Slashdot Mirror
Newest Patent Threat to MPEG-4
Sachin Garg writes "After the notorious JPEG patent which has made many big and small names pay
huge amounts to Forgent (total more than $105 million), PCMag reports that
AT&T claims to
have a patent covering core MPEG-4 technology and has warned Apple and
others of Patent Infringement. Pentax and Nero have already paid them."
1) Help to form new "revolutionary" file format. ...
2) Wait for it to take off and become popular
3) Use new file format popularity to hold companies to ransom thanks to the incompetancy of the current USPTO system.
4)
5) PROFIT!
But honestly, is this the way for people to get their money nowadays? Claim "prior art" on any patent which seems convenient and then hold any company which uses the format to cut a hole in their wallet? Any patent issues should be resolved before a file format is made readily available, therefore any companies who happen to use the format will know of any pitfalls.
I still admit that this may be nothing compared to the JPEG patent (which about 99.9% of websites use), but it still seems silly, just like any other USPTO story which is posted on /.
Oh, and FP :)
Some think the Internet is a bad thing. I just think that AOL is a bad thing.
How would this affect open source/freeware implementations of standardized codecs like H.264?
What about ffmpeg? I assume that will also be affected, as they provide MPEG-4 compression/decompression. What happens when you try to collect licensing fees from an open source project?
Maybe I'm completely off base, but I think I remember hearing that if you don't defend your trade mark, you can lose your rights to it. Patents should be the same way, if you knowingly allow your patent to be infringed apon for 3 years and never so much as mention it to the infringer, why should you have the right to sue?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I guess Dirac's time has come.
Before there were patents, there weren't any multinational companies with huge research teams; there were guys like Whitney and Franklin, who invented things on their own.
Before the patent was invented, if you invented a way to do an existing process or manufacture an object cheaper and/or faster and/or better, you could put all your competetion out of business.
Of course, under this system you would be a fool to let anyone else know how to make a cotton gin or whatever. So what happened was that novel things and processes were invented, and the secrets of these inventions died with their inventors.
The patent system was thus itself invented - you have a limited time monopoly on your invention, but in return you have to let everyone know how it works.
Like everything else, after a couple hundred years it's been twisted by those with the power to change laws. The patent was supposed to do away with the trade secret; now the big multinationals have patents AND trade secrets.
Power corrupts, but it doesn't corrupt people, the people who seek power are already corrupted. What power corrupts is the system itself.
(lame MRC="recruits")
Surely Apple's been in the game long enough that they've got something in their IP portfolio to sting AT&T with, and thus enter a cross licensing deal, rather than licensing it straight out?
when these big companies pay up to some little patent troll it just gives the troll more ammo to use against other companies, if NO one paid they should hopefully quickly run out of money for all the lawsuits, but the more money they get the more lawyers the more people they can sue ;(
Before you start in on your rose-tinted "but we have Teh Intarweb now, and computers are so cheap thanks to the Free Market(TM)" drek...
Yeah? And? Where are the flying cars we were all supposed to have? Where's our fusion energy? (Other than that big fiery lamp out in the Big Room) Where's our moonbase? Where's our Mars colony? Where's my fucking robot sex toy?
We'd have all of this shit by now if humanity were focused more on developing as a species and less on making money with the least possible effort. We need more cooperation as a species-- and note that "cooperation" and "competition" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. During the Space Race, broad swaths of humanity came together and cooperated to compete-- the West versus the soviet East. What did we accomplish? We went from the first suborbital flight to landing on the fucking moon in less than a decade.
THAT is what humanity can do when its priorities are aligned properly.
Now, it's Megacorp A versus Megacorp B versus Megacorp C, and they're all so busy playing chess with patents and lawsuits, they can't be bothered to innovate. It's fucking sickening.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
That's nice. So where's the cure to HIV? To cancer? To the common cold? Where's the organ cloning plant? Where's the "rewrite the genes of your choice" service? Where's the designer babies shop? Where's the "change your sex with a retrovirus and a massive hormone/stem cell injection" service? Where's the "make yourself into a furry" boutique? Where's the brain transplant clinic? Where's the "grow new muscles in a vat overnight" outpatient graft center? Where's the "upload yourself into a computer" facility-- or, for that matter, even something as limited in brain/computer interaction as a VISOR? Where are the nanites, the artificial T-cell booster shots, the dermal synthesizers?
