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Patent Troll Attacks Cable, Digital TV Standards
DavidGarganta writes "A patent troll firm in suburban Philadelphia, Rembrandt IP Management, is trying to force large cable operators and major broadcasters to pay substantial license fees on the transmission of digital TV signals and Internet services. The firm is apparently trying to get 0.5% of all revenues from services that supposedly infringe on the patents. The targeted companies include ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter and Cablevision. According to MultiChannel News, Rembrandt's assault is especially aggressive, even for a patent troll: 'It is attacking two key technology standards used by the cable and broadcast industries, CableLabs' DOCSIS and the Advanced Television Systems Committee's digital-TV spec. "If they're successful, this could affect everything from the cost of cable service to the price of TVs," said the attorney close to the litigation, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.'"
What the hell is a patent troll?
When I first read it I assumed it had something to do with internet trolling but the articles describes it as some sort of legitimate enterprise.
Aren't patents wonderful? Spreading innovation everywhere!
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
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SCO isn't a patent troll. SCO does have a business that is not based on suing others for patent infringement, and that's why they are in so much trouble now: countersuits. A patent troll is immune to being sued because it does not distribute anything, it just makes money through royalties and lawsuits, and so can't really be sued for anything. It is actually a very dangerous entity, because it has nothing to lose.
Palm trees and 8
Sooner or later, we'll save ourselves untold trouble if we vastly scale back the notion of Intellectual (imaginary) property to something relatively sensible.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
just look at the list of companies.
they may not get along with each other, but the last thing you want to do is force them to unite against a common enemy.
i think they just opened a can of woop-ass.
In their careers section they have the following description.
http://www.rembrandtip.com/careers.html
"
Analyze markets and companies to assess IP commercialization opportunities
Develop and model business cases and royalty analysis for specific licensing opportunities or industries
Perform competitive analysis breakdown and strategic direction of leading industry companies
Supporting analysis for new business opportunities around targeted patent acquisitions
"
Give me a freaken break! This company goes out looks at what are up and coming industries. Then it "creates" ideas and patents the heck out of them so that they can license and throttle an up and coming industry.
This is not even funny. Imagine coming up with some really cool idea, but to have it patented away from you. This is how industries are broken. Part of the problem with this is that lawyers can sue without restrictions. Lawyers can go fishing in the industry. They can patent, sue and see what sticks.
To make that go away, you can do the following:
1) Make lawyers work pro-bono (as they do in many countries). That is they can only charge so much.
2) Make lawyers pay if the lawsuit fails. For example, if say somebody brought up a lawsuit where they wanted 50 billion say, "if you loose you need to come up with say 1%". That way you can still sue, but you better have a good case. Otherwise it is going to cost you quite a bit.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The concept is called adverse possession. In real property someone can aquire possesion of abandoned property
by open and continous use. Now you wouldnt want someone becoming the new patent/copyright holder but the negative part
"extinguishing the rights of the prior holder" would make perfect sense and help deal with both the problems
of patent trolls and abandoned copyrights as well as legalizing abandonware.
If a reasonable person knows or should have known their patent or copyright was being infringed on and takes
no action within say 3 years, their patent or copyright becomes null and void. Also a system could be set up
to allow "notices of intended infringement" to be filed with the copyright office, if the copyright or patent
holder does not respond within the required time then the copyright or patent would lapse and the work
would go into the public domain.
I knew this girl from my college that worked at Rembrandt.
She explained that the way that these operations work is they hire students with slightly above rudimentary technical skills from the local universities in technical courses of study. Their "discovery" process simply entails these students trying to reverse engineer the mechanisms that they hold patents for. However, since they're not trying to actually build the device, they usually stop when they have a guess that suits their needs.
To put it bluntly, they do not really know; it is a wild guess, and hope that they can litigate it successfully.
I agree. What makes this troll particularly disgusting (for the benefit of the non-RTFA'ers) is that it is based upon patents originally owned by AT&T which had agreed to license the patents to all for Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The patents got bought up by this troll company which is now refusing to honor those terms. If this is allowed to stand, then no company can ever rely on FRAND as a business assurance. Any patented process could get sold to an IP management company and be fair game for extortion.
