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ITC Judge Calls For US Xbox Import Ban
symbolset writes "In the long running dispute between Motorola and Microsoft, Judge David Shaw of the ITC recommended Monday an import ban on Xbox 360 S consoles, as they are found to infringe Motorola's patents (PDF). The judge also ordered Microsoft post a bond of 7 percent of the retail price of all unsold U.S. Xbox inventory. The decision will go to the ITC's board of commissioners, who will either uphold the recommendation or overturn it. 'Microsoft argued that Shaw's exclusion order does not serve the public interest because it would leave consumers of video game consoles with only two options to satisfy their needs: the Sony Playstation and the Nintendo Wii. Shaw rejected that argument, finding that the public interest in enforcing intellectual property rights outweighs any potential economic impact on video game console buyers.'"
This follows news last week of Microsoft winning an import ban on Motorola's Android devices.
It's ridiculous. Both this action by Motorola (Google) and the patent system in the U.S. Do you really think it's good ban all sales of XBOX360 because there is (supposedly) some video playback algorithm used in XBOX360 that Motorola has patents for?
Microsoft's point is also perfectly good. Banning Xbox360 will do serious damage. If you want to play any current generation AAA games, then your choice is Sony's PS3. There is Wii, but it doesn't have the games. Google is evil. Ridiculous.
This could wind up being a great way to force a compromise.
There goes Apple again - litigating rather than inno... What's that? Not Apple? Oh... Awkward...
Maybe the politicians will notice that the patent system is fundamentally broken when it finally gets to the point that nothing can be sold in the US any more (the Mutually Assured Destruction part of the current ongoing patent nuclear war)
Yeah, right...
Can't we all just get along?
"Microsoft argued that Shaw's exclusion order does not serve the public interest because it would leave consumers of video game consoles with only two options to satisfy their needs"
Bah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Microsoft sure has some huge balls.
The ITC has determined that just about every product out there violates some patent or other, so to play it safe, no products will be allowed into the United Staes ever again.
The only winning move is not to play.
Those patents sure are working well. Soon we will have nothing that we can buy in the states. We will have to travel to asia, buy it, and sneak it back here.
Microsoft wants it both ways. They want to block somebody elses product.... Android..... but not their own. Fairness says both companies should be blocked. Good for the judge.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It's about time this patent warfare resulted in some mutually assured destruction between Microsoft and Motorola.
When the bottom line gets hit, maybe somebody will have some incentive to reform the patent office.
My two favorite proposals:
1. Legally mandated cross-licensing of patents. Anyone who wants one must be given one, on equitable and even terms.
2. Patents get filed with itemized research and development costs. Any individual, company, or group can buy out the patent by paying out the office-accepted R&D costs times ten. Once bought out, the patent is public domain. If you want exclusivity, license it, don't buy it.
The judge is a moron. The public has no interest in stupid ass IP lawsuits.
They should have had a BSA raid to put the shoe on the other foot.
The truth shall set you free!
On this point you are incorrect. From the ALJ's Recommendation (Footnote 1, p. 2): The complainants are Motorola Mobility, Inc. and General Instrument Corporation of Horsham, Pennsylania (collectively, "Motorola".)
My understanding is that the Xbox 360 uses Windows Media Audio 10 Professional for all system and game audio.
If the main issue is the H.264 video codec, why can't they just switch to Microsoft WMV/VC-1 or one of the many open source ones available? Sounds like a simple software system update to me if its just the video apps doing it. If H.264 is used on game discs then MS needs to payup.
I wonder how long this system will remain viable?
Reminds me of a story concerning the game "MULE" (an excellent little multi-player economy-based game set around the building of a new colony). I liked this game a lot and often played against my brothers and friends. We'd play very competitively, each trying to maximize our own profits. Then I met a friend at college and happened to mention this game. She said, "Oh, I love that game too. What was the richest colony you made?" Until she asked, it hadn't occurred to me that you could play the game a different way: cooperatively, in order to achieve the best good for the colony as a whole.
I wonder when humanity will figure that out too.
