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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.
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.
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.
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.