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Tandberg Attempts To Patent Open Source Code
An anonymous reader writes "As if the current situation with software patents wasn't bad enough, it appears a new phenomenon is emerging: companies are watching the commit logs of open source projects for ideas to patent. In this case, Tandberg filed a patent that was step-by-step identical to an algorithm developed by the x264 project — a mere two months after the original commit. The particular algorithm is a useful performance optimization in a wide variety of video encoders, including Theora."
EAT MY DICK, idiots!
i'm thinking of patenting the word god and ripping off the colection plates from churches. corporate america would raise me a statue.
The open source project should file their own patent. Because patents in the U.S. are on a first-to-invent basis, and because they can clearly demonstrate having invented it first, their patent will effectively invalidate the other patent. Then sue the other company for violating the patent, win, and use this to fund many decades of x264 development.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
1 ) follow open source commit lots
2) patent the idea's there
3) try and figure out WTF they are doing
4a) can't figure it out , sue any one using it.
4b) figured it out , sue anyone using it
5) Collect settlement from innocent users
6) Collect payoff from MPAA/RIAA, Microsoft etc.. for killing open source.
We cannot solve problems with the same thinking that got us there - A Einstein(paraphrased)
More companies should do the same, patent everything until the whole thing collapses into a gigantic innovation blackhole.
...steal it! Those OSS hippies will never have the gumption to fight back...
There was also a study (2004?) which showed that getting patents makes you more likely to be the target of patent litigation, and there's a guy in FFII who published a computer science paper only to find that someone else patented an extension of his work a few years later.
The links and descriptions are at the below link, but it's down briefly for maintenance:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Publishing_information_is_made_dangerous
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If you came to my gangs place and took our stuff, we would come to your house and get medieval on you and your families asses.
So what's the Geek equivalent? You gonna infiltrate and drop his company down the shitter or just whine about it like I think you're gonna?
About 60% of you want to defer to the useless justice system, about 20% will just sit there wishing 'someone' would DDoS them, 10% just give up, 5% think the code could be bettered anyway, 2.5% would do something if it directly affected them and the rest just opened another tab to explore their sexuality.
Well, maybe if we whine in unison in 5 part harmony with a bridge, chorus, turnaround and 5 verses of " Life Ain't Fair". It's bound to work, we do it here all the time with smashing results.
We get results, right?
Yup, business as usual.
The US is not a first-to-file country but a first-to-invent country. That means that it is possible for an inventor to get a patent even thought they were not the first one to file an application at the USPTO but were the first to invent and were diligent in efforts to obtain a patent. Copying of this type is serious indeed. Theoretically, conduct of this type could also be a copyright infringement.
I for one would like to see a *lot* more proof before reading about allegations like this. The mere fact that one event happened after another is far from sufficient. These are *very* serious accusations.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Ever since attending NTNU university it's always been a dream of yours to be featured on /.
Well, you've finally succeeded. Congrats!
Who were defending patent system by this or that excuse or justification, by broad shooting or beautifying or rationalizing what was happening ?
Just a day ago someone justified some mishap with the system again, and attributed to this, that, and i have told him that the rate things are going is in front of us, the system is faulty, and it wouldnt take a few months before it would reach rock bottom.
and lo. it didnt even take a day.
Read radical news here
Even if i dont like it, i do think the only viable solution in the current climate is if the open source community gets its own warchest of patents to use in negotiations.
A fund where you could input your inventions that patented them and then offer them to anyone using a GPL license for their code. If a corporate entity wants in, fine, just cross license and use them for all they care as long as they dont use their patents against GPL licensed code.
HTTP/1.1 400
You guys have really fucked everyone up with this "Intellectual Property" concept you invented and marketed to the rest of the world.
Now everyone is arguing with everyone else because they somehow believe the delusion that they are the only fucking people in the world to ever have thought of something. And guess who is making a ton of money? The lawyers, of course.
If you have the brains to market your idea (or negotiate with someone who can) then you deserve the profits you'll make. If you just want to be paid because you thought of something, go to hell.
There's a big difference between having a flash of inspiration in the shower, and actually bringing a product to market. There's this notion that patents reward creative people - as if creative people were in short supply. Everyone is more or less creative. Those who get the reward, however, are the ones willing to make the effort to develop their ideas.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
RIM has been quite evil at this for some time now. For certain open source projects used on Android and/or iPhone, you can be sure RIM will have a patent application two weeks after any good idea commited in the project.
