Slashdot Mirror
Xiph.org Comments For the FTC's Patents Workshop
Freddybear writes "Xiph.org, makers of ogg audio and theora video codecs, submitted a detailed proposal to the FTC for the patents workshop. Their proposal recommends changes which would help to eliminate the practice of 'submarine' patents regarding standardized technologies. Quoting: 'The Xiph.Org Foundation recommends that the FTC work to require specific, ex ante disclosure of patents or patent applications that would read on standards under development, that failure to disclose exhaust the patent, and assertion of such a patent ex post be deemed anti-competitive. This should apply not only to standards development activities that the patent holder participates in or knows about, but those it should have known about. Furthermore, vague infringement allegations or activities designed to avoid an SSO's disclosure requirements or undermine the standards process should also be deemed anti-competitive.'"
I would like to add my name to a list of people who support this submission.
Does such a list exist?
I appreciate the time spent by xiph.org to think about and put together the information. Unfortunately I know little about patent processes, but I know that patents have been a major concern and pain, because one can, through no fault of their own, create a "method" like something that had been patented.
I also know that there are many patent troll companies out there and they need to be taken care of, regardless of how much the government thinks it brings in on fees during these processes.
I understand parts of what was said, and found nothing that I can disagree with. Although I would rather they do away with software patents completely, in our reality that will not be the likely case.
Thanks xiph.org.
Congratulation to a great initiative and a good effort to take at least standards out of the subject matter to be patented.
This would bring huge advantages to the end-user, inclusive the latter's purse.
And it would open up all standards to be beautifully implemented by Free and Open Source coders - and maybe more beautifully than by coders of proprietary software.
My concern is about the legal term should have known . Not that I mind this term being applied, though once introduced it would apply to all sides. It is fine with me, if Larry E. or Steve B. are hit by this. But John D. coding Free Software in his parents basement? I have currently nothing better on offer, though I'd rather see a text that even more clearly points out that anything standardized does automagically void patent-ability. This would offer a viable alternative to the inventor: You can standardize your protocol, and be the technology leader and at the same time be sure that nobody can (mis-)appropriate it; or you decide that you want royalties for your new superb-data-exchange-protocol, which will never be standardized.
I know, I know, this is not what I would would from my heart, but it could be a compromise to improve the current, miserable state pretty much.
I feel the following quotation asks some important questions that should be considered when making decisions that affect a group of people: "What assumptions about human nature and social organization underlie adversarial patterns of deliberation and decision making (e.g. debate, propaganda, partisanship, etc.)? What views of human nature give rise to mutualistic, reciprocal and cooperative patterns of deliberation and decision-making? How can we foster deliberative processes that encourage freedom of expression and build unity among participants? What social structures need to be in place to support more inclusive processes of deliberation and decision-making? What is the role of leadership and authority in unifying processes of deliberation and decision-making? What are other examples of integrative processes of decision-making? Concerning social integration: How can social tensions be resolved in a unifying framework? How do we ensure that raising consciousness and addressing the conditions of injustice that affect a particular group does not reinforce divisive distinctions? How do we ensure that emphasizing the value of unity does not reinforce passive habits of acceptance and resignation but rather strengthens the will to champion justice?" http://bic.org/statements-and-reports/bic-statements/transform-collective-deliberation-unity-justice How can we answer this?
I think there should be a rule that if any change whatsoever is made to the patent, the date of the modification becomes the new patent filing date.
Let's not feel too sorry for the basement guy. You're trying to make him sound too poor to get his own place, and yet you're also talking about a situation where he paid many thousands of dollars for both the patent fee, and also to hire a lawyer (or similar expert) to find all the relevant prior art. I think the guy can afford a few minutes to Google and learn whether or there are standards development in the works. Tip: if everybody has been talking about the applications for a few years, there just might be a group trying to create standards. If basement guy gets indignant and says "How dare you say I should have known that people are trying to standardize video codecs?!" I think we can all point and laugh at him without any feelings of guilt.
OGG is not a codec, it's a container, usually for the Vorbis audio codec. And what's up with "ogg and theora"? Too lazy on Sunday?
