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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.
it was an iphone app long before it was an android app
IA (definitely) NAL, but I thought the whole purpose of patents (other than protection) was to disclose the invention in full (not behind trade secrets) in exchange for knowledge of how the invention is done/made. Have the patent owners given any implementation details about their application?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Is that a Barbra Streisand song I hear?
Because iPhones suck.
Because I didn't Google it up properly. And Slashdot doesn't let me edit the story submission after I hit send. Its my fault.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
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.
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
In the US at least a patent application is public record, and is intended to explain to the world how the object functions. This is not just to enforce the patent, but also to reward spreading the knowlege about how a patent works.
Asking someone to take down a blog post that describes the workings of a patented process is foolish. If the patent is written like it is supposed to be, anyone should be able to understand the patented process. You are no longer protected under trade secrets if you patent (which is why some choose not to). It is by definition at that point public knowledge.
Whether or not they have a patent case against him, they have no case against his blog.
The ______ Agenda
Use pHash instead, my open source perceptual hashing library that can detect similar audio, video, images and text files. It does not use Shazam's patented algorithm, which isn't all that great anyhow.
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
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.
BoingBoing has a good write up (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/08/patent-holders-legal.html). Most interesting was the fact that Landmark Digital Services took exception to the technical details of a patent being discussed. I think most people (myself included!) believe that reading a patent should tell you precisely how to replicate something, but there's a subtext to this story implying that is not the case here. I think a situation where a patent holder treats someone discussing a means to replicate patented technology as though they where handing out trade secrets is pretty interesting, certainly ./ worthy.
He's not employed by them is he? Because if he's not, I don't think their trade secrets mean squat to him. If I mess around and discover coke's trade secret recipe, they're not going to come knocking on my door. And they wouldn't have any legal precedent to do so in the first place. If you discover someone else's trade secret, it's fair game. You can even sell a product using that trade secret as long as you didn't work for them and take it, or buy it from someone who did.
"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?
I RTFA, and he posts pretty much the entire source code of his implementation in the original blog post. That is what they were upset about: implementing the patent *and* distributing it. Had he merely discussed the methods Shazam used, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. However, I can go to his blog, cut-and-paste the code into a text editor, and have a working clone of Shazam. That is fairly cut-and-dry patent infringement, minus commercial gain and sidestepping the issue of software patents.
It's not like he was just talking about the process.
they have to defend their patent or risk losing it.
That's trademarks.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The name of this proyect that seems to be prior art is Tararira (music retrival by sung query). It's from Uruguay, and does recognition of music just humming at a microphone. Proyect was created in 2004 and have code published.
http://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gmm/proyectos/tararira/ingles.php3
http://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gmm/proyectos/tararira/descargas/tarariraEN-src-0.1.tar.gz
http://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gmm/proyectos/tararira/descargas/tarariraEN.tar.gz
http://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gmm/proyectos/tararira/descargas/tararira.pdf
Tararira is a query by singing system. The problem of music retrieval by sung query (QBH, query by humming) consist of building a machine capable of simulating the cognitive process of identifying a musical piece from a few sung notes of its melody.
A melody is described by a sequence of notes, so it is natural to compare melodies by means of the similarity of their constituent notes. For this reason, the problem can be divided in two stages: the transcription of the voice signal into a sequence of notes and the search of this pattern in a MIDI melody database.
Tararira originates in July 2004 as the graduation project of Ernesto López, Martín Rocamora and Gonzalo Sosa at the IIE of the Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República.
Don't even have to RTFA, or even the summary.. Just the tagline says specifically that its a patent claim. Whether or not the claim would actually stand up in court is up to a judge should it get that far (never mind international concerns), but everything I've seen so far tells me that Shazam has all the right in the world to at least make the claim.
As far as I know, neither "easy after someone else has thought of it" nor "it didn't take me very long" are terribly good defenses in a patent case. The one you're looking for is "figured it out before someone else has thought of it", which this guy obviously didn't do given that he specifically set out to duplicate the abilities of an existing product. At this point his only defense is to show that his algorithm is sufficiently improved over (or at least different from) Shazam's that it would warrant being called 'innovative' (at least in the US.. I don't know about the EU's rules). Also, being his own code isn't a defense in a patent case (whereas it would be a defense in a copyright case if it could be proven).
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.
> I think a situation where a patent holder treats someone discussing a means to replicate patented ./ worthy.
> technology as though they where handing out trade secrets is pretty interesting, certainly
In a sane world making such an admission in a legal filing would be grounds for voiding the patent since patent law requires dislosure of everything a person skilled in that field would need to know to implement the patented tech. The idea of patents is to trade full disclosure for a limited monopoly on commercial exploitation of the idea. However as soon as a patent is filed others may begin using your patented tech as a base to build their own innovations on. Of course they will need to license your original tech to sell theirs and you will have to license theirs if you want to incorporate it, etc. Of this are vast portfolios built of cross licensed codependent patents.
But we live in bizarro world. Sucks don't it.
Democrat delenda est
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.
It's a wholly owned subsidary of BMI... As in BMI/ASCAP?
It's the record companies again.
More at http://www.music-similarity.com/ I wonder if it uses the purported patented technology.
BTW, the assertion of a potential harm being caused by "...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'" is certified bullshit.
All patents are public documents -- they must be public in order to inform the world just exactly what it is that the patent owner actually owns. It's detailed in the Claims section. "If you don't claim it, you don't own it."
Furthermore, a patent must "teach the invention," meaning that anyone "familiar with the art" shall be able to implement the invention with only the descriptions provided. If there actually is a patent for this technology, the cat is out of the bag.
Patent courts in the US are very favorably disposed to inventors -- assuming the technology is actually protected. It sounds like maybe not, and so the bluster and shrill threats.