(This is not an endorsement of "socialism" or "communism" or anything like that, or even a criticism of competition. It's just a note that we tend to focus too much on little-picture, selfish goals instead of big-picture ones. Compete to make the best thing, rather than compete to kill the competition.)
Release Xbox 720, just make sure you didn't rip off anyone else's patents on it.
However, all this shows is that Google is not all about "do no evil". The fact they paid 25 billion to buy a company only to turn around and use it as a vehicle to sue another competitor pretty much seals the fate that Google is about as cantankerous and vile as any other corporation.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It looks like a typo, but I don't think it is. What, exactly, is "fnord"?
:(){
MS switching to an opensource codec on a closed DRM machine to get around software patents...
You are FUNNY!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
'Shaw rejected that argument, finding that the public interest in enforcing intellectual property rights outweighs any potential economic impact on video game console buyers.'
This guy is seriously disconnected from the real world if he thinks that enforcing intellectual property rights is more important to the public than the availability of a popular product. As far as I can tell, the only people benefiting from the escalating levels of IP enforcement are the lawyers and cartels, while the public are getting shafted as the draconian measures erode their freedoms.
When did playing on a game console become a need?
Just this morning I read a seemingly unrelated article in which the author, a former Motorola Mobility employee, theorized that a little talked-about possibility for Google wanting to buy MMI centers around set-top boxes.
The Google/Motorola Deal is Done. What Now?
http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/smart-phones/240000845
According to the article linked above, Motorola moved their "home" division, which includes set-top boxes which Motorola manufacturers, over to Motorola Mobility in an attempt to "sweeten the deal" for Google to buy it. If that assertion is correct then one can conclude that Google is the real entity that just got the ITC to impose a ban on the xBox.
While this may look like another garden-variety patent battle I'll bet it has more to do with the upcoming TV battlefield that, rumor has it, already includes Apple and their yet-to-be-officially-announced AppleTV. The folks at Google appear to be well into their plans to compete with Apple (and Microsoft, which already has a set-top box in xBox).
Silicon Valley is betting huge on TV content streaming and gaming.
take your hammer and sickle back to china you dirty zipperhead
Micro$oft just needs to pay up as the judge ruled to get their consoles out of customs or wait for the appeal and not have them in the market. If they don't want to pay in the future, simply remove the offending IP from any new consoles. It may not be profitable for Micro$oft's game console business, but it is what it is.
My Guess is that Micro$soft will eventually pay up, but right now they are hoping to reduce the supply of units in the pipeline by slowing production. The game console business is not very profitable, so this may just hasten the end, but it will surely be cheaper to pay up and sell already built hardware than to just dump it into the trash.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Enforcing intellectual property rights means charging us more for the same thing, that is against our interests. It is in the interests of entrenched players, they benefit from IP rights but the public just gets hosed by them. If we did away with the patent system competition would keep technology advancing. There is always a better way to do something and always someone willing to do it. Open source software proves this point. The patent system needs to be abolished and patent lawyers rendered into Soylent Green.
It's like MAD where both sides just say "eh, fuck it".
Anyone who's ever taken an economics coarse has figured that out. They however have also probably figured out that the next epiphany is that if everyone is working for the common good except one selfish bastard who is out for himself, the selfish bastard wins at the expense of everyone else.
The day we solve that problem is the day we can declared victory on basically all of society's problems excepting a few edge cases like disease and the irreversibly of entropy.
(This is not an endorsement of "socialism" or "communism" or anything like that, or even a criticism of competition. [...])
It's quite telling that you need to add this to your comment, as if promoting cooperation over competition was somehow un-American (I'm assuming you're from the US).
As the saying goes, "Those who live by the sword die by the sword".
Is that like playing Risk where no one attacks each other? Of course it yields many many more armies and everyone lives in harmony. But it is completely uninteresting and lacks creativity. May as well live without possessions like a Franciscan.
Maybe when enough shit is banned and enough people are forced to pay insane sums of money on captain obvious's bullshit enough of us will have had enough that something meaningful actually gets done about insane, unfair and illogical legal regimes...enough to overcome lobbies who prefer stagnation, lockin and lack of competition.
