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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."
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.
Well, when you say you feel sorry for them, you're obviously being sarcastic. But I do feel sorry for them.. as sorry as you can feel for an for-profit corporation anyway. Britannica is obviously flailing around trying to maintain some kind of revenue as shown by this lawsuit, but to say they made money on "monopolizing" information is completely unwarranted.
Did you ever read an encyclopedia pre-internet days (I'm guessing you're too young)? An encyclopedia was an enjoying read just like wikipedia is today. Literally EVERYTHING in the world was accessible to a young kid in 200-500 word chunks. Britannica did not monopolize information, they made it available to anyone that could pick up one of their books. That was their mission, and they did a damn fine job of it. Yes, they didn't keep up with technology and couldn't find their niche, and it looks like the company is going to die... but that really is sad - to have a company devoted to learning die off is never a good thing.
BTW: getoffmylawn!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.)