Slashdot Mirror
Apple, Burst Reach Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "In 2005, Microsoft settled Burst's lawsuit for infringements on media player patents for $60 million. Many thought that Apple would be a ripe target next. However, Apple successfully voided 14 out of 36 Burst.com's patent claims in their iPod lawsuit. Apple would have gone after the remaining 22 claims. Today, Market Wire announced that the case was settled out of court: "Apple agreed to pay Burst a one-time payment of $10 million cash in exchange for a non-exclusive license to Burst's patent portfolio, not including one issued U.S. patent and 3 pending U.S. patent applications related to new DVR technology. Burst agreed not to sue Apple for any future infringement of the DVR patent and any patents that might issue from the pending DVR-related applications." The big winner would be the lawyers who reduced the settlement to approximately $4.6 million."
Why not just develop stuff :(
Laws are evil.
... everytime a company settles like this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"The big winner would be the lawyers whose fees reduced the settlement to approximately $4.6 million."
There. Fixed that up a bit.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
So far, from my layman's perspective, my Tivo can pwn burst for some of its products. Ahh the business circle of lawsuits... or was it life. I'm not sure here.
The game.
Guess what? Our government is itself a product of the market system. Cities like New York, London, and San Francisco are successful precisely *because* of their enormous governments--they compete for capital, talent, and prestige against cities with small, ineffectual governments that are unable to effectively lure and corral said capital, talent, and prestige. And as goes the city, so go city-states and nations: Somalia, being a libertarian paradise, is a rather unpleasant place to live for non-ideologues. Somalians, those who can, vote with their feet and leave.
GPL says nothing about making something similar.
When the GPL on WordPress gets used to shut down Blogger.com and MovableType, then we'll talk.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Really??? are you trolling or do you not understand the purpose of GPLv3? Are you being willfully ignorant? GPLv3 is all about preventing this sort of behavior. It is trying to bring about change by working with in the existing framework (one that the authors of GPLv3 dislike). Turning the existing IP laws against themselves. I'd hardly call that hypocritical, some would call it poetic.
If you think the GPL (any version) is "extremely restrictive" then you haven't read many software licenses.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dub you tard features, and from this day everyone on slashdot will know you have a brain powered by a hampster running in a wheel
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Not in this case. Burst is not a patent troll, they developed the IP in question, but outfits like Apple, MS, et all helped themselves to it, thinking they were too big for a little company like Burst to take on. I'm dissapointed Burst accepted the settlement: they had an open-and-shut case.
and dont feed trolls either please...
If you download a project and it is GPL, then feel free to ignore the fact that it is GPL, and use it under whatever provisions your local copyright law gives you (perhaps "fair use" if you are in the US, in Australia you get some "fair dealing", etc). Now do you feel more or less restricted?
It's funny how
There's nothing odd about it.
When I attach the GPLv3 to code that I have written and you don't like the GPLv3, you're no worse off than if I had never existed. (Furthermore, even though you may not like the GPLv3, but it still is a lot less restrictive than just about any commercial license for copyrighted materials.)
When Burst takes out bogus patents on digital video transmission, everybody is worse off because Bust can now prevent other people from doing things.
but when MegaCorp or someone else who owns IP tries to enforce terms of ownership, it's an evil bad thing...
There is nothing evil about enforcing legitimate property rights; quite to the contrary.
What is evil is that these companies obtained these "rights" in the first place due to a breakdown of the patent system.
Cue Bob Cringely on 1, 2, 3.....
I've read GPLv2, MIT/BSD, old-BSD, PHP, OpenSSL, the Apache licence, zlib licence, Boost licence, Microsoft Reciprocal License, LGPLv2 and LGPLv3. Which ones have I missed?
Don't want to Burst your bubble...
"Intellectual Property" is a loaded term. There are different laws regarding patents, trademarks, and copyright.
Software Patents are pretty much universally despised.
To help you understand the difference between a patent and a copyright, it's the difference between "we own the IDEA of a word processor, and nobody can write one without OUR permission," and "we own Microsoft Word, but you don't need our permission to write a competing program."
It's funny how a lot of people here insist that extremely restrictive licenses like the GPLv3 ...as opposed to the "Microsoft source code license" which allows you to freely distribute Windows source code in your own proprietary software, right?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
About a million...
Hint: proprietary software have licenses too.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If I hadn't burnt my mod points earlier you'd definitely getting -1 troll. I'd recommend you actually read up about the license. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Version_3
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
I don't know... Apple's?
