Where's the infringing use? There are hundreds of PC games designed for use with a keyboard or digital joypad, such as Jazz Jackrabbit (proprietary) for PC, Street Fighter II (proprietary) for PC, or any of EA's console-style sports sims (also proprietary). Plug in a light gun and bind the joystick to WSAD[1] for a natural control setup for a first-person shooter. (Point your gun at the side of the screen to turn your character.) Or you can plug in a Visoly Flash Advance Linker and play Game Boy Advance games that you've bought at Best Buy, through the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. Loading licensed copies of those games onto a licensed copy of Windows creates fun without violating Title 17, United States Code.
Or you could just throw on Mandrake 9 and an open-source game such as Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd clone of Tetris that will make you hallucinate. Available for Windows, Linux[2], and Game Boy Advance. Or try any of the other excellent open-source games such as Doom, Tux Racer, etc. Some of the gnome-games work well with the included trackball.
I don't see how the arcade software publishers could even think of attacking this fellow.
__________
[1] Yes, I know, "We Suck At Deathmatch." But are there really any advantages to EDSF over WSAD in the typical FPS game?
[2] Linux binaries aren't available because the distros' ABIs vary and because I have only so much space on my web host.
Hmmmm, I am a worker of ordinary knowledge and from what I see this invention is pretty obvious.
I'll show you how a computer science student with no electrical training could have thought up this mod.
The Apple II, C=64, Amiga, and Atari ST computers had their keyboards built into their cases. Some desktop x86 PC cases, and all notebook computers, are the same way. Call this piece of prior art "Keyboard In PC Case".
Some users have suggested modding a PC keyboard using microswitch buttons from an actual arcade machine, or otherwise connecting a JAMMA joystick to a PC using the PS/2 keyboard interface. Call this "Keyboard With Arcade Buttons".
Keyboard In PC Case + Keyboard To Arcade Buttons = what Ed is selling. Given the design goal "arcade enclosure for a device that runs software designed for Microsoft Windows", and given the prior art, I don't see how anybody with a CompTIA A+ certification could not have come up with such a mod.
Ed, could you provide more information on relevant patents so that we can know what you invented?
(a) [Copyright holders may DoS a pirate's b0x0rz.]
(b) EXCEPTIONS. Subsection (a) shall not apply to
a copyright owner in a case in which (1) in the course of taking an action permitted
by subsection (a), the copyright owner... (B) causes economic loss to any person
other than affected file traders
Loophole: Such DoS attacks harm the ISP.
The bill does include a counterclaim procedure.
In addition, if a studio abuses this privilege, the Attorney General can take the studio to court and get an injunction against the studio from attacking further computers. (This may not apply to Mr. Ashcroft, who has been sympathetic to the studios.)
Where do I send an e-mail? Where do I send a hand written letter?
If you want to contact those 535 Americans who have the power to get rid of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's circumvention ban once and for all, you may contact them here:
How long did it take Forgent to realize it even had a possible patent claim... 10 years?
Forgent bought a set of patents. Eighteen months later, Forgent legal realized 1. that one of its patents covered JPEG, and 2. that the company was not party to any contract mandating royalty-free licensing. ISO members must license patents that cover ISO standards under RF or RAND terms. The previous owner of the patents was an ISO member; Forgent isn't.
Who cares if the picture grows an extra 5% because it lacks a certain dithering algorithm?
Not 5%. 500%.
the lack of your pet quantizer is largely irrelvant.
You don't understand. The human visual system converts received images partially to the frequency domain. Without a quantizer that works on data in the frequency domain (such as JPEG's DCT followed by integer division), you're not going to be able to store images efficiently.
won't notice the extra 2 seconds it takes to download porn with PNG, but will scream bloody murder for the minute involved with GIF
GIF and 256-color PNG use similar technology (uncompressed palette data, then lossless Lempel-Ziv* compression of color indices) and produce similar file sizes to within 10%. A 24-color PNG is in essence a gzipped 24-bit BMP file.
* PNG uses Deflate, a variation of LZSS, an LZ77 (window based) algorithm. GIF uses LZW, an LZ78 (dictionary based) algorithm.
/me goes to work on his own pet wavelet project, based on prior art
They did. It's called the TOC protocol. But unfortunately, AOL doesn't really care about the availability of the AIM network's TOC gateway, and when AOL adds a new feature to OSCAR (AIM's primary protocol), it doesn't add the feature to TOC in parallel.
