Bittorrent and uTorrent Sued For Patent Violations

dutchwhizzman writes "Bittorrent and uTorrent have been sued for using certain techniques in their clients and the bittorrent protocol. From the article it appears technologies are being used that were submitted in a 1999 patent that was subsequently approved in 2007. This itself is not uncommon, but given the technologies involved, HTTP could very well be prior art, or it could violate at least part of the same protocol."

Comments

Why is this still news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Software patents need to die. End of story.

Re:Why is this still news?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

It has been solved, in many countries where software patents are not accepted. In this case it really is black and white.

Re:Why is this still news?

[Luckyo]

"In two-three countries, software patents are accepted". Everywhere else, they're not.

Specifically USA, South Korea and partially Japan. That's it.

Re:Why is this still news?

[elastic_collision]

Not just countries but also industries have benefited from lack of protection against designs: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Blizzard Updates

[what2123]

Would this not also include Blizzard and their new way of updating/downloading games? They would seem to have far more wealth to go after than either of the two torrent providers.

Re:Blizzard Updates

[jonwil]

They are also VERY large and might actually have the resources to fight back long enough to get the patent overturned.

Suing people who are likely to settle because they cant afford to fight is a common tactic of patent trolls.

Re:patent violation

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a patent violation in my pants.

I have a torrent... never mind!

Data formats are the biggest problem

[ciaran_o_riordan]

This is a real problem - much bigger than the usual story we hear about some big corporation maybe having to pay some amount of money.

Software, to be useful, *has to* be compatible with other software - exactly compatible for data formats, and a degree of similarity is needed in terms of interface and behaviour.

This is the real problem, and it can't be fixed by "reform" or higher standards (which are much talked about but never come).

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Harm_to_standards_and_compatibility
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Interoperability_exceptions
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Harm_with_neither_litigation_nor_threats
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patenting_around_what_will_become_essential

Re:Data formats are the biggest problem

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Dave 1.0 says:

> what if someone wants to keep their software from being compatible with someone else's software for security or profit reasons?

If you want your servers to only talk to *your* software, then the hi-tech answer is: passwords.

"Security by obscurity" is the term for your proposed abuse of incompatibility :-)

(If you want to block compatibility for profit reasons, you either use passwords, or you're asking for a legalised monopoly and the answer is sorry, but just no.)

It is legally impossible ...

[Compulawyer]

... to infringe ("violate") *part* of a patent claim. Each claim at the end of a patent is separate. You either do everything one of the claims describes or you are missing something. If you do everything, you infringe the claim. If you are missing even one piece, you do not infringe.

HTTP may be prior art, but it is only *invalidating* prior art if it does everything that is described in the claims. New inventions necessarily build on old ones. There is nothing legally improper about claiming an invention that is based on something old. It is called an *improvement.*

The only one who created something from nothing was God. Everyone else has to work with what is already here.

Re:Demanding a jury trial?

[delinear]

That, or they think a judge would see through the evidence more quickly than a jury of "peers" who would be more easily flim-flammed by a fancy lawyer.

In My Opinion, Protocol Patents Are Much Worse

[eldavojohn]

Software patents need to die. End of story.

I can't access the article but, if I'm understanding this correctly, the part about the protocol is worse than a software patent. Protocol patents are very bothersome to me because in my mind they totally destroy the chance a competitor has to interface with your product. And in doing so it really hinders innovation and integration. It's very easy to see how a simple ploy can result in people being "bought in" to a line of products even though a better competing line may come along. This vendor lock-in or competitor lockout (whatever you want to call it) is a very serious problem in my line of work (ever had your boss demand that you "decrypt" .doc files from years ago?).

Now, the common counter argument is that people would simply just buy products without patent laden protocols ... but I think there have been many examples where this simply hasn't happened. Even now people don't realize/recognize this problem when they look for a solution to their needs. Massive companies seem fine with using proprietary protocols because they are of higher quality than the more open competition. I've seen cost/benefit studies where openness (protocol or software) doesn't even factor into the final scores of the products.

I think a good concrete example would be if Samuel Morse had patented not only the telegraph machine (his particular device design) but also the Morse Code protocol and sued anybody using that alphabet to send messages. Do you think telegraphy would have progressed as quickly if that had been the case?

Re:Demanding a jury trial?

[Haedrian]

"If you're innocent get a Judge, if you're guilty get a Jury"

Re:Crazy Patent

[Theaetetus]

This is even worse than the usual bad patents I've seen. They have 20 pages of a very detailed description of their "preferred configuration". However, they say that it shouldn't be taken as a literal description of the system and that their patent is intended to be very broad. The claims are ridiculously broad and don't even reference the description of the system (apparently they were serious when they said that the description wasn't intended to be illustrative of their claims). The claims don't even make up half a page of text.

Look, I don't know much about patents, but surely there's no way such a bad patent can stand up in court... Can it?

Yes, with all due respect, you don't know much about patents. This patent is actually pretty decent. The detailed description is quite detailed, sufficient to enable one of skill in the art to make and use the claimed invention. The boilerplate line about "shouldn't be taken as a literal description" simply says that when they talk about, for example, removable media that could be an Iomega Jazz Disk, a memory disk, hard drive, etc., that it could also include thumb drives, flash memory, a CD, etc. Not a real concern.

That the claims "don't even reference the description" is also not important. I'm not sure what you expect the claims to look like, but if you were thinking they'd say "a media server, such as the ones described above in cols. 5-7," then, no. This is what they look like - a numbered series of single-sentence claims reciting one or more limitations, defining the bounds of the patented material.

Now, if you've only ever looked at patents from the 1800s, you might have expected to see an omnibus claim instead, such as "I claim the invention as described above." But those aren't legally valid anymore.

Re:70s YMODEM/XMODEM protocol prior art

[canajin56]

He's a moron. He didn't read the patent at all. He just said "Suing BitTorrent? The only thing I know about torrents is they split files into chunks and do an error check on each chunk! XMODEM does that too! So clearly a patent on any part of BitTorrent must be on the only part I know anything about, so the patent MUST apply to XMODEM too!". The patent is about load balancing. BitTorrent load balances because you'll request chunks from peers that aren't busy, as opposed to ones that are saturating their link already. XMODEM doesn't do that at all. (How could it redirect the modem line to a different computer, anyways?)