OSx86 FTW
Back in 1998/9 when Burst thought they had a 'novel' idea, they were making the rounds pimping their wares (so to say) to all the large satellite broadband providers and anyone else in the video and content delivery industries.
They tried for an NDA, but the company I was at didn't believe in signing anything to preview some software from a bunch of nobodies. Their software was alpha quality at best, the so-called 'SDK' didn't exist (IIRC the one 'document' provided with the photocopy-labeled cdrom), and the components were nothing more than a simple windows server and client providing a delivery pipe. They also couldn't seem to grasp the fact that one-way satellite networks did not have a backchannel. Yes friends, you need to get your files to the other side with a unidirectional transport. You could compare this to someone giving you ftp.exe+ftpd.exe and telling you you should license them for P2P delivery.
I ended up tossing their stuff aside because after about a dozen emails attempting to educate people on the deficiencies of their system one just has to well.. give up. The only novel point was their 'instant on', but most datacasters like us already had this kind of technology, or didn't need it period. I will say that the demo was canned and only used a few codecs. So it was very hard to ascertain the level of bullshit in the client-server demo.
Regardless, I now find it extremely interesting that they are sueing people who signed NDAs with them and/or had talks with them. I am sure other companies had the same experience we did. What a bunch of douchebags.
If I download a project under the BSD licence, and I abide by the 'mention the copyright holders' clause, I can then use that software in a (closed source) commercial product and make money by combining it with my own ideas.
I cannot do this with any GPL software, it violates the terms of the licence. The GPL is therefore more restrictive than the BSD licence. This is an unassailable fact.
Now don't get me wrong... I don't have a problem with this - if someone makes the code, that person gets to say how the code can be used by others. Fine. Just don't pretend that the GPL doesn't impose limits and take away opportunities, because it very much does.
I've written and released software under the GPL, the LGPL and the BSD licence. I've written commercial software that includes BSD-licenced code (and complied with the terms of that licence, obviously). I don't care about the political agenda of either camp, for me it's just "what can I do with this code", and I get tired of hearing that the GPL doesn't take away anything when it quite clearly does.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You did not list GPLv3, of all things. Which I find odd, since you listed GPLv2, LGPLv2, and LGPLv3
To Apple, Burst now represents an additional barrier to entry into the same market. It won't make a difference necessarily to a large company, but a small potentially more innovative competitor will now have to pay off Burst before using similar features. It seems that Apple's lawyers could have taken out all of the patents, given how successful they were with the 14 they invalidated. They took out just enough to reduce their liability, paid Burst a token sum, and then left Burst enough ammo to challenge others--ultimately to Apple's benefit.
They've done this before. This doesn't seem that different from their settlement with Creative over hierarchical lists for sorting music.
Where the fuck would I be if I did not know this? God damn I am glad I looked here.
This is off topic, but is driving me crazy for a few months now. On my work machine, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, running Firefox 2.0.0.7, I get this nice little control box for slashdot comment display, with a bunch of sliders to see more comments, or to see less comments. Clicking on the comment summaries also opens them up on the same page.
At home though (Gentoo, Firefox 2.0.0.8), I don't get this fancy control box, but instead get a bunch of drop downs for comment levels, and comments styles (threaded, nested, flat), etc. Clicking on a comment header also opens it on a new page. I am running
I really like that fancy control box, with sliders, and that the comments open on the same page. I was wondering if any one knew how to get that. I tried poking around various links, but no dice. Tried disabling FF extensions, still no dice.
The BSD imposes more limits then if I take source code from the public domain. Oh wait, I can't do that thanks to our ridiculously long copyright terms. Nevermind!
Actually it is very much assailable. The BSD license gives you more rights to the code as a software developer, but as a software user, GPL guarantees my current and future rights better over that code.
BSD is more developer-friendly perhaps, but GPL is more user-friendly. That doesn't mean you can't make money over my GPL code, you just have to be more careful as a developer in the way you handle it (see TrollTech for example).
I can't see how you can complain BTW, my GPL code is free, you can try and use it, test it and see if it fits your need as a developer. If you decided to use it in your own software AND redistribute it, then, and only then, do you have to abide by the provisions of the GPL regarding opening your own code.
The alternative is no code at all for you. GPL forces you to share, yes. Is it bad? discuss.
