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Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram
Nushio writes "The code wasn't even released, and yet Roy van Rijn, a Music & Free Software enthusiast received a C&D from Landmark Digital Services, owners of Shazam, a music service that allows you to find a song, by listening to a part of it. And if that wasn't enough, they want him to take down his blog post (Google Cache) explaining how he did it because it 'may be viewed internationally. As a result, [it] may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world.'"
Update: 07/09 00:31 GMT by T :Story updated to reflect that Shazam is multiplatform, not Android-only, as implied by the original phrasing.
Two: you cannot use a patent as a method to censor free speech.
Three: any US patent can be viewed internationally. A patent is by definition NOT a trade secret. Even if this guy's software DID use a patent-encumbered algorithm, his post cannot "contribute to someone infringing ... patents in any part of the world."
Four: a patent is not valid for the entire world.
Yep - I bet he's hit on a Trade Secret of theirs in his blog post and/or development work, and they're just trying to scare him away from posting the details. Trade Secrets are only secrets as long as nobody else knows about them - there's no protection on them other than that.
The patent holds NO ability to stop him from disclosing ANYTHING - anything covered by the patent is by definition publicly disclosed in the patent itself. If it's not there, it's not covered. Period. The "international viewing" holds no water either - there's nothing preventing someone from viewing the patent from another country.
He can go tell them to fuck off. He can probably sue for SLAPP or something like that too. I would!
In addition, my understanding is that this goes even further - there's nothing preventing him from developing his own implementation of their patent. The only issue arises when he distributes it beyond himself. IANAL, so this part I'm only 99.9% sure on. :)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Injustice is always newsworthy.
A story submitter, on Slashdot, humbly and openly admitting a mistake. My hat is off to you, sir. Here's hoping some of the people responsible for the more absurdly sensationalist summaries (your submission is certainly _not_ one of those, just to be clear) that creep onto the front page take your precedent as an example. I won't be holding my breath, though.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
At least in the US you have absolutely no recourse against someone who independently (not an employee, etc) develops one of your trade secrets. They can even patent it themselves and force you to pay a license fee!
That's the trade off between patents and trade secrets.
Well patents are pretty damn public knowledge, so I don't see how an open-source project that does the same thing can be infringing on a patent. Now, the people who use the source code might infringe on it, but drawing a schematic of a door latch doesn't infringe on the door latch, but building one does. It might not work this way at all, but the above is why I think its fairly unfair to ask someone to remove a post about how to do it.
Momento Mori
His implementation was different than their's, and if that's the case, they've got bigger issues, as one of their developers wrote a PDF on how Shazam Works..
And this guy certainly wasn't the first to write an article about How Shazam Works either.
They're afraid of the code.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
Yes, I am. As a non-native english writer, who has difficulties dealing with grammar nazism, I find commas useful to explain stuff. =P
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
What is far more scary is that using a sliding window to calculate DFTs and then hashing these values, and storing there offsets is somehow patented. To say that this is "obvious" to someone with any understanding of waves and Fourier transforms is an understatement.
"What is far more scary..."
Yes. As others said, unjustice must always be news, no matter how (sadly) common it becomes.
1) It's an obvious application of a Fourier transform so it shouldn't have been accepted for patent on first place.
2) Even if it wasn't obvious, this guy did not have access to the original code so chances are by big margin that this a different method to achive the same result so even after the patent is granted is very dificult to believe he could violate it.
3) Even if it wasn't obvious and it was the very same patented method, patents are, well, patent, so it's ludicrous to say "you shouldn't make public this" when the very patent system is built around the fact that the patented method is meant to be made public.
All in all this is a news about a disfunctional and criminally stupid patent system abused by a disfunctional and criminally stupid company.
Yes: this needs to be aired.
By that logic you could freely distribute an infringing program as long as you don't run it.
Yes, exactly. In the same way that a description or schematic of a patented invention does not infringe a patent, simple source code does not infringe a patent. How is this difficult to understand?
Don't get me wrong, this really sucks for the guy and is completely unfair. But this sort of thing happens all the time. If this were a rare occurrence, then yeah, I'd be up in arms. It's sort of not newsworthy anymore.