Juno... hypes the fact that you can use the same IM that AOL uses for a lot less money
That's because you can download AOL Instant Messenger and use that over Juno's IP connection. However, under Windows 9x, the absolute number of applications you can open at the same time is limited by the 64 KB user.exe heap and the 64 KB gdi.exe heap. Windows NT, 2000, XP do not have this problem.
Was that integer decoding library thing for ogg ever worked out?
Xiph.org finances development of Ogg media technology by selling shared-source licenses for a proprietary fixed-point Vorbis decoder. (Fixed-point math is an approximation to floating-point math using the integer arithmetic instructions of a DSP.) But now that Ogg Vorbis 1.0 is out and that the help file contains the complete Vorbis audio layer I specification, you'll probably see a couple fixed-point ports of Xiph.org's reference decoder pop up on the usual sites.
Of significant irony is that JPG itself may soon be revoked as a standard (lame software patents tick me off), and PNG *appears* to be the only legitimate replacement candidate.
PNG is not a legitimate replacement because it doesn't have any frequency-domain quantization support; it supports color quantization only in the spatial domain, which isn't as efficient. Spatial color quantization (i.e. dithering to 8-bit) can't go much lower than 4 bits per pixel after the lossless phase.
Try JPEG2000 (.jp2). Those who have claimed IP on JPEG2000 have agreed to license their patents royalty-free. And this time, ISO has probably learned its lesson and isn't going to let anybody sell a patent to a third party such as Forgent who plans to terminate the royalty-free license.
the biggest browser of all, Internet Explorer, has broken alpha support! That's one of the biggest reasons why GIF isn't dead yet.
IE 5.x and later correctly support binary alpha channels in indexed PNG images. It just has problems with the deeper alpha channels used in grayscale and true-color images. Given that transparent GIF images are also indexed and also use binary alpha, I don't see any difference between IE's transparent PNG support and IE's transparent still GIF support that would preclude use of PNG images in web site graphics.
On the other hand, unlike Mozilla, even IE 6 does not support animated PNG images, which are called MNG. This is the real reason why PNG hasn't taken off on the web, because it can't be used to deliver animated advertisements.
The standard mode of Compuserve GIF(tm) with Unisys LZW(tm) Technology supports only 256 colors. To squeeze a 16-bit or 24-bit image into 256 colors requires a lossy operation called "color quantization." This can produce either banding (if no dithering is used) or noise that cannot be compressed (if error diffusion dithering is used).
You can actually get more than 256 colors in a GIF image, but you have to use multiple-image GIF to first draw a 16-color preview image, then add 255 new colors in each subsequent frame. That's OK for low-end high color (1K to 4K colors), but don't count on doing 24-bit true color that way.
PNG supports up to 48-bit color, compressed with zlib. The MNG extension supports everything in PNG plus animation and JPEG sprites (the latter to be removed if Forgent has its way).
Specifically, lets assume that *I* am sitting here as a private citizen holding a patent on some process of manipulating data.
Private citizens usually don't have the $$$ to take on a big business in the courtroom, and no lawyer in her right mind will take a software patent holder's case pro bono publico. The best you can hope for is contingency, where the lawyer takes a case on for free in return for a big cut of the settlement if you win.
Am I worried about getting shut out of the market? No, I was never in the market. This gives me a chance to hold the market hostage for millions once it's in wide spread use.
Your signature comes in handy:
I am trafficking in circumvention devices. 5 years jail $5 mill fine.
If it is discovered that you own patents that encumber a widely used standard, the industry will be able to use such trafficking to blackmail you into licensing the patents royalty-free.
When you get a P/S 1 (or 2) you agree (like it or not) not to reverse engineer or modify the device, and since it's a proprietary machine they can say that.
Could have, but didn't. I didn't see such a notice outside the box of my PS1 console, which I bought with cash a couple months before Dual Shock came out. I also didn't see such a notice inside the box.
Imagine if FF9 had been written and published for P/S2 [sic]
IBM PS/2 (slash) != Sony PS2 (no slash). Unless FF9 for PS/2 were to require a dongle that fit on the PS/2's MCA bus, it would run on every existing PC, through Bochs if nothing else.
Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware).
Not necessarily. I could claim that my program is linking against an LGPL clone of the PSX BIOS. This is a common claim for homebrew Game Boy Advance software, as most GBA emulators re-implement BIOS functions.
According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission
You don't need permission from IBM to link against the PC BIOS. You don't need permission from Sun Microsystems to link against the C library included with the Solaris(TM) operating environment. You don't need permission from Microsoft to link against msvcrt.dll; otherwise, 90% of third party Windows software would violate Microsoft's copyright on the Windows OS.