You're looking for the checkbox labeled "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System." just above the comments on the article page. It's off by default, but you apparently checked it at one point, on your work machine. Presumably at some point they'll make it the default, with perhaps a preference option to use the old system for those who prefer it.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Did Burst ever make use of their own IP to do anything useful? I think that is the true test of the troll, that you sit on progress and make people pay you for thinking up crock.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
If I was Ballmer, I'd be throwing chairs at my incompetent attorneys. They wasted over $50 million by not picking apart Burst's patents and settling for way too much money.
I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have.
And if someone else did, I'd fault them too.
You can't say "the system allows crooks to get away with this, so it's not the crooks' fault". The fact that something happens to be legal doesn't make it acceptable.
Whoah people. Burst didn't win this one by my reckoning. $10m is a tiny fraction of what they hoped to get by enforcing their patents across the 100 gazillion iPods that Apple is 'infringing' their patents with.
I'd call this:
Burst: Pay us $1bn dollars, or we'll take a license off every iPod that you ever sell.
Apple: FOAD. We'll send our lawyer hoards after your patents, dumbasses.
Burst: Pay us! Pay us now!
Apple: OK, how many more of your patents do you want us to wipe off the face of the earth?
Burst: erm, how about $10m?
Apple: Since that's less than our lawyers fees, ok. Don't EVER try that again.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
I wasn't complaining. You were supposed to glean that from the bit where I said "I have no problem with this".
:), in some ways one could argue that a licence that enforces sharing while simultaneously delivering the source-code to the public view is an egregiously harmful thing. It forever opens up independent developers to false accusations that they copied and incorporated GPL-licenced code. There are only so many ways to write some of the more fundamental algorithms in computer science. What happens when all those ways for a given algorithm have GPL implementations ? What if two people independently write very similar code, and one of them is GPL ? What if the first implementation of 'test-and-set' or memory barriers had been GPL'd[*] ? Why should the closed-source developer be impacted by software (s)he may never even have heard of ?
With regard to your point about users - since (if I am solely a user) I am restricted to what developers do, I think the the knock-on effect of the developer-restrictions are very much restrictions on the users also. If a developer feels (s)he can't do something with GPL-licenced codebase X, the user doesn't get to enjoy that whizz-bang feature, or the software-project is simply discarded as not feasible.
In any event, (and to re-iterate, as I *said*) I don't have a problem with any licence that any software is released under - it's the owners privilege to assign the licence (s)he feels is most appropriate. What I was taking issue with was the assertion in the parent post to mine, vis: "The GPL only grants you rights that you wouldn't have had without it. It doesn't take any of your rights away.". This is quite clearly wrong - if no rights are taken away from you when you download and use GPL software, you'd be able to do anything with it that you could do with self-authored software.
To play the devil's advocate (since you *instructed* me to "discuss", you cheeky bugger
I happen to think the GPL is a good and useful licence, but like all good things, it can be abused. The moral of the story is simply to consider the ramifications of the licence you choose, for *any* code you release. I've released GPL code, and contributed to GPL projects. Likewise I've released BSD code and commercial (closed source) code. I've even released commercial (open source) projects. Choose the right vehicle for your code, and most people will be happy. Attempt to coerce them, or make a political statement with your code, and it will probably die a death, with some notable exceptions.
Simon.
-=-=-=-=-
* In this case, it would have been impossible to write a commercial operating system, "Windows" would not have happened, and the standardisation that the Microsoft Hegemony wrought would not have taken place. Without a standard OS, the software industry would probably have resembled the fractured state of the various un*x companies of the late 80's, and we probably wouldn't have seen the commoditisation of the PC, the resultant lower prices and exponential growth of the PC market. Without a single player driving the emerging marketplace, there wouldn't have been the enormous cash injections (and commensurate profits) needed to interest the large companies that fund the development of nascent markets. We may all still be using 80-character text displays (apart from the fortunate few using high-end workstations). All because of a licence.
Sure, this is a worst-case scenario, and it's just vaguely possible that the 30 or 40 open-source operating system communities could have come
Physicists get Hadrons!
Than for fuck's sake. THAN.
That was classic intercourse!
I don't care about the political agenda of either camp, for me it's just "what can I do with this code", and I get tired of hearing that the GPL doesn't take away anything when it quite clearly does.
You clearly do care about the political agenda, because the political agenda is what allows you to use the code in the first place, otherwise the code would all be closed and you wouldn't be able to touch it.
...you don't say. And how is "hamster" spelled, again?