Sony UK Refused P2P Software Patent

blane.bramble writes "The Register reports that Sony cannot patent inventions in the UK that remove the anonymity of the peer-to-peer (P2P) user experience. Sony tried to patent a method of passing around user reviews of shared files, but the UK Patent Office rejected it, and then rejected it again on appeal. The article indicates the patents were rejected because the 'inventions' were not eligible for patenting. " From the article: "When a P2P user downloads a piece of content from another user's computer, be it a song or a game or a movie, he normally knows nothing about that user - or where that user obtained the content. Sony's proposal would change that experience. Sony describes a method for attaching a user history to content when it is shared among computers or other devices. When one user downloads a song, he can see who had it last and what he thought about it."

Comments

Strange Focus

[Enoxice]

The article/summary should've focused less on that actual invention (it's a nice idea and it might be cool) and more on why the patent wasn't granted. The summary almost made it sound like "omgz s0ny haxxored lim3wire!!!11".

UK European Patent convention

[Elektroschock]

The UK is party to the European Patent convention which clearly says that software, organisational rules and business methods are not inventions, not patentable subject matters.

In the past ten years the European Patent Office tried to establish case law which perverted the EPC and created the EU software patent mess. As we see now, patentability advocats are on retreat thanks to the intense lobbying of software patent critics. And the courts follow.

The major task is now to gain ground and continue advocacy. What Sony proposes here is no INVENTION. So no surprise that it is not patentable.

What will be further crucial is the US getting real and abolishing software and business method patents.

Stealth attack on P2P

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sony describes a method for attaching a user history to content when it is shared among computers or other devices.

This is clearly a stealth attack on P2P. A wolf in sheep's clothing. By attaching a history to every file you've altered the file. That ends multi-homed downloads since every bit changed in a file changes it hash code and makes it not match any other version. As such, a file like this would only be able to be downloaded from one source, provided that they have the whole file, and stay on line long enough for you to receive it.

And just what evidence such a file on your machine might provide in court is equally dangerous. You would no longer be able to claim you ripped the file yourself, even if you were holding the CD in your hand, because their lawyer would point to its trail around the Internet in reaching you. Bad Move!!

Sony clearly does not have P2P user's interests at heart as they tout this as a must have feature for the future of P2P.

Because otherwise someone will sue them

[Moraelin]

With patents being the sad mess they are, at least in the USA, it's not like they even have any choice. Mind you, Sony isn't exactly the "good guys" in the first place, but even if they were, they'd have no other choice at the moment.

To use your car rental example, imagine this: so you have your car rental, as in your example, and you start letting users write reviews and rate the cars they drove. I'll also assume it's in a program (e.g., an internet site where the users can book cars ahead of time, for when they arrive in your city), so it's relevant to the software patents disaster. So you're a good guy and think to yourself, "self, wth, it's just a common sense extension of what already happens with books, movies, etc, and it's not even that useful anyway" and you don't patent it.

So two years from now, when you've made a fair bit of cash and maybe even expanded into a new city, some patent troll sues you on account that it infringes on their "user-review system for car rentals" patent. (Which the patent office gladly granted, since prior art was about books, movies, etc, not about car rentals. So obviously it's a great innovation to copy it verbatim to car rentals too.)

At this point it may not even matter whether you win or lose, since patent lawsuits are the most expensive kind. You can win it and still go bankrupt because of the expenses. But chances are good that you'll not even manage to win it, since someone had clearly patented it a good year before your site went online, and you have obviously infringed on their patent.

So what what everyone is doing is hoarding patents as an aggressive defense. In that:

1. If you patent that first, you can't be sued later.

2. If they sue you for something else, you hope that they infringed on some of yours too, so you can counter-sue them into the stone age. (Of course, this doesn't work against pure patent-trolls, who never actually have a product or service of their own.)