Mod chips/pirates games are all in one and the same
Give me a break. A pirated game is a copy of a game created without authorization from the government or from the copyright owner. A mod chip is a device that lets you run unsigned code on a game console. How does putting an interop chip in your PS1, writing a program on your PC, compiling it with GCC, burning it to a CD, and putting it in the PS1's drive violate Sony's copyright?
[What about companies] who have decided not to answer the JPEG committee's "call to disclose their intellectual property"?
If JPEG committee members refrain from disclosing their IP, those members are dropped from the JPEG committee (and possibly from all of ISO); just look what happened when Rambus pulled a fast one on JEDEC. If third parties who own patents on JPEG2000 but aren't members of ISO refrain from disclosing their IP, they risk being shut out of the market; just look what happened to Rambus's market share.
In order for a patent to apply, all of it's claims must be met.
I wouldn't be so sure. A typical patent contains a plurality of independent claims ("A computer with memory and a first image source...") and a plurality of dependent claims ("The invention of claim 2, where in addition..."). If a device matches an independent claim exactly, it infringes the patent. Dependent claims exist so that if the independent claim is found to be obvious or not novel, the patent owner has additional inventions. In this case, any device that matches a nullified independent claim plus one or more non-nullified claims dependent on that claim infringes the patent.
What's t say that some other lawyer isn't going to claim that thay have a patent on one or more of the algorithms used in Jpeg 2000?
The JPEG committee, which is developing the JPEG2000 standard, has issued a call to entities who claim to own patents on technologies necessary to implement JPEG2000 compression to disclose their intellectual property. The companies that have disclosed such patents have agreed to license them to the general public on a royalty-free basis.
Quirks on the preferred platform
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 1
All you need is a subtle performance advantage with the preferred platform, and just a general instance of "Quirks" on the non-preferred platform
Or, in the Win32 API's case, vice versa. WINE started out by implementing the winapi as it was specified in MSDN documentation, but not many apps worked. When the developers changed WINE to emulate the bugs in Windows, on the other hand, compatibility improved. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the substantial noninfringing use?
Where's the infringing use? There are hundreds of PC games designed for use with a keyboard or digital joypad, such as Jazz Jackrabbit (proprietary) for PC, Street Fighter II (proprietary) for PC, or any of EA's console-style sports sims (also proprietary). Plug in a light gun and bind the joystick to WSAD[1] for a natural control setup for a first-person shooter. (Point your gun at the side of the screen to turn your character.) Or you can plug in a Visoly Flash Advance Linker and play Game Boy Advance games that you've bought at Best Buy, through the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. Loading licensed copies of those games onto a licensed copy of Windows creates fun without violating Title 17, United States Code.
Or you could just throw on Mandrake 9 and an open-source game such as Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd clone of Tetris that will make you hallucinate. Available for Windows, Linux[2], and Game Boy Advance. Or try any of the other excellent open-source games such as Doom, Tux Racer, etc. Some of the gnome-games work well with the included trackball.
I don't see how the arcade software publishers could even think of attacking this fellow.
__________[1] Yes, I know, "We Suck At Deathmatch." But are there really any advantages to EDSF over WSAD in the typical FPS game?
[2] Linux binaries aren't available because the distros' ABIs vary and because I have only so much space on my web host.
Hmmmm, I am a worker of ordinary knowledge and from what I see this invention is pretty obvious.
I'll show you how a computer science student with no electrical training could have thought up this mod.
The Apple II, C=64, Amiga, and Atari ST computers had their keyboards built into their cases. Some desktop x86 PC cases, and all notebook computers, are the same way. Call this piece of prior art "Keyboard In PC Case".
Some users have suggested modding a PC keyboard using microswitch buttons from an actual arcade machine, or otherwise connecting a JAMMA joystick to a PC using the PS/2 keyboard interface. Call this "Keyboard With Arcade Buttons".
Keyboard In PC Case + Keyboard To Arcade Buttons = what Ed is selling. Given the design goal "arcade enclosure for a device that runs software designed for Microsoft Windows", and given the prior art, I don't see how anybody with a CompTIA A+ certification could not have come up with such a mod.
Ed, could you provide more information on relevant patents so that we can know what you invented?
Loophole: Such DoS attacks harm the ISP.
The bill does include a counterclaim procedure.
In addition, if a studio abuses this privilege, the Attorney General can take the studio to court and get an injunction against the studio from attacking further computers. (This may not apply to Mr. Ashcroft, who has been sympathetic to the studios.)
Where do I send an e-mail? Where do I send a hand written letter?
If you want to contact those 535 Americans who have the power to get rid of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's circumvention ban once and for all, you may contact them here:
Write Your Representative
Write Your Senators
Don't you mean NAMBLA?