You can't patent anything that's in the public domain already. I'd say this move is based on the negligence of application referees. Rightly so.
things that award ownership of THOUGHT to private individuals, can NOT work.
its the fools who try to make it go around, with justifications and excuses and 'but maybe's.
Read radical news here
So, based on this case you automatically assume that there is a phenomenon going on, big companies are now patenting every open source code they can find, suuuure.
You open source talibans should see a therapist, you all have a really serious case of paranoia
Patents for software are founded on the idea that the software drives a mechanical device to perform tasks. However, Software also falls under copyright. Would you not therefore be able to sue a company for copyright infringement if they patent software that you wrote? That would be a fun little test of the legal system...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For smaller companies, you're taking a huge risk developing anything, but for the big corporations, who bought these laws in the first place, this ensures less competition, less innovation and higher bar of entry to market. It's perfect, so for them the system works fine, and thus they won't be doing anything with it.
If the unfairness was aimed at huge corporations, the patent-system and copyright-laws would be gone within a few months or a year. I have no issue with the trademark-laws, and copyright might work out when we have something like GPL. However, the patent-system is such a big beast, it's continual existence is assured because of it, not in spite of it.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
It would seem the Oracle lost it's touch... It's not very prescient to patent something after someone else published it for the world to see.
It's supposed to be *before* otherwise it's just called copying, cheating or stealing instead of prophetic, prediction or precognition.
Oracle, you're doing it wrong!
Can I patent the idea that people can protect their ideas by patent?
Or I would like to patent the process of watching code commits and see if I can patent something.
They are really thieves, but it's mostly a US thing, if the US is making it difficult to do something useful by it's own patent laws, then somewhere else (China) people will just make products and profit and will kindly not understand anything about patents and go on doing useful things.
Oh, I thought someone had patented the very idea of open sourcing code.
This sounds pretty convincing that it's a copy. You can tell the patent examiner about the prior art. You don't have to sue or be sued. The only defense Tandberg could claim is they actually told you about the idea, and you "stole" it when you committed the code. They would have to show evidence to the examiner to rebut his rejection based on your ex parte evidence.
Although your comment was modded up as 'Funny', I suspect that wasn't your intent.
There's an important idea here; not the suing part, but the patenting part. The FOSS community should organize itself to patent EVERYTHING it does that's even remotely patentable. Everyone who wanted to use the software commercially would then have to sign a "For one dollar received and other valuable considerations" licensing agreement that, while effectively keeping the software free, would explicitly support the FOSS licence, making it easier to pursue legal action against violators.
Where would the money for this come from? Well, I think a good chunk of it would come from the greed-headed businesses that would patent blue sky and green grass if they could do so. Because preventing your competitiors from having a patent that locks you out of key technological innovations, is almost as good as locking them out of those same innovations yourself. If a corporation can't gain exclusivity over a patent, it will support a 'level playing field' approach just to ensure that none of their competitors can gain exclusivity.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/2201/tandberg.jpg
Take note, pro-RIAA patsies: if this story is true, then it's a case of actual IP theft. That is, Tandberg would actually have deprived the original authors of the use of their own work, in this situation by making it illegal for them to continue distributing their invention.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I thought it was not legal to patent copyrighted material. Did I miss something?
If the code is open source, it means it's got an open source license, rite? Doesn't that provide copyright protection of said code?
This patent crap really sucks.
The code in the patent application has been translated into legalese, wonder if that's done by machine? If so, it would produce predictable patterns and be compilable back into C.
My next entry for the Obfuscated C contest will be*:
A method or apparatus for compiling a patent into a C program that, when executed, outputs its patent.
Inventors: Bazzargh, W.V.V. Quine
*) of course I can't be arsed actually writing this
Except he patented it all. Not the extension. Not the "value add". And is any value added that deserves patent protection anyway?
Even if under a certain reading of the patent claims says that the original isn't patented, in what way has that ever been an impediment to suing someone for patent infringement?
NEVER.
Guys in the oval office, please continue with this madness. It will be over when small folks form a joint patent pool and manage to destroy a corporate giant just by lawsuit. Either that or laws will change before that trial is over.
