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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 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.
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.
What might surprise you is the fact that the computer industry was doing just fine for forty years without patents. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (patent maximalists by anyone's standards) have said many times that if patents had been more prevalent back in the day, neither would have succeeded with their businesses.
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.)
If I spend five years developing a device
And spend most of that reading every line of code to see which software patents it infringes (there will be dozens, including several that are not published because they are "pending"), and then cross-license it with the other big boys... oh sorry you aren't a top-ten company? They won't cross license it with you, but they will each license it for 5 percent of your revenue though. Unless they are a troll, in which case they will wait until you release your product, and then sue you for all your revenue. But thanks for playing.
Isn't this a case where the US Government should be sued since they own the USPTO?
Brilliant, I agree! In theory, at any rate.
Except for the fact that if a company can successfully sue the USPTO after it revokes a patent, then the USPTO will never again revoke a patent simply out of liability avoidance. Then we've made a half-broken system all-broken.
The process needs to be fixed at the front end, and the patent office needs to be REWARDED for overturning patents, not sued, in order to encourage it to continue this behavior.