I propose two short-term fixes.
First, FRAND terms should be able to be added to the patent itself, either originally or through some amendment process. That way, if it gets bought or sold, the IP holding compnay has to adhere to the original terms.
Second, companies that are developing open standards should be allowed some kind of superpatent, where (presumably for higher fees) there is a public hearing at which the final standard is vetted, and challengers are given sufficient time to come forward with their own patents which may encumber upon the proposed open standard, and they can negotiate whatever terms are in their best interest, without restriction. Afterwards, though, if the superpatent is granted, no more challenges will be entertained. Anyone who finds a prior patent in their closet or falling out of their portfolio five or ten years hence will be out of luck.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I do not know what their patent is, but the ideas from the DOCSIS MAC layer are also used in all 802.11 standards as well as satellite modem standards. The MAP metod to mix CSMA-CD and mandatory transmit opportunities is the de-facto method for managing Layer2 QoS in all subscriber oriented tech that has hit the market for the last 10 years. There are other places where other network standards have heavily borrowed from DOCSIS.
So if their patents are anywhere close this it will get extremely entertaining...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This is exactly what we need at this moment. This might be the straw that broke the camel's back because with so many potentially affected, and with HDTV the new "standard", we are going to see a backlash not from a single company but an entire industry that is now being forced to pay ransom to stay in business thanks to that standard. The way I see it is that the FCC(and any other FCC-like organizations in other countries) will take a decent portion of the heat for forcing the industry to use a non-open standard, that will then put pressure on the USPTO to make some real reform. Where it goes from there is a bit cloudy but I suspect this will be enough to force the Supreme Court to rule on this type of behavior; after all, patents are supposed to promote innovation, not stifle it.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
It's time to kill software patents once and for all. This is not what the patent system was intended to do. There's no investment by the litigant, other than monetary. It's not like the company involved is offering any value to the TV broadcast industry. It's nothing but a tax, worse than a tax because at least your tax money has some return. What Rembrandt is doing is a legal extortion racket. In any other setting this would be a crime.
Gotcha capitalism at its finest. Sickening. Enough is enough already.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Why should someone who holds the patent get a percentage of revenue not generated by the patent? Even if they win the suit on the point of ownership, etc. There is no legal reason for broadcasters to pay a percentage of revenue they generate from the combination of all the technologies and content they use.
At most they should get a percentage of sales of the devices that use the patent directly.... not Ad revenue or other licensing revenue for syndicated shows, DVDs, etc.
What actual devices implement this patented technology?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Analog TV is set to be turned off, rendering many TVs useless next year, unless a convert is purchased.
So instead of turning off Analog and going all digital, leave analog on until the patent expires.
I'm sure a lot or Analog TV owners will be happy.
A number of people are saying that this patent troll company will get its ass whooped because of the companies they are trying extort. Perhaps. But here's a rather more cynical view that I consider at least as likely. It has to do with the other end of the incentives -- profit and loss.
Most if not all the cable and media companies have a virtual monopoly on providing you service. Consider, how many of us have any choice in which cable provider to bring service to the home? So, what happens in this situation is that because the company can pretty much raise your rates or reduce your service by say, shifting channels currently on the cheap "Basic" bundle over to the pricier premium bundles. They can pretty much write their own profits. So now patent troll company comes and wants $X piece of the pie. As a cable provider, they'd look at the cost and risk of legal action vs. shelling out the money for a new agreement. Result: they just jack up rates for the consumer and pay off the extortionist, safely keeping the patent system alive for their own future interests.
We the consumers would see another jump in cable rates or some such service change, but there's not going to be a straw to break the patent camel's back on this one.
Not quite. http://www.eolas.com/research.html
Dr. Michael Doyle of Eolas is actually a well-respected researcher in bioinformatics, is partnered with the University of California and demonstrated a working plug-in enabled browser at Xerox PARC in 1993. He is, incidentally, the son of a noted inventor, so the urge to create seems to run in the family. The company's other projects include SAGA, Fios, Zmap and ODIN.