That means that if a company, no matter how big or small, ever files a patent that relates to video compression, they have to suddenly join every single standards body just so they can tell those standards bodies that things they're looking into infringe on patents? At what point is this company supposed to move on and do engineering work?
Also, if I start a standards body that becomes moderately important in the field, then I have to suddenly deal with 500 different companies that deluge me with possibly related patents?
Currently a continuation or divisional application will enjoy the filing date of the application of which it is a continuation or divisional. This means any tiny improvement enjoys the protection of the original.
Xiph.org suggests that a continuation has as its own filing date. This means that there also is more prior art available, which potentially invalidates the patent.
You could argue that the proposed way to handle continuations still allows the filing party to extend a patent, but you forget that the filing party has the choice of filing a new patent anyway, which would just cite the previous patent, and would start the patent timer anew.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I think they just wanted some way to avoid companies using shell corps to insulate their "knowledge".
"I'm sorry, Right Hand Inc. didn't look through the patent portfolio of Left Hand Inc. before commenting on standard X. We are not the same company, even though we share corporate overlords."
"Defacto Standards" will be all that remains. Our standards will be determined by the best marketer or highest campaign contribution which results in the most purchases.
Ultimately, Microsoft's original strategy will become the only strategy that will work -- give it away for free until critical mass is achieved and then raise the prices.
I assumed that what he meant was free software developers being sued for violating patents that they "should have known" about, not free software developers applying for patents of their own.
"Put up, or shut up"
Thanks Xiph.org. Someone has to fight the good fight.
a) The patent office needs to employ some experienced, unbiased software engineers who understand the word "obvious".
b) They need to break the link between "profit" and "number of patents accepted".
c) They need to make it much easier to invalidate a patent due to prior art and obviousness (this isn't necessarily a good thing but it's needed because of all the "a" and "b" they've done in the past).
No sig today...
This doesn't affect the eccentric inventor working in his basement. It is about STANDARDS. Standards are created by large companies not individuals. The work of an individual CAN become a standard but how can an individual submarine patent his own patent? No, this only affects those standards created by multiple companies where one party seeks to contribute something that later turns out it has patended. The individual could only be affected if they deliberately create a new thing, seek to make it a standard then reveal at the end they got a second element in it that is secret. There is no way to submarine a patent as part of standard in innocence.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A) Joce640k Should vote for the increase in salary of goverment employees and not vote for the guy who offers the biggest tax cut.
B) Joce640k Should stop trying reduce spending by trying to make institutions be profitable regardless of the effects.
C) Joce640k Should stop voting for senators that are wholly in the pocket of big business just because they promised him a tax cut.
The patent office used to work, then cut backs came along. Now it doesn't. Who voted for the cutbacks?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, and?
It should be clearly spelt out that standard != patent.
Think about the metric standard for nuts and bolts. A 120x15 is clearly defined, including the thread. And now, at this very moment, when you tender for a work to be paid by taxpayers' monies, the only way (outside of imperial countries) is to specify that all nuts and bolts have to be standard metric sizes. And miraculously, some well-connected company has some so-called intellectual property on these, so each and every nut and bolt entering the public property will pay handsomely to the owner. That's a concession to print money. Microsoft has one of those concessions, as we found out here when the Swiss Government tendered software, and prescribed that it had to be Microsoft. So nevermind who gets the tender, all royalties are by default ending up in Redmond. The very moment a tender like that is written, some pockets will fill.
No, I'm wrong: metric nuts and bolts are unencumbered by patents. And that is good so.
Skype is the opposite. I hate it as much as I can hate anything non-free. But it doesn't transgress into the realms of standards. There is no H462 or ISO06990 for it. They may compete as one contender in the communications market. But MPEG, ISO, etc. are different. Specifications are laid open: and so they must be unencumbered. And not unencumbered through the backdoor, but as clearly spelt-out default.
I propose the following change to the current patent system:
Under this system, inventors have a clear path to profit from the effort they invested to create a patent. No matter how much they invest, they will always make 50% of that investment back in profit. There is also a clear path to the public domain for the patent - anything so fundamentally critical can be purchased and contributed to the public domain with the USPTO as the intermediate broker. It is likely more profitable for any given company to place a patent in the public domain for all to enjoy than it is for them to license it from the individual company.
