Slashdot Mirror
PTO Rejects Instant Live Patent
Jivecat writes "Instant Live, a service of the concert promotion company Live Nation, makes recordings of live concerts that are rapidly burned onto CDs to be sold to the audience before they leave the venue. It's a nice service for fans, but Live Nation holds the patent for a technology that places markers between songs so they can be written as separate tracks rather than one big track — in effect giving them a monopoly on in-concert recordings. Now, thanks to the efforts of the EFF and a patent attorney, who found prior work of similar technology, the U.S. Patent Office has revoked Live Nation's patent. This is good news for those who consider Live Nation to be the Evil Empire when it comes to concert promotion."
Some people like to diss EFF here on Slashdot, specially when they don't win some cases, but forget to thank them for the victories that make our lives easier. To show your support and help them to help us all, shell in some cash. The digital world thanks you :)
Unfortunately scumbags like Clear Channel still overcharge for tickets and hoard any good seating for their crappy radio stations to use or give away as prizes. Until asshats like CC clean up their act I, for one, will no longer attend any live event. I'll just wait for the DVD.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
why does anyone need extra software to break things into individual tracks? these concerts are almost certainly being recorded into protools... and it's about a 1 minute process to zip through the total recording and and just seperate the songs into different regions... and then burn away... you'll get seperate tracks, and you won't have to deal with patent issues over something this insane...
now is the winter of our discotheque
How hard is it to run a line off the sound board to a recording device and have some dude hit a button at the end of every song to signal 'put this as a new track'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Unfortunately, that's the most debatable of the clauses. Much of the time, if it's both "novel" and "useful" (the other two things you have to have for a patent), and nobody's done it before, the patent filer will claim that as evidence that it isn't obvious. A lot of things are obvious in retrospect, but until somebody has shown it to you you'll walk right past it.
That said, "non-obvious" isn't sufficient, it has to be not obvious to somebody "skilled in the art". If somebody else seeing the same problem would find the same solution immediately, I'd consider that "obvious", but for a long time the PTO has disagreed. They say that often recognizing the problem is not always obvious itself, and it gets bogged down from there.
I'd really like to see the PTO work up a good paper on what they mean by "non-obvious", and try to raise the bar a bit from where it currently stands.