Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."