Before taking up this DMCA case, which NAMBLA organization did the ACLU defend?
How long did it take Forgent to realize it even had a possible patent claim... 10 years?
Forgent bought a set of patents. Eighteen months later, Forgent legal realized 1. that one of its patents covered JPEG, and 2. that the company was not party to any contract mandating royalty-free licensing. ISO members must license patents that cover ISO standards under RF or RAND terms. The previous owner of the patents was an ISO member; Forgent isn't.
Who cares if the picture grows an extra 5% because it lacks a certain dithering algorithm?
Not 5%. 500%.
the lack of your pet quantizer is largely irrelvant.
You don't understand. The human visual system converts received images partially to the frequency domain. Without a quantizer that works on data in the frequency domain (such as JPEG's DCT followed by integer division), you're not going to be able to store images efficiently.
won't notice the extra 2 seconds it takes to download porn with PNG, but will scream bloody murder for the minute involved with GIF
GIF and 256-color PNG use similar technology (uncompressed palette data, then lossless Lempel-Ziv* compression of color indices) and produce similar file sizes to within 10%. A 24-color PNG is in essence a gzipped 24-bit BMP file.
* PNG uses Deflate, a variation of LZSS, an LZ77 (window based) algorithm. GIF uses LZW, an LZ78 (dictionary based) algorithm.
Why don't they simply publish the API
They did. It's called the TOC protocol. But unfortunately, AOL doesn't really care about the availability of the AIM network's TOC gateway, and when AOL adds a new feature to OSCAR (AIM's primary protocol), it doesn't add the feature to TOC in parallel.
Juno ... hypes the fact that you can use the same IM that AOL uses for a lot less money
That's because you can download AOL Instant Messenger and use that over Juno's IP connection. However, under Windows 9x, the absolute number of applications you can open at the same time is limited by the 64 KB user.exe heap and the 64 KB gdi.exe heap. Windows NT, 2000, XP do not have this problem.
Was that integer decoding library thing for ogg ever worked out?
Xiph.org finances development of Ogg media technology by selling shared-source licenses for a proprietary fixed-point Vorbis decoder. (Fixed-point math is an approximation to floating-point math using the integer arithmetic instructions of a DSP.) But now that Ogg Vorbis 1.0 is out and that the help file contains the complete Vorbis audio layer I specification, you'll probably see a couple fixed-point ports of Xiph.org's reference decoder pop up on the usual sites.
Of significant irony is that JPG itself may soon be revoked as a standard (lame software patents tick me off), and PNG *appears* to be the only legitimate replacement candidate.
PNG is not a legitimate replacement because it doesn't have any frequency-domain quantization support; it supports color quantization only in the spatial domain, which isn't as efficient. Spatial color quantization (i.e. dithering to 8-bit) can't go much lower than 4 bits per pixel after the lossless phase.
Try JPEG2000 (.jp2). Those who have claimed IP on JPEG2000 have agreed to license their patents royalty-free. And this time, ISO has probably learned its lesson and isn't going to let anybody sell a patent to a third party such as Forgent who plans to terminate the royalty-free license.
If you're concerned about sound quality, you are not listening to compressed audio of any sort.
Tell that to the r3mix team, who achieved transparent reproduction of audio using the LAME MP3 encoder at under 192 kbps.
the biggest browser of all, Internet Explorer, has broken alpha support! That's one of the biggest reasons why GIF isn't dead yet.
IE 5.x and later correctly support binary alpha channels in indexed PNG images. It just has problems with the deeper alpha channels used in grayscale and true-color images. Given that transparent GIF images are also indexed and also use binary alpha, I don't see any difference between IE's transparent PNG support and IE's transparent still GIF support that would preclude use of PNG images in web site graphics.
On the other hand, unlike Mozilla, even IE 6 does not support animated PNG images, which are called MNG. This is the real reason why PNG hasn't taken off on the web, because it can't be used to deliver animated advertisements.
What are you talking about? GIFs are not lossy
The standard mode of Compuserve GIF(tm) with Unisys LZW(tm) Technology supports only 256 colors. To squeeze a 16-bit or 24-bit image into 256 colors requires a lossy operation called "color quantization." This can produce either banding (if no dithering is used) or noise that cannot be compressed (if error diffusion dithering is used).
You can actually get more than 256 colors in a GIF image, but you have to use multiple-image GIF to first draw a 16-color preview image, then add 255 new colors in each subsequent frame. That's OK for low-end high color (1K to 4K colors), but don't count on doing 24-bit true color that way.
