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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.
And I have a patent for Windows Viruses ... so ya 'all better stop writing them or I'll sue your @ss.
Is AT&T Serious?
Nobody ever taught me about how lucrative this patent business was in school. Here I am, just a small-time dev working at an electronics shop to support my family. I need to patent something!
I think Nero paid because they don't want to be shut down. AT&T could easily hold up a small company in court for years, bleeding their profits dry. I guess someone just did the math and figured it would be cheaper to pay off the patent mafia.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
How would this affect open source/freeware implementations of standardized codecs like H.264?
The more case like this one we get, the faster free formats will be adopted by the industry.
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
Christ. Look at the earthshaking technologies that were invented/discovered and/or popularized in the interval from roughly 1860 to 1960: Radio, the telephone, the television, the laser, nuclear fission, the automobile, the airplane, the rocket, the microwave oven, the computer...
... Blackberries? ... Cell phones? (read: radio + telephone)... umm ... well, our computers are smaller now, and faster?...
Now look at what we've achieved since then. Uhhh..... let's see. Um. PDAs?
I cannot help but think that the shift away from R&D, the overreliance on patents like this story, and the constant threat of being sued/bought out by megacorps have combined to slow the pace of human technological development.
The new business model seems to be "obtain patent on a niggling detail of a process or device; sue over patent; profit!". Back in the day, the business model was "Research fascinating new things; patent them; bring them to market; profit." I'm all for a return to the old model...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
...so why did it take AT&T this long to argue that someone is violating one of its patents?
Isn't there something fishy about this?
Or is suing 'late in the game' now the norm for patent lawyers?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Some information on Dirac can be found here and here (PDF warning).
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Now that the Unisys LZW patent has expired ;)
I guess Dirac's time has come.
You know, the more and more I read stuff like this, the more and more I think that open source, general public liscense is the way to go.
Sue early: people say 'Ah, well we'll just use some other video codec, then.'
Sue late: people say 'Shit, we've committed our whole business to this technology. Better pay up.'
There's more profit to be had this way, which is why it's done like this. What, you expected some ethical or technical reason?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
We moved from a manufacturing based economy to a "service" based economy.
Now it's lovely that we are moving on from even that, and can earn money by letting others do the hard work and implementation while we can sit at the patent office all day and submit vague, obtuse applications (that read like and are about as specific as Nostradamus predictions, he predicted Hister you know!) to gain a monopoly on "methods", "software", etcetera all in the name of "innovation" (because without patent, there wouldn't be any you know. Civilization started when Romulus and Remus instituted the first patent office.....)
A great time to be an American. It's also nice we are exporting this type of mentality to the rest of the world too.
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")
(Yes, I know this is /. and software/algorithm patents are eeeevil to their core. Bad USPTO! Bad! But allowing the system as it currently exists, aren't there safeguards against stuff like this?)
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?
The problem with your request is that slashdot groupthink narrowly defines profit as bad, so with such a definition no there are no good uses of patents.
;) boat.
However, if we accept that we live in a money driven society and that profit isn't necessarily a bad thing then yes profits have helped many, many products come to market. For instance it is not difficult to argue that the invention of Nylon by the DuPont Company created profits that allowed for increased R&D spending that ultimately turned out Teflon and Kevlar, among other things.
The catch is that we can't run the control experiment so the standard anti-patent comeback to this is that some other player would have developed them anyway. Personally, I think that an anti-patent stance reduces to an anti-business stance, but hey whatever floats your (commie pinko
All that said the USPTO is incompetent and patents like "one-click shopping" and the JPEG and this nonsense are abuses of the system that shouldn't be allowed. A patent should, in my mind, cover things that are actually unique and non-obvious, and a working implementation of the patented device should have to be presented. Oh, and there should be some kind of common property catch where if something you patented has become widely popular and profitable and you haven't acted you can't try to cash in after the fact.
The point of a "..." or "????" step is that it's not clear how to get from the previous step to the following one. In this case, there's no "..." step. There's just proft.
corporations finally realise that the patent system only helps lawyers as is. This won't happen because under the current system, a company with patents to enforce can turn their legal department into a profit center--i.e. the lawyers make more money for the company (in licensing fees--extortions from smaller companies, and so on) than it costs to keep them employed, so the corporations see a positive bottom line, not a negative one.
r! Seriously this is how the elderly get things done.
