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Encyclopedia Britannica Loses Information-Retrieval Patent Ruling
angry tapir writes with a snippet from Good Gear Guide: "A notorious patent case about a technology that allows people to search multimedia content may finally be coming to a close. Earlier this week, a judge ruled that two patents initially awarded to Encyclopedia Britannica are invalid. The patents were built on the infamous 5,241,671 patent first unveiled by Compton's NewMedia in 1993 at the Comdex trade show. That patent, which covered the retrieval of information from multimedia content and is now owned by Britannica, would have been relevant to the many companies selling multimedia CD-ROMs at the time."
I always wonder in these sort of over-rulings where common sense has prevailed, how it sits with the other companies who DIDN'T have the patent at the time.
Is there now a resource that those companies can sue Britannica for possibly not ALLOWING them to conduct business as normal due to Britannica having a patent that's invalid?
If I wanted to make a CDROM with some info on it, and these guys jumped in and stopped me due to a patent, and now I found out the patent is invalid, I would be (pretty rightly) pissed off.
Any lawyers/patent-know-it-all's in the house?
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I always wanted to know where my mandibula was.
Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls.
I feel sorry for Encyclopedia Britannica. Like many other companies that were built on the concept of monopolizing information, they no longer have a viable business model.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
a great big "fuck you".
Fuck you for taking my freedom.
Fuck you for engaging in a game where the rich steal from the poor, because the rich can afford longer law suits.
Fuck you for capitalizing on the ineptitude of the USPTO.
Fuck you for standing on the shoulders of giants, and patenting everything you can reach from there, so that no one can stand on your shoulders.
Issued in 1993, invalidated in 2009, what a deal. Valid patents only last for 20 (or sometimes 17) years, so this invalid patent turned out to choke the marketplace for almost as long as a valid one would have.
Don't hate the playa. Hate the game.
(Incidentally it's a US company despite the name). Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since they own the USPTO? The publishers of Brittanica shouldn't be sued because they didn't grant the patent. I think this is a really interesting idea. Companies affected by piss-poor patent granting by the USPTO should start a class action against the US Government to enforce proper patent investigation. Up till now large companies have been beneficiaries of the system more than losers, so have had no incentive to rock the boat. Small companies may have stayed quiet in case they came across a doubtfully patentable but potentially profitable idea. But once bad patents start to be invalidated, they are potentially losers, and so the balance swings towards trying to reform the system.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's the real problem with patents these days - they were designed in a time when 20 years still meant the patent was useful at the end; it was reasonable to give the discoverer/inventor a short term exclusive right in order to spur more invention and, overall, increase society's knowledge.
Unfortunately, for computers, 20 year old patents are virtually worthless to society. Net result is that society is paying (by restricting itself) but not getting anything worthwhile at the end.
(LZW compression, for example, is completely eclipsed by more modern standards *except* that it's part of certain file formats.)
Compare to drug patents, where they are (generally - antibiotics perhaps excepted) still relevant and useful after the patent expires.
(Plus, there is the occasional overly broad patent - no drug company would patent using any drug to cure a type of cancer; but people try and patent using a Computer to do Commerce.)
Am I the only one going to comment that it is spelt Encyclopaedia Britannica? While an US firm, Encyclopaedia Britannica still retains the British English spelling, as well in its look up, e.g. it prefers "colour" over "color" and so forth.
Clicked pie.
Personally, I only like the Compton Encyclopedia. Who'd have guessed that what was happening in Compton in 1993 would be so relevant now?
While Wikipedia is an amazing effort, it will not ever be Britannica
Don't knock Wikipedia - I bet Britannica never had an entry on the various slime pits in the Masters of the Universe, um... universe. :-)
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That's the real problem with patents these days - they were designed in a time when 20 years still meant the patent was useful at the end; it was reasonable to give the discoverer/inventor a short term exclusive right in order to spur more invention and, overall, increase society's knowledge.
Unfortunately, for computers, 20 year old patents are virtually worthless to society.
Yeah, for certain industries. The problem is the rampant anti-patent crowd on Slashdot keeps ranting about abolishing the entire patent system, or reducing the terms to 5 years or less. While that may be fine for software (only may - currently it takes almost two years just to get an application examined), it doesn't work for pharmaceuticals which have long FDA-mandated trials and expensive R&D or machines, which have much slower development cycles and more costs associated with manufacture.
Congress could fix this and simultaneously do away with all the confusion over Bilski and others by making a new category for patents, like design patents have with their 14 year term. Make a software and business method category explicitly patentable, but with a shortened term and an accelerated examination procedure.
Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.
Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.
The last print Britannica might be the last back-up check point for our civilization.
Compare to drug patents, where they are (generally - antibiotics perhaps excepted) still relevant and useful after the patent expires.
Silly me, I read that as "after the patient expires", in which case the drug patent has probably proved its uselessness, no?
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Drug companies are some of the worst for patent abuse really. I've seen patents on any drug related to a certain protein for example, they also love to patent drug x + pre existing drug modifier y (such as extended release drugs).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Drug companies are some of the worst for patent abuse really. I've seen patents on any drug related to a certain protein for example, they also love to patent drug x + pre existing drug modifier y (such as extended release drugs).
... and neither of those are patent abuse. What's your point, other than that you understand neither patent law nor chemistry?
[Prominent CEOs] have said many times that if patents had been more prevalent back in the day, neither would have succeeded with their businesses.
That reminds me of Disney. Had copyrights been at their current life + 70 terms back in the 1940s through 1960s, we probably wouldn't have several of the films in the Disney animated canon that were first published the year after copyright in their source material expired worldwide, such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book.
They had the Picard retrieval feature.
Of course they were abuse. Legal, sure, but ethically evil. They got congress to make laws that allowed them to extend patents over and over and over. The prevent generics from starting when the patent ended. Just look at the history of Claritin. Quick dissolve to extend patents, claiming it was too dangerous for a generic to make, then claiming it was safe enough to be over the counter once the patent expired and they wanted to create a market. Anyone who doesn't see those things as abusing is crazy.
The other thing that drug companies like doing is paying the generic producers to not produce generics
The only thing this will do is get even more companies to set up shell companies to hold their patents for them. Those companies won't be making any profit so even if you fined 50% of it you still won't be getting any of it. They already do it for questionable legal procedures (RIAA), questionable monetary flows (Cayman Islands, products sold in Cuba) or for questionable products (Made in China) thus leaving the parent company protected from any blame or harm.
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