Slashdot Mirror
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?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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.
Don't hate the playa. Hate the game.
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.
So protecting your work is evil but knocking off some one else's hard work is good? If I spend five years developing a device but some one else can knock it off in a matter of months then what's the point of developing anything new? I loose my development money plus some foreign company under prices me and I never make money at all. Patents are out of control but some encourage innovation and development of new technologies and they aren't all held by big corporations or trolls. Do you honestly believe the computer you are typing on now would exist without patents or be afordable enough that the average person could own one? The point is to use common sense when issuing patents not just scrap the system. Some things might get cheaper as companies knock off products but innovation would largely dry up. How would you feel if you'd spent every cent on an invention only to have it stole and knocked off shortly after you brought it to market? What protection do you have? Patents.
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.
(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."
Because a mechanical can-opener is only patented "as is". If someone else builds a different mechanical can-opener that uses a different mechanism then they are free to sell that.
Business model and software patents are starting to become "a method for selling can-openers using the internet" and "a can-opener using a touch-interface".
The patents should protect you from a direct copy and if you design a great new feature (say a new material for the cutting edges), that feature should be protected. But if someone else can come up with an even better way (using lasers attached to friggin' sharks) of opening a can your patent should protect you.
The problem is that the new patents are too broad. It's true that not all the claims will hold up in court, but how should a layman be able to tell which ones will?
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.
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.
That's not the problem. The problem is these are getting patents:
[$SomethingDoneForCenturies] but on a computer
[$SomethingDoneForCenturies] but done wirelessly
[$SomethingObviousToThoseSkilledInTheTrade]
Those are all not allowed to be patented, and yet due to work overload and quotas, USPTO clerks are rubber-stamping these patent apps and are leaving it up to the courts to sort out. Compounding the problem is that the clerks who SHOULD know better can fix this problem but due to workloads and quotas do not, while the courts know exactly shit about patents and technology and uphold patents which should not due to clever arguments based in emotion and propoganda and not based on law.
The end result is the little guy is getting fucked.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls.
Microsoft bought the F&W encyclopedia in 1993 and rebranded it Encarta. It finally lost to Wikipedia in 2009.