Maybe EFF should do that, collect a huge pool of patents and then sue Microsoft/Apple/Oracle (or anyone high on their hitlist) and collect a shitload of money. Open source has invented enough, now they should be busy making world's largest IP pool and start using it to blackmail major governments to abandon software patents.
Yes, give the PTO lots of money, that'll solve the problem of software patents at the PTO!
Does FOSS have a community warchest to sue every company in the US infringing on patents? If not, then they've just paid to have worthless bits of paper given them.
....so should it be of any surprise this sort of thing is happening?
This makes me wonder, why isn't there a law related to OSS and companies trying to patent or benefit from open code or software without complying with the related license (GNU for most part)?
And if the such a law is not possible, there should be an OSS organization that itself patents some code or ideas, profit from it, and eventually drive development of open code.
The way I understand it is that even if Tandberg is awarded the patent, it will be effectively invalid because of published prior art. If they sue anybody over the patent, the su-ee will just have to point out the open source project. I am not an expert -- am I missing something?
Who were defending patent system by this or that excuse or justification, by broad shooting or beautifying or rationalizing what was happening? Just a day ago someone justified some mishap with the system again, and attributed to this, that, and i have told him that the rate things are going is in front of us, the system is faulty, and it wouldnt take a few months before it would reach rock bottom. and lo. it didnt even take a day.
I first called you a moron for whining about patents in a thread on trademarks. Then you called me out in a second thread about patents where, as it turned out, the submitter was entirely wrong and the system worked perfectly.
And now this... And if you scroll up only a few comments to this one, you find that Tandberg has proof that they had this code in their private repository more than six months prior to the x264 commit, so again, you're wrong.
My question for you is, how many days in a row are we going to get a thread from you with a subject line like "I'm asking again, where are those fools," "Alright. que the idiots who were still defending," or some further permutation?
Ok so I got bored and wrote a quine patent application. Almost as painful as COBOL. Havent tested it by running it through the lawyers.
METHOD FOR RECREATING THIS PATENT APPLICATION
CLAIMS
1. A method for constructing a textual representation of this patent
application, by executing the method described in its claims; the
method comprising:
(i) emitting the text result of applying a decoding procedure to a
data string S, followed the content of S, followed by a period
character ('.').
2. The method according to Claim 1, wherein the decoding procedure
comprises:
(i) splitting the data string S into pairs of characters H;
(ii) converting the pair of characters H into a number N via a primary
decimalization procedure;
(iii) Returning the result of replacing each number N by the by the
corresponding ASCII character.
3. The method according to claim 2, wherein the primary decimalization
procedure for a character pair H comprises:
(i) Splitting the character pair H into two characters, the first H1
and the second H2;
(ii) Converting the first character H1 into a number N1 via a
secondary decimalization procedure;
(ii) Converting the first character H1 into a number N2 via a
secondary decimalization procedure;
(iv) Returning the result of adding 16 times N1 to N2.
4. The method according to claim 3, wherein the secondary
decimalization procedure for a character C comprises:
(i) if the character C is a digit from 0 to 9, then the result is the
value of that digit;
(ii) otherwise, the result is 55 subtracted from
the ASCII value of the character C.
(iii) Return the result.
5. The method according to claim 4, wherein the data string S
comprises:
4D4554484F4420464F52205245...(and I had to remove the rest of
the hex-encoded version of the text above because the slashdot
lameness filter objected. Quite reasonably, I think)...
65696E20746865206461746120737472696E6720530D0A
636F6D7072697365733A0D0A.
... the patent's claims explicitly mislabel critical assembly instructions as 'c++ functions'... so to be non-infringing to those claims, all you have to do is NOT create c++ wrapper functions for these assembly instructions with these specific names.
The method according to Claim 2, wherein the creating of the array C is executed by a C++ function PCMPGTB, and the creating of M from C is executed by a C++ function PMOVMSKB.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
why not being in the public domain?
When I read the headline in my mailbox, I thought it said that "Tanenbaum Attempts To Patent Open Source Code". Which might be an amusing twist in the non-existent Minix-Linux Wars.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What a shame; it may spell the death of open source, if companies start mining such projects and applying for patents on them. It seems like this trend has only two significant likely results: either more programmers will start patenting their software, or opposition will mount to the point that software patents will be eliminated. It will be interesting to see which side wins in this issue.