The only reason that these things happen is that every time these things happen everybody looks around and says "Well, these things happen..." and THAT'S why they happen!
If you see something, say something...peace out.
Where would we be if Wheel had hid her round rock in a cave instead of showing everyone how it rolls?
it was an iphone app long before it was an android app
What does it matter that it was on the iPhone before Android? It's hardly surprising, considering the iPhone was released years before the Droid. I admit there hasn't been the usual heavy complement of Apple stories today, but that doesn't mean you have to start looking for ways to create them from unrelated articles. In any case, this has almost nothing to do with any platform, except that the author wrote the code in Java so as to run it on Android.
Back on-topic, the author has posted an update which talks about the alleged patent infringment and includes the notices sent by the company. Classically, they hesitate to give actual patent numbers, but what it really comes down to is this: As the author says,
I've written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. [...] I'm just a programmer who likes to work on technical, mathematical algorithms in his spare time. And if enough people ask for the source code, I'd be happy to give it to them. Who would have thought that creating something at home in a weekend could result in a possible patent infringement!?
But oh, no! Landmark claims
Landmark Digital Services owns the patents that cover the algorithm used as the basis for your recently posted "Creating Shazam In Java".
Well butter my biscuit and call me Daisy! Case closed! After all, they have a patent on "the algorithm". To be fair, the biggest instigator of this entire fiasco is probably his choice of using the commercial software's name in the article title. Going just by "Creating Shazam In Java", you might at first think he's attempting to completely re-create the software (for who knows what purpose). Of course, if you bother to read even the first few paragraphs it painfully clear that it's nothing of the sort. But because of this,
The code isn't published yet, but I was planning on releasing it under Apache License to the open source community soon. [...] Since I don't want to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov, with the possibility of a lawsuit, I'm not going to publish the code anymore...
If crap like this continues, independent software development in general (including a large chunk of FOSS) is doomed.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The whole point of software patent wording has become to ensure maximum ambiguity; the more ground you cover the less there is room for your competition to lay it's own claims or to avoid patent extortion. Who you gonna call when an industry monster sends it's goons around? Probably some nonprofit organization that'll tell you to cave cause it might get rough out there.
The claim being that in software, once you do something, nobody else can do anything similar, even if it doesn't use any of their code or procedures. If the end result is the same, then whoever the most money to spend on legal fees is the winner. It's a fucked up way to run a railroad.
So, once someone made a word processor, nobody else should be able to make a word processor. And once somebody made a program that can play music files, nobody else should be able to write a program that can play music files.
"Innovative" has become such a cheap word. It really doesn't mean anything any more. When a word like "innovative" becomes a legal term of art, innovation ceases.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not just any scum, but unscrupulous corporate scum, which means that it's not even a person making the decision, but legally fictive golem that exists only to reward those that have bought shares, even at the expense of society as a whole. If it was a person, at least a case could be made for going up to him and calling him a piece of shit who should be ashamed of himself, to tell his neighbors that he's a piece of shit, and to remind his wife and kids that they're related to a piece of shit.
But what is a "Shazam"? It has no neighbors, no family, no community, no responsibility to do anything but eat and shit money in the pockets of its shareholders. It doesn't respond to shame, to peer pressure, to moral outrage. It doesn't even respond to the "marketplace" because they assert another legal fiction (patent) in order to pervert the marketplace, to ensure that it is immune to market forces.
And that is ultimately what this "Intellectual Property" baloney is all about: making sure that the marketplace can not work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah and you're supposed to put a comma in front of conjunctive words like "and, or, but, because" especially if they join two sentences.
<snip>
I rocked my English SATs (99th percentile) so I'm fairly certain I'm right.
Shouldn't you have put a comma before "so" if you are going by that rule?
- I rocked my English SATs (99th percentile). I'm fairly certain I'm right.
- I rocked my English SATs (99th percentile), so I'm fairly certain I'm right.
independent software development in general (including a large chunk of FOSS) is doomed.
Only in countries silly enough to allow software patents...
And the ones stupid enough to accept the crap ACTA will feed on their throat... actually, for those will be even worse: no allowing their software developers to patent but preventing them to use methods already patented in US.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.