Nintendo and PS3 have got to be infringing on something...come on trolls do your worst. Someone has got to have patented the act of talking into a portable sheet of glass and plastic all phone imports and exports must be banned. Everyone using any electronic device is guilty of infringing on something.
(MAD= Mutually Assured Destruction)
was that noone was actually supposed to pull the trigger!!!
DOH!
Your end comment is exactly what made Apple so successful. No one at Apple (not even Jobs) ever really expected Apple to crush their competitors and become "top dog". Jobs wanted to create the best products they could and attract the few customers who appreciated that quality and were willing to pay a little bit more to get it. That was the plan anyhow. Of course now that they are the corporate behemoth that they have become, they are playing the same game as everyone else, and that I fear will lead to their eventual doom.
...fuck you Motorola. I'm never buying another piece of shit product of yours. And I will make sure nobody I know does. Fucking losers.
M.U.L.E. is a little different than RISK, it's more like a farming game.
Players can specialize, and decide to produce food, or only electricity, or other goods, then trade them on the market. There are geographic features that improve certain types of actions in each territory, and assignment is semi-roulette, so if you specialize in things your territory is good for you depend on others to survive (by getting things you need during the trading phases), but can be a lot more productive. At the end the game reports both individual and combined scores. At my house we got "The Colony was a Success" a couple times.
The subsequent epiphany is that an entire society working together for the common good will pretty easily curb stomp the one selfish bastard who tries to run it for their own personal gain.
"focus too much on little-picture, selfish goals instead of big-picture ones"
And who gets to define the "big picture" - Hitler had a big picture, so did Stalin and the list goes on and on.... These things never work and looks like we never learn from it.... Nothing beats a society where each individual can decide for themselves what is important and what is not...
Capitalism is based on competition.
But if EVERYTHING is patented, trademarked, copyrighted, so that it's impossible to even make any kind of product without infringing on something, then Capitalism is OVER. Because everything will be held eventually by one company, and that company will have a monopoly on EVERYTHING, and therefore will also control the government. End Game == Fascism.
For the good of Democracy in a Capitalist society, IP "laws" must end.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There is nothing more cooperatively competitive than open source, and I don't think anyone would accuse Red Hat of being communist. Some of us are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
The penguin made me do it.
I don't hear comments on slashdot. I read them. "threesixty" is dumb. Write "360", "XBox", or "XBox 360".
Risk is really bad example. And if you're comparing Risk to life you need to A) go outside and smell the flowers and see how many billions of different things there are out there and B) not have a one track mind. MULE is a lot more complex than Risk. So is life. You can pick up risk when your 6 years old.
Follow up: your also comparing playing Unreal Tournament and doing nothing - to playing Civilization 4 and trying to win through diplomacy or the space race.
End Game == Fascism.
The End-game of capitalism is Fascism anyway. By reducing political involvement to voting as a form of consumer confidence, people become used to the idea that Government is something that is provided for you, rather than something you have to actively participate in and contribute to. Whether the existing public sector evolves to adapt, or whether it gets surpassed by the private sector providing the infrastructure requirements, in the end, taxation becomes payment for services, the public sector adopts corporate hierarchy structures that retain people with "success-first" mentalities, and ideology becomes driven by factors that the markets take to be essential values.
That's not an argument against dropping IP laws. But what's the driving reason? If you're worried that it's a block to Free Capitalism, then you're right to be worried, but wrong to think IP has anything to do with it.
Myu:
In general, to foster cooperation, you need some ideals that the great majority agree upon. Your examples are quite the opposite.
At the same time, though, the majority of people can be real dumb asses. So perhaps things ought to be decided by a majority of people who have enough education to know what they're talking about. Of course, everyone should be able to get educated.
But as far as what "needs" to be decided - that's where we need to be careful. I'm all for preserving freedoms and such, but as life plainly shows, there are lots of messy issues. Regarding the issue at hand: How should inventors be compensated? Or artists, writers, and other creative folks? How could we encourage people to make *more* use of previous work, rather than less?