If a company is going to force this kind of licensing patent issue on another company, then they should be obliged to issue this kind of legal action within a number (say 90? 120?) days of first learning about any infringement. This company has clearly waited until MPEG-4 is hugely popular, having been implemented in popular technologies like Qucktime, the PSP, in HD DVD codecs (I believe in the form of H.264), Nero Digital and Xvid..........
If a company with any patent rights had asserted its right in the first place, then maybe they would be in the right here, but to allow a technology to grow for a number of years and then assert your claim to large amounts of money is immoral and should be illegal.
What if a company like Apple submits and then counter-sue the company for deliberately allowing a free lunch then asserting it's patent, causing financial and legal pain to Apple et. Al.
It's like a bar giving out water to customers and then trying to back-charge for it when they're halfway through the evening, under threat of kicking them out of the bar otherwise.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
I think the thing that stinks is that they sit there, knowing full well that they hold the patent, and let the tech go into wide-spread use before informing anyone that they hold the patent.
With trademarks, the rule is enforce it or lose it. Too bad the same doesn't apply to patents...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
save the celebration until the FTC and FCC allows SBC and verizon merge.
'' Are there any cases of patents actually helping people/companies? ''
In the case of MPEG 4, there are dozens and dozens of patents that all the parties involved have thrown together to create that standard, and they all license them to each other. You can get a license for that whole patent pool relatively cheaply, and I guess for free if you supplied patents to the pool.
The problem here is that AT & T is not in the pool, and that they don't have any MPEG 4 products. Apple or Microsoft couldn't do this kind of thing because they are members of that pool, and by making patent claims they would lose the right to use the other two dozen patents. AT&T has nothing to lose here as they have no MPEG 4 product.
Companies like Apple and Microsoft mostly benefit because the system allows standards to develop _without_ everyone having to check that there are no patents violated. Specialist companies that concentrate on producing that kind of intellectual property benefit because they have a much better chance to get paid; on the other hand, they can't demand extortionate fees because otherwise their stuff will not be made part of the standard. Companies like Nero benefit first because there is a standard, which makes life easier, and second, because they can get licenses for everything quite cheaply.
The whole system suffers if there are any outsiders involved who don't play by the rules.
Please note that AT&T here really means SBC. SBC purchased AT&T not too long ago but kept the AT&T name. It is run by the same cocksucker who thinks Google, Yahoo and other content providers are getting a "free ride" on his infrastructure and wants to charge them for the right to travel his wires -- peering be damned.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
I think you better think twice about all that. It's easy to say 'down with the man,' especially when you ignore what the man's doing for you.
When there's more money to be had in patent-mongering than in R&D, nobody is going to bother to do R&D. And I don't care how much of a FOSS zealot you are, there aren't any free projects that approach the scale of the big commercial research projects. You aren't going to go on Sourceforge and start a project to develop the next silicon wafer technology. Development takes a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of expensive equipment, and to be honest, sometimes just requires putting a lot of smart people in a room together for a while. That kind of stuff is funded by corporations -- in the semiconductor and technology sector, in the pharamaceutical sector, and probably in lots of other places. That's not to say that 'lone wolves' don't do important bits of invention, but innovation -- fitting those bits together along with existing technologies -- is not something that's easy (or frankly, always fun; which is why they pay people do it) to break up and work on in a distributed-collaborative environment.
Governments aren't going to pick up the ball here either. Nor, I think, would we want them to -- anyone who's been paying attention shouldn't have been surprised about the recent "revelations" that research at NASA gets politicized. Can you imagine the right mess we'd be in, if some Senate committee handed out all the awards to do drug research in this country? (No doubt we'd have Viagra that would make your penis eight feet long...)
Unless you want technological development to come to a grinding, screeching halt, you want private corporations to want to develop new stuff. What we need to get rid of are these parasitic non-developers (to be fair, I'm not sure where AT&T fits into all of this) who are destroying the incentive to innovate and develop by companies that actually do useful work. They are the really dangerous ones, and if you look at the companies who do useful stuff (IBM, for instance) and generally play nice with others, they have some of the most realistic proposals for patent reform.
In short, when I hear people on Slashdot writing stuff like "fuck the system" and "down with patents," it reminds me of a suburban teenager driving their mom's minivan, while wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt. It may score you points with your buddies, but I really doubt that you want what you're advocating, if you saw where it would leave you.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
First, the article stares that the original letter about this was sent back in December of 2005 - this is before the merger/rename was completed. This means that we can't blame SBC (now renamed to AT&T) for starting this.