The buyer of the patent can be a company, community pool of money, or even the US Government itself (think cancer cure) based on the criticality of that patent to any entity's set of interests.
So patents aren't gold mines anymore. You can't build a business model around exclusivity. Who cares? Innovation will continue, as it always has, and now everyone can participate. I dunno; I like the idea.
With the pace of competition today, why do patents last more than 2-4 years?
It almost seems easier to just relocate your business to another country, or form a new nation. I am not meaning to sound like a troll, but i do wonder what inventions we might never see until the status quo deems them profittable enough. Humans did do some amazing feats thousands of years ago without any need of patents.
I have been thinking about a possible model for handling the awarding of patents that might mitigate certain problems with our current patent system. I'm curious as to if anyone has any feedback on it.
As the last stage of the patent registration process (so when the applicant already knows that the patent will be awarded), the applicant declares how much they will charge to license the patent. There would probably need to be multiple licensing models (flat-rate, per product sold, etc.) that the applicant could opt for - I don't know enough about patent law to go into detail here. The applicant must then pay a fee whose amount is related to the declared licensing cost before the patent is officially awarded. (The clock is already ticking on the patent's expiration, of course.) The applicant is free to charge less to parties to license the patent if they choose, but are obligated to license it to any interested party for no more than the previously declared amount.
Here are the advantages of the system:
1. Under the current system, there are currently parties who file or acquire a large number of cheap, vague patents solely in the hopes that some other party develops a massively profitable technology that happens to make use of them so they can extort a large sum of money from them. This practice is a parasitic load on technological development and should not be unnecessarily enabled by our patent system. The fact that the patent registration fee under the model I describe is related to the size of the licensing fee would discourage this practice. If the applicant didn't pay much to register the patents, then they cannot charge much for licensing. If the applicant did have enough confidence that the patents would actually be used profitably when they registered the patents, then that would indicate that the patents were actually of some value.
2. If the applicant is the proverbial "private inventor" without much in the way of financial resources but develops what they believe to be highly valuable IP, the fact that the fee need not be declared until it is already known that the patent will be awarded will aid in them acquiring investment capital to cover the fees to complete the registration of any relevant patents.
3. Under the current system, there are some industries in which companies acquire patents on potentially competing technology for the sole purpose of sitting on them and preventing what would otherwise be a better alternative to their business from developing. The mandatory licensing system would effectively prevent this practice, and the relation of registration fees to licensing costs would discourage setting unreasonably high prices to potential competitors.
Thoughts? Criticisms?
Because there are developments that require years and millions of $, think pharmaceuticals.
Software must not be patentable. Why? Because with software patents it is possible to monopolize mathematical concepts, see http://vimeo.com/11206098
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
A most reasonable request by Xiph.
If your part of a standardizing organization and the algorithm, process, procedure or function you have developed to has been developed and patented prior to standardization you shouldn't be able to force payment for it on everyone who might use it. Though Xiph goes too far assuming that groundbreaking technology which might become a standard should be revoked from the patent holder upon standardization whether or not they know about the potential standard coming about from their work.
Virtual wars are waged over standards. BlueRay players in Playstations won Sony the HD standard war, they will get royalties for every player and disk sold as long as their patent stands. The Alcatel-Lucent Patents on MP3 technology ends soon and while it is the standard their patent should not be revoked because of it.
A furniture removals company that understands, that if your team is not back at work as a matter of priority after your move your business is going to be loosing profit.
Business moves need careful planning and a detailed project management process to be followed, this why many businesses have trusted us for their office relocations Melbourne, Furniture Storage Melbourne, Office relocation checklist, Furniture removals Melbourne, Office Removalists Melbourne.
Office Removalists Melbourne
As an IP attorney (okay, for the public, "patent" attorney" - sheesh!) HOORAY! It is about time we started bringing some common sense to this problem!
Also, I agree with the comments, to some extent. Starting with copyright, all IP should "support the arts and sciences", not big business, and all of it should be for more limited terms; I propose 5-10 years for copyrights (and no automatic copyright), and 10 years or so for patents. Trademarks are different, but they should be harder (MUCH harder) to obtain and retain.
Gene Cavanaugh
Small Entity Intellectual Property Attorney
dba Law Offices of M. E. Cavanaugh