Oh. Yeah. We can clone cats-- for $30,000. And we're kinda sorta maybe working on some kinda sorta maybe medical treatments that involve genetic engineering. Wowie zowie. Meanwhile, we're still freaking the fuck out about the fucking Flu being capable of mutating and taking out a statistically significant chunk of humanity.
How you can even compare our progress in biological science to our progress in electronics is laughable. We've taken the first few baby steps. Barely. No great breakthroughs that transform the lives of average people, like television or penicillin or power plants or automobiles. Just baby steps.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Either its the article or AT&T, but all I could glimmer from the article is that AT&T hold the patent on some underlying technology of MPEG-4? What is this mysterious 'underlying technology'? It would be nice if there were more specifcs, but until I see it just sounds like FUD.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Didn't SBC recent buy AT&T? SBC has pursued bizarre patent claims like this before, I wonder how much of this is SBC looking through AT&T's patent portfolio and thinking, "Hmmmm...."
If I'm right we can expect a lot more of these from "AT&T" in the near future.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I agree it stinks, in fact I have been working on a part 4 to my essay where I make the same point.
The problem is how to get from 'this stinks' as Plankton would say,to solving the problem without creating ways to game the patent system entirely.
One solution would be to have a requirement that patent holders have to monitor major standards efforts in their field of invention, but how do you arrive at a legal definition of a standards effort? How do you avoid the problem of someone creating a bogus standards organization for the sole purpose of creating an exclusion to a patent?
OK I know this particular problem would not make slashdotters upset. However it would likely allow the patent trolls to stop the law being changed.
I am not interested in just debating the problem ad nauseam on slashdot, I want to get it fixed. To do that we need to create a wedge between the patent trolls and the major corporate holders of IP.
If you look at what free software people want and where the interests of the big computer corporations lie there is a huge overlap, probably 95%. The problem is that a small number of ultras insist on all or nothing.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I will admit, patent knowledge is not something I can claim as a strong point, but a little bit of googling as to AT&T's patent on the coding of MPEG-4 brought up a lot of FAQs about MPEG-4, but not a lot of mention about AT&T. In fact, the only thing I can find relating AT&T to MPEG-4, after digging through a couple pages on Google, is that AT&T now is claiming a patent. Why isn't AT&T more prominently mentioned in a lot of these FAQs on MPEG-4 (one specifically having a section dedicated to who owns the patent)? If they had the patent, why didn't they let people know that the proprietary use of it was patent infringement? And, above all else, what specifically did AT&T contribute to MPEG-4?
RMS started warning about software patents about 20 years ago. Now we have an utter mess, and no one will be able to convince me that the ability to patent software has been a significant spur to inovation.
How is it that Daimler-Chrysler has a trademark on "Jeep," which started as a generic term used by servicemen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep#The_origin_of_th e_term_jeep )? How does one go about taking a term in general public use, and turning it into private property?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But honestly, is this the way for people to get their money nowadays? Claim "prior art" on any patent which seems convenient and then hold any company which uses the format to cut a hole in their wallet?
This is an example of submarine patents. You have an idea, quietly patent it, but noisily advertise the technology. Then you wait for the patents to be granted and for industry to incorporate your technology into their products. Once the market has matured, you fire off multiple patent violations in every direction. By then, the cost of removing your technology from their products will cost far more than it would to pay the license fee.
(For digital file formats, this is especially true, since both software and hardware codecs will already have been distributed, and third party customers will have distributed their data into this format.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Might be one of these?