The original systems that were put in place for these things (patents, copyrights, etc) are being co-opted more and more as simply tools for corporations to benefit financially from the public while doing less and less work. They're addicted to their "revenue streams", and they keep going back to the government to make them bigger and last longer. The government set these things up as a balancing act between the creators and the common good, but the balance has been lost (taken).
I'm doing too much pondering on an empty stomach...
There's a lot of cooperation in a free market society, or else you wouldn't even have half the things you have right now, nor would you be here replying to a message. Just look at how many companies are involved to build an airplane, car or machines, quite a lot of different companies working cooperatively for the better good and of course more profit. This is just plain dirty fighting between one technology company vs. the other.
I think you illustrate perfectly fine that basic logic is challenging enough for you, how about getting on with the wars after you grasp it?
p.s.>
because risk, by nature of its ruleset, only allows for creativity / interesting situations when you wage war. life on the other hand.
If you restrict the market algorithm in the way you suggest, you do not get a better result. Humans aren't wired to predict the actions of other humans who act with certain arbitrary, subjective morals. They are wired to assume a kind of pseudorationality. This works much better for distribution of labour.
(This is not an endorsement of "socialism" or "communism" or anything like that, or even a criticism of competition. It's just a note that we tend to focus too much on little-picture, selfish goals instead of big-picture ones. Compete to make the best thing, rather than compete to kill the competition.)
Well, you may not want to endorse socialism, but I sure as hell will.
Marxism and Socialism and Communism should not be treated as dirty words. They are valid, well thought out and highly viable ways to run a country and an economy.
There is a hell of a lot or knee-jerk reactions whenever either of those three words are used, which tends to derail any discussion into an irrational mess of name-calling and idiocy.
Everyone should read Das Kapital (the Penguin classics edition is what I have, it's very nice). Karl Marx was a visionary and a hero to workers everywhere. It is such a shame that his philosophies have been appropriated by power-hungry tyrants and twisted into something Marx never intended.
Eat the rich.
Or they could always buy a PC...It could even run Microsoft Windows, and be controlled with an Xbox game controller.
Much noise has been made about Xbox 360 and PS3 games' multiplayer modes going online-only as opposed to split- or otherwise shared-screen. But PC games are even less likely than Xbox 360 games to support even two players on one machine.
Every time PC vs consoles topic comes up, this non-argument is trotted out and it doesn't become any more true from repetition.
You say your gaming PC cost you $350. How much did gaming PCs for other members of the same household cost, and with the demise of spawn installation, how much did extra copies of those games cost? Though one can plug two to four gamepads into a PC, almost no mainstream games take advantage of it.
PC games are orders of magnitude cheaper
Really? One order of magnitude is a factor of ten; two are a factor of 100. Perhaps if you include Flash or JavaScript games or the old freeware on LiberatedGames, the average PC game is less than 1/100 the price of the average console game.
and you only need one computer
What PC games do you recommend that support multiple gamepads on one computer?
A console will be limited by it's current video card. You can upgrade the one on your PC very very easily and very cheaply.
How do I upgrade the video card in the majority of laptops? Otherwise, someone for whom "your PC" means a laptop must first buy a desktop PC.
Now, I only play occasionally on my iPhone.
An unlocked iPhone costs more than $600, which will buy two Xbox 360 consoles with hard drives.
The rest of the machine doesn't cost extra because you'd have machine for browsing web and for work anyway.
I'm using my Dell laptop for browsing web. Where do I plug in the $50 video card? Or should I be buying a new laptop anyway because it's due for a 2-year battery replacement?
Being able to just sit down on the couch with a beer, pop in a game, and play it lounging back without having a keyboard/mouse spread is relaxing. I do love playing PC games as well, but sometimes I just want to be sprawled.
PROTIP: Several PC games support gamepads as well, and for games that aren't in genres known for precise mouse twitching, you can use a USB gamepad to emulate a keyboard. All HDTVs from the past five years have an HDMI input that works with the DVI-D or HDMI output on your PCs, and most also have a VGA input.