PNG supports up to 48-bit color, compressed with zlib. The MNG extension supports everything in PNG plus animation and JPEG sprites (the latter to be removed if Forgent has its way).
Specifically, lets assume that *I* am sitting here as a private citizen holding a patent on some process of manipulating data.
Private citizens usually don't have the $$$ to take on a big business in the courtroom, and no lawyer in her right mind will take a software patent holder's case pro bono publico. The best you can hope for is contingency, where the lawyer takes a case on for free in return for a big cut of the settlement if you win.
Am I worried about getting shut out of the market? No, I was never in the market. This gives me a chance to hold the market hostage for millions once it's in wide spread use.
Your signature comes in handy:
I am trafficking in circumvention devices. 5 years jail $5 mill fine.
If it is discovered that you own patents that encumber a widely used standard, the industry will be able to use such trafficking to blackmail you into licensing the patents royalty-free.
When you get a P/S 1 (or 2) you agree (like it or not) not to reverse engineer or modify the device, and since it's a proprietary machine they can say that.
Could have, but didn't. I didn't see such a notice outside the box of my PS1 console, which I bought with cash a couple months before Dual Shock came out. I also didn't see such a notice inside the box.
Imagine if FF9 had been written and published for P/S2 [sic]
IBM PS/2 (slash) != Sony PS2 (no slash). Unless FF9 for PS/2 were to require a dongle that fit on the PS/2's MCA bus, it would run on every existing PC, through Bochs if nothing else.
Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware).
Not necessarily. I could claim that my program is linking against an LGPL clone of the PSX BIOS. This is a common claim for homebrew Game Boy Advance software, as most GBA emulators re-implement BIOS functions.
According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission
You don't need permission from IBM to link against the PC BIOS. You don't need permission from Sun Microsystems to link against the C library included with the Solaris(TM) operating environment. You don't need permission from Microsoft to link against msvcrt.dll; otherwise, 90% of third party Windows software would violate Microsoft's copyright on the Windows OS.
All they need now is a wireless video adapter
Or a video display built into the console unit.
and a wireless power supply
That's called Batteries(tm).
Mod chips/pirates games are all in one and the same
Give me a break. A pirated game is a copy of a game created without authorization from the government or from the copyright owner. A mod chip is a device that lets you run unsigned code on a game console. How does putting an interop chip in your PS1, writing a program on your PC, compiling it with GCC, burning it to a CD, and putting it in the PS1's drive violate Sony's copyright?
"It's fun to violate the D-M-C-A!"
Relevant User Friendly link (© 2002 Illiad)
[What about companies] who have decided not to answer the JPEG committee's "call to disclose their intellectual property"?
If JPEG committee members refrain from disclosing their IP, those members are dropped from the JPEG committee (and possibly from all of ISO); just look what happened when Rambus pulled a fast one on JEDEC. If third parties who own patents on JPEG2000 but aren't members of ISO refrain from disclosing their IP, they risk being shut out of the market; just look what happened to Rambus's market share.
No, that's trademark law. Patents are viable until the prescribed date they become invalid.
That's what I thought until I learned about the "laches" doctrine.
In order for a patent to apply, all of it's claims must be met.
I wouldn't be so sure. A typical patent contains a plurality of independent claims ("A computer with memory and a first image source...") and a plurality of dependent claims ("The invention of claim 2, where in addition..."). If a device matches an independent claim exactly, it infringes the patent. Dependent claims exist so that if the independent claim is found to be obvious or not novel, the patent owner has additional inventions. In this case, any device that matches a nullified independent claim plus one or more non-nullified claims dependent on that claim infringes the patent.
What's t say that some other lawyer isn't going to claim that thay have a patent on one or more of the algorithms used in Jpeg 2000?
The JPEG committee, which is developing the JPEG2000 standard, has issued a call to entities who claim to own patents on technologies necessary to implement JPEG2000 compression to disclose their intellectual property. The companies that have disclosed such patents have agreed to license them to the general public on a royalty-free basis.
All you need is a subtle performance advantage with the preferred platform, and just a general instance of "Quirks" on the non-preferred platform
Or, in the Win32 API's case, vice versa. WINE started out by implementing the winapi as it was specified in MSDN documentation, but not many apps worked. When the developers changed WINE to emulate the bugs in Windows, on the other hand, compatibility improved. Go figure.
I use mozilla all the time, you know why? Because no matter what computer I'm on, I can run it.
Not if the computer is a school-issue P100 with 24 MB of RAM.
Not if you don't have the admin password, and the admin has configured your account not to run binaries from /home.