___
*insert sig here*
The weird thing about this is that AT&T is attacking companies like Apple instead of the MPEG-LA. Apple, Nero, and other companies pay their MPEG-4 royalties to the MPEG-LA, under the assumption that it granted the rights to the technology. If this is not the case, AT&T is trying to circumvent the current licensing process and double-dip on the implementors, AND will likely hit the MPEG-LA as well. In other words, AT&T could likely create a drive AWAY from the technology rather than getting their hand into the cookie jar pulling this stunt.
That's nice. So where's the cure to HIV? To cancer?
If you had any idea how much progress has been made in medical science in the past 15 years you wouldn't push these points. We've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about how some of these pathologies come about, to understanding the exact molecular mechanisms. Being able to do something about it (without killing the patient) is another story.
In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the fact that the mortality of your heart attack is now under 11% if you make it to the ER in time, down from over 50%. Plus now you can get a stent, or if you get coronary artery bypass grafts, they don't even need to stop your heart and hook you up to the pump anymore. Plus arterial grafts have a >90% patency at 10 years, up over 20% from venous grafts. Or that if you get many types of cancer you can live long enough to die from some other cause first. Or that you can have virtually any kind of surgery done endoscopically (not to mention the fact that the anaesthesia risk is way down now due to better drugs and monitoring techniques).
But yeah, people still die. And will continue to do so. If you had any idea of how the influenza virus works, and how easily it mutates, you would understand how hard it is to deal with it.
It's very easy to knock something you know nothing about. But rest assured, many solutions to these problems are being presented every month. We're not idle in the bio-medical field.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Apple (AAPL) logo has one bite. ATT MPEG-4 license would take a second bite. Steve Jobs will abstract technology layers than pay royalty and redesign his logo.
Apple's Quartz avoids Adobe's Postscript license fee. iPod music is about to be fully abstracted. ATT will be left to sell MPEG-4 versions of pop music on their own damn network if they want a royalty cut. Jobs isn't going to let their fee ride over his iTunes service for free. Fees work both ways...SBC
DNA sequencing, stem cell research, cloning, nano-tech, and genetic engineering.. all patented.
We can't teach you anything about these topics unless you sign this NDA right here.
If you want to work in these fields go out and rediscover it for yourself, then hire a patent attorney before selling anything.
Thanks,
The American Way of Life.
I've been issued five patents during my career, covering the disciplines of hardware, software, and system design. I can personally assure you that the USPTO does not just freely issue patents. All five of mine have involved tremendous amounts of non-technical effort interacting with the Patent Office to convince them I had novel inventions.
In fact, for the last three I had to personally travel to the USPTO offices in Crystal City VA to argue with the Examiners and, in one case, before the Appeals Board itself. Endless paperwork, legal documents, and attorney's fees were involved. This was no cakewalk - the Examiners came at me and my employers with refusal after refusal and we had to counter them all, claim by claim.
OK, so now let's say you have a patent. It's not as "easy" as the "submarine patent" stories would have you believe. For example, if someone uses your technology for ~6 years (depends upon which Federal Circuit you're in) and then you try to shut them down, they can get an estoppel which essentially grants them royalty-free access to your patent forever. The court's "reasoning" here is that the holder of a patent has some obligation to police the use of their government-issued monopoly. It's not fair, according to the court, to permit someone to blindly invest lots of time and money and they pounce upon them after the fact. So if the patent holder doesn't act within a "reasonable" amount of time (generally held to be around six years), it is presumed that the patent holder is aware of the activity and, by not stopping it, has granted implicit permission. Nice, eh?
It goes on and on. Lots of people gripe about the patent system, but no one with any personal experience in the process of inventing something, filing a patent application, arguing with the Examiner and the Appeals Board, and going over the claims language word by word to satisfy the USPTO will ever tell you that getting a patent is "easy". Nor will they tell you that, once you have a patent, enforcing it is "easy". Anyone who says those things is inexperienced or an attorney.
Ummm... did you miss that many of these things too are also being patented so that companies can sit back and wait for someone to discover that their patented gene cures some disease... then wait for someone else to spend money developing the cure and claim they have the patent to that very gene that made the whole process possible and that they therefore deserve a large chunk of the pie?