
So, a patent has a default lifetime set up on a class basis (for-cars, for chemical-engineering, for software, etc.) and if a patent is truly innovative (in the opinion of the examiner), it gets a longer lifetime to start off with. Then the author and examiner can come to an arrangement ("yes, I'll exclude areas X,Y,Z but I want another 2 years"
Default lifetimes for different patents ought to reflect their industy-area (eg: software ought to be very small, say 3-5 years. If someone comes up with transparent aluminium via a novel process, they get 20 years for the process, as it relates to transparent-Al; 10 years if they agree to sell the rights for everything other than Al; or 5 years in general).
This would allow the patent author to decide how to leverage the patent, make them relevant only to what the patent author has thought of (overly-general patents would be useless because of the low time-limit) and still keep the 'reward-a-good-idea' mentality that fosters exploitation of innovation.
It'd require the courts (or perhaps a fair few more patent examiners) to oversee the increased workload, but it would kickstart the various industries again, and all the lawyers currently working on creating patents could work on overseeing them instead
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Will this affect satellite radio and digitally transmitted cable tv? Video on demand? How is this tech not obvious to someone skilled in the art?
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
a patent for a "Circular Transportation Facilitation Device"
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
The patent appears to be so vague that it could apply to the teletype. Or perhaps even the telegraph.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When was the Internet created? Back in 1977? How about FTP? When was Sun's .au audio format created?
Or how about this: Find any audio file that was on a BBS before 1991, and locate the BBS's owner. Remember dialup?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Could it be any more vague? Sounds like a webserver to me.
I just read through the patent and I'd be amazed if it didn't cover WAIS. I implemented Brewster Kahle's WAIS server (Wide Area Information Services, based on Z39.50 protocol) on high-speed networks back in the late 1980s through 1991, putting a campus newspaper, campus phone directory and a collection of wave files onto the DecStation 2000 running the server.
It appears that the patent office must believe more in time travel than intellectual property registrations given the wealth of prior art available. Or perhaps the perspective I read that they're "the department of information, not information retrieval" was correct; e.g. USPTO blindly approves the applications and leaves it up to the courts to decide if they actually have any merit. IANAL but several IP atty associates have given me this perspective and explained that one does not want the USPTO rejecting anything as a bureaucratic clerk should not make law -- a court should (!!!).
Unfortunately, this overloads the already taxed court system (district court here taking 12-18 months to get a date for civil litigation; 2.5 to 3 years for appealate court beyond that, meaning any civil action will likely take you five years to see a dollar starting from the day you file litigation, and assuming you have rapid discovery). It puts companies in limbo, causes hard working technology employees to be at constant risk (which they'll naturally migrate to other types of employment) and leaves the US uncompetitive.
Nothing like a five-year time table to block up technology development. Guess the trial attorneys have ensured that the Chinese and Indians will lap US technology development, eh?
*scoove*