In 1994, he offered to license the plug-in technology to Microsoft and was rebuffed. So, he went after them. Incidentally, Eolas' license page specifically states that Dr. Doyle is a supporter of open source and non-commercial uses covered by this so-called "906 patent" are allowed via the issuance of a royalty-free license. http://www.eolas.com/licensing.html
As much as I hate patents, Eolas isn't the patent troll that some folks make then out to be; Doyle's idea was to build a browser-centric platform for the biomedical industry, and the company actively does software research and creates actual technologies. Microsoft's violation of the "906" patent made Eolas' platform project commercially nonviable, at least in Eolas' eyes and Doyle has stated his case that there were no legal alternatives after Microsoft refused to license the technology from them in '94.
And lest anyone weep for Microsoft, this is just an example of "what goes around, comes around," as VirtualDub developer Avery Lee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub#Advanced_Systems_Format_support can tell you.
SCO, on the other hand, bought what they thought at the time was exclusive ownership of somebody else's (Bell Labs/AT&T, University of Ca.) technology, whole cloth, made little if any improvement to it, and attempted to use it as a patent/copyright hammer to flatten other software projects that demonstrably violated none of SCO's IP/licenses/patents. At least, none that SCO could ever prove in court. I would consider SCO much closer to a patent troll that Eolas, as they didn't invent the hammer they were attempting to wield. Eolas, at least, did design and build their own hammer.
"If they're successful, this could affect everything from the cost of cable service to the price of TVs," said the attorney close to the litigation, who spoke only on condition of anonymity."
.50 BMG rounds for all fortune 500 companies.
I would like to point out, that in America when cable was first offered to the public, the ONLY purpose of buying it was so that you can watch TV WITHOUT commercial interruption. Else, it was the typical bunny ears with tinfoil wrapped around them, watching General Hospital on ABC or was it CBS, and have to watch a commercial every five minutes or so.
I think it happened in or around this order....
MTV proved to attract quite the audience, but most importantly, impressionable young soon-to-be Consumers. Marketing types, shall focus in on this, "untapped" market... or rather, the bucket for which they might shoot the fish; made of gold, with complimentary
MTV used to play music videos, as might be suggested by the name. Then came the trends focusing on teen appeal; the first commercials on MTV were Noxima commercials and they even used one of the female VJs.
As MTV was being raped by Capitalism, not to mention the Musicians and Artists--as by this time, it's been established that if a band can get a video to be played on MTV, they are as good as gold--other major networks soon followed suit.
HBO trying so hard to maintain the original concept, of a Home Box Office (hence the HBO), first resorted to in-house production, heavily laden with product placement or other dung such as plots or lines conforming tightly with social trends; like anti-racist tears, or commie-bastard themes...
Then with the marketers pouring so much money into Cable Television, a market they would have loved to defeat for many reasons, let alone the fact that it was a product that freed the Consumer from Advertisements to begin with, Cable television exploded.
Advertisers were SO ADAMANT in penetrating cable television, they did everything from attempt to bankrupt the networks (by means of connections, such as getting buddy buddy with the utilities companies--gas, electricity, phone--and all sorts of other avenues) to outright attempting to sue them for not allowing them slots for their commercials. Forcing the cable television networks to start airing commercials in disregard of the fact that the Consumers were paying for the service, and had expectations of what their product received would be.
Now, this might shed pity upon the cable television networks. And maybe it should. However, for those who still might wonder how this "hurts" the consumer...
Cost of Cable Television, and considering inflation, has only gotten more expensive; it never got cheaper, and that's likely by demand of the Advertisers who insist that if a Consumer has to pay for something, they'll take it more seriously.
So there is something amuck with the whole OP, as when I hear Attorneys blabber stuff like what I quoted... what garbage to fool the Consumer into a reason to jack up the price of Cable Television. When, the fact is, they make so much money from the Advertisers, they can afford to revamp their entire infrastructure twenty times and still come out heads over toes all the while giving it out for free to all those who might have a coaxial jack in their house, outhouse, doghouse or whateverhouse.
And where would the extra money go to; if they do raise prices under this false pretense? Who the fuck knows; but what I do know, who it will go to you probably didn't vote for.