OTOH, knowing how the 'new' AT&T (aka SBC) has handled things before, I don't think there is any hope of them just letting this go and ignoring that they have the patent. If anything, they now have more money and lawyers to persue other companies.
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 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?
Anyone?
Patents helping companies, yes, plenty. AT&T was founded on a patent.
Patents helping society, yes, some. It is doubtful that there would be as much medical research without the incentive of a patent.
Junk patents harming society, well lets start with Henry Ford.
Before he invented the assembly line Ford made a much more important step to making cheap motor cars possible. He took on the Selden patent and the automotive manufacturers cartel. At the time the cartel insisted that you could only get a patent license if you paid a large royalty per car and that the car cost at least a certain amount. The other motor manufacturers went along with it even though they knew the patent was junk because it kept their sales prices high.
Looking at what we know of the AT&T case I can not tell whether it is in fact an example of a good or a bad patent. AT&T spent billions a year on Bell labs. Bell labs was founded as a patent factory. AT&T spent billions on research and then made it back licensing the patents.
This is a fair deal provided that two important criteria are met. First the party that gets the patent should be the actual real inventor of the invention. This is where the USPTO goes wrong by not following its own rules. They allow patents despite copious prior art and they allow patents that are far too broad.
The second criteria is that the 'invention' must be something that would not have been discovered anyway. This is where the US patent law needs to be changed. The 'obvious' criteria is not working.
A third criteria some people are trying to propose is some sort of fence test. A big problem with software patents is that you don't know where the field of the invention starts or stops. I think that this is probably just another aspect of the second prong.
I have no problem with the patentability of the RSA algorithm. There are four or five other patents I have read that are justifiable. But 98% of the software patents issued are pure junk.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I am afraid that you are infringing on one of my patents.
/. With content that is directly related to the article to which said First Post was posted is contained."
"A First Post on
I would kindly ask that you remove your post and rewrite it at some later point in this discussion.
Intelligent First Posts, next they actually look at patents before the issuing them... What is the world coming to?
This sounds like a SCO/Darl McBride strategy:
1. alert the world that "ubiquitous thing X" is infringing on your IP
2. start sending out bills
3. use the court system to refrain from telling the public exactly how they are infringing.
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
Yes, a license was always required. But the MPEG LA visual license is royalty-free for less than 100,000 units, so someone who just wanted to personally use open source MPEG-4 stuff like xvid or tcpmp could just sign MPEG LA's license, compile his own copy of the code, and report to MPEG LA a sale of one unit (or few more with updates or multiple computers), and pay nothing. A nuisance (I do not know of anyone other than myself who has gone through this), of course.
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
The reason XVID binaries can only be found on underground networks, is because the MPEG4 standard is INFESTED with patents. There's no way an open source project can pay all the licenses. Ergo, they develop for "academic purposes", and provide only the source code so you have to compile it yourself. The binaries are unofficial, unsupported, in other words, taboo. Legally speaking, NOBODY should be using xvid AT ALL.
(Isn't it amusing how commercial interests hinder innovation? I've been expecting DivX-capable players since 5 years ago.)
Opensource/freeware doesnt means patent free.
AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs, fortunately we have better luck with image (PNG) and audio (FLAC) formats.
Besides MPEG-4, JPEG2000 is the only other "standard" option available for cutting edge video compression. JPEG2000 recently gained traction with digital cinema. But it will no longer be a surprise to see such patents come up for it within another 3-4 years. It has already had a near miss recently.
Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion, above text taken from this post at Data Compression News Blog: After JPEG, Now Patent Threat to MPEG-4
And, above all else, what specifically did AT&T contribute to MPEG-4?
Nothing. They probably patented something a long time ago that got independently implemented in MPEG-4. This is the very definition of a submarine patent.
The problem is that this test can not* easily be applied in a proper manner.
If you place a dozen random engineers in a room, and ask them to solve a problem, you are likely to get only a couple of different solutions. Patents on these should be disallowed. Other solutions would be patentable.
Note from the link that An invention is nonobvious if it would be viewed as an unexpected or surprising development by someone skilled in the technology of the particular field. Note that it's not nonobvious to joe-six-pack, but to someone who is knowledgeable in the field. Are we really to believe that the poor people down at the USTPO are experts in every field? Almost by definition, even if you start by hiring 'skilled' people, they lose their 'skilled' status as soon as they leave the field (due to changes in the field) to work the patent desk, and you end up with non-skilled people reviewing for obviousness.
