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Australian Firm Targets Apple and Google Cloud Music Services
littlekorea writes "The online music services of Apple and Google are likely to be challenged by a Sydney-based company that has been granted three new patents around file hashing and deduplication. The patents are being managed by Kevin Bermeister, of Altnet/Kazaa fame, who believes that the technology behind P2P music services has been commercialized by the music industry without license."
In semi-related patent troll news, Google is being sued over using interactive panoramic images in Streetview. Because QuickTime VR didn't exist years before the patent was filed.
They built panoramic images with computer graphics then let you click to move through them in 1993. It was hypercard, sure, but still the same thing.
just by reading the title? I hoped "Australian Firm Targets Apple and Google" meant they were going to, oh, I don't know, produce a product and compete? But, no, targeting can only mean one thing any more: lawsuits.
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
Dear Google, prior art on this was posted in the ACM SigGraph Journal in the latter 1980's.
BTW, did we say Oklahoma loves you lately?
The Aussies think the U.S. Gov't and U.S. corporations care about them. Simply adorable!
So this is a patent on any implementation of the following?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti
Or any similar system like git, nonsense on just shows how horrible the worlds IP troll is (the worlds IP troll is primarily the US since it wants the rest of the world to also be full of horrible patent trolls). Oh the horrors, oh the lameness.
“Spatial referenced photographic system with navigation arrangement”
OP, here's your Jump To Conclusions mat.
Seriously, this is getting to be freaking ridiculous. No one is allowed to do anything. No one can have any service because some fuck tard has a patent for some idea which he either was never able to implement or bought from some other fuck tard who was not able to implement it.
This system is completely broken. Something has got to give.
I don't think any company can introduce a new service or product without being hit with a lawsuit! The only winners here are the lawyers who are makings lots of money at the expensive of the consumer as companies just pass on the costs. Seriously, we need some reforms -- now!
I recently read an article on Ars about this and the thought there is that Google will not be doing deduplication in order to avoid lawsuits. Link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/are-google-music-and-amazon-cloud-player-illegal.ars
--
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
Bertrand Russell.
Oh god, that's just hilarious. I so want to see someone from Kazaa screwing over the music industry based on not properly licensing stuff.
But, really, de-duplification has been commercial use for some number of years ... and identifying files by hashes and the like is hardly new ... so I think from what I've seen in TFS, these sound like stupid patents.
If we could cause pain to the music industry and Microsoft, Oracle, and SCO out of this ... I think it would be great. Can someone get on that?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
but do they know how this actually impacts them personally? In other words, why do people have feelings about Google, Apple, and Kazaa fighting things out? Do people know how they are impacted in the end? Why do people care?
Are corporations the new deities of modern culture that people will have feelings for when they are perceived to be attacked by another deity? I can't understand why people feel this is ridiculous other than it is emotional.
If I submit a patent that I believe someone infringes, do I not have a right to discover if infringement happened and be repaired for the damage? Do people believe corporations should steal ideas from little people leaving them with no protection? I think these are ridiculous ideas.
Patents do not seem to be the problem - it is the patenting itself that is the problem. It seems that the quality of patents definitely need to come into question as once the patent is issued, there is power to disrupt that comes with it.
This has GOT to be prior art.
What about deduping in XFS?
Yes, but it's an ingenius patent troll! Now the pirates get to sit back and make bank on all the companies who basically road in on the backs of pirates, who quite honestly DID invent the first "cloud" with P2P. I wish we had more trolls like that. It's kind of a load of crap that some smart kids in school make incredible technology, then get crushed by the likes of the RIAA, only to have some big shot company stroll along, throw money at the record labels, and do basically the same thing without actually innovating... and it's not like these companies came along and at least bought the technology. No, they waited for the original creators to get sued into oblivion, and then appeared out of nowhere like they're Jesus-F*cking-Christ of the Cloud.
Ok, I way over stated that. But I am laughing my ass off that at least someone is getting their just rewards and throwing punches in the other direction.
I8-D
Kazaa is the competing service, now Kazaa.com, which they still run. You'd know that if you read the article, saw that Kazaa is still operational as a legitimate business, and is a competing service, and is the company the patents are based on. It was worth the hit to my Karma to make a second post to the same thread to make a completely separate point.
Then I read your sig and it all made sense why you wouldn't get past the title, fanboy blindness. Too bad none of your Mod's bothered to read the article either.
I8-D
I don't understand how this works. How do you get a patent on something that has been done for years? Even if they surfaced a submarine patent, couldn't you argue in court that they haven't been aggressively defending their patent and thus automatically invalidate it?
When patent trolls regularly collect triple the amount of damages awarded to practicing entities in patent litigation, it is certainly no surprise that more NPEs ("patent trolls") are springing up and becoming ever more aggressive. They have everything to gain and relatively little to lose by filing patent enforcement actions. I fear that the only way to minimize the threat that PAEs pose to small businesses is by eliminating their incentives to assert patents -- i.e., by limiting the damages that they can collect. In the meantime, you can't really blame a company like Intellectual Ventures for taking advantage of weaknesses in the legal system.