The patent system as designed is set up to fail...it can end nowhere other than where we are today.
*some suggest independant review boards, but that smells like the old-boys club to me... i.e:the system will just be broken for some peope, not everyone. Perhaps patent review would be like jury-duty for engineers.... :)
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
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
The parent is correct that MPEG-4 is "infested" with patents. You could easily say that the main reason the MPEG organization exists at all is due to the issue of patents in multimedia. They are countless. There are so many patents governing every individual aspect of multimedia file formats like MPEG, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to move forward with a product without licensing some of them.
Seriously. If the companies that hold the multimedia patents did not work together, there would be no multimedia.
The MPEG-LA organization mentioned in TFA is the compromise these companies achieved. The purpose of MPEG-LA is to license those patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" basis. "Non-discriminatory" means anyone is entitled to license the patents -- the patent owner cannot wield the patent as an anti-competitive tool. "Reasonable" means the fee does not amount to holding the licensee hostage; it does not, however, necessarily mean that the fee is affordable to anyone who asks.
An open source project like XviD, which has no money, is not in a position to license the MPEG patents, so they don't. As the parent said, the source code is available "for academic purposes." It's not illegal. The source code itself doesn't do anything. A working binary, on the other hand, may be infringing.
Given this legal gray area, why would a company like Philips take the risk of incorporating XviD compatibility into its products?
Easy. There's no risk. Philips licenses the patents. Case closed.
Breakfast served all day!
Some people claim that the US patent system is broken, but that way of expressing the problem is a bit misleading. The word "broken" implies that something undefined caused the patent system to be disfunctional. That's not what happened. The disfunctionality was caused deliberately. Those who want government corruption so that they can make money have caused the patent system to be underfunded. They've done the same to the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Here are short reviews of books about the corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
In the future, everyone will have 15 software patents. Then we can sue each other until we are all rich. That will put RMS out of business. Bwahahahahaha.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
You must have a dumbass lawyer if this patent can get through and you had issues. Not to be rude, but that patent PROVES there is an issue.
Here's an example of how SBC is trying to win back the consumer. (The reason for this blog was SBC's incredibly poor customer service. The U.S. lags considerably behind other countries on price and speed. Taiwan: $23 USD. Hong Kong: $19 USD. etc.)
You should probably know that SBC has expanded outside California, even before it merged with AT&T. And you are right about them having a bad name. Not that AT&T has a much better one.
Patents, constitutionally, only exist for the "promotion of the useful Arts and Sciences." They don't exist to guarantee inventors revenue streams.
Now, you could say that the potential revenue stream that an inventor may get is what caused her to invent the safety pin, and that without patent protection, instead of inventing the safety pin the inventor would have instead sat on the couch and watched Jerry Springer. But the burden of proof for such a counter-argument is on he who puts it forth: why wouldn't the inventor have invented it anyway? How many inventors of our most seminal technologies claim to be motivated primarily by economic incentives? If this inventor had not invented the safety pin, why would no one else have invented it independently?
The truth is, there are a host of natural incentives for inventing the safety pin that exist without patent protection. The obvious one is: people buy safety pins. True, you wouldn't be able to avoid others from also making and selling safety pins, but there is nothing that prevents you from selling them yourself. And there are a number of 'first-mover' advantages in any market. If you can't use those advantages to your benefit, then perhaps you don't deserve to make as much money as a competitor that can. And the marketplace, in general, actually benefits from this competition.
Substitute any invention or discovery for 'safety pin' above. The argument is the same.
The following is more specific: the safety pin is a rather trivial 'invention' -- anything that couldn't naturally be protected by trade-secret should be considered obvious enough that it doesn't warrant patent protection in the first place. This harks back to my original post, about the essential trade involved in creating a patent system: inventor discloses a secret, society grants monopoly. If the inventor couldn't protect his original trade secret, he has nothing to trade to society in order to get his monopoly. What is the secret he can bring to the table to trade for? Thus, the patent is invalid to begin with. The much lamented 'patent quality' issue is also at play here.
I know that the current patent system doesn't recognize these arguments; it grants patents for essentially anything that can be created, regardless of the value to society of disclosing it publicly in a patent application. But that doesn't change the fact that the constitutional basis for giving Congress the power to grant idea monopolies is based in 1) an argument for spurring the Arts and Sciences and 2) an exchange of value for value (disclosure of a trade secret for grant of patent).