So I take it you think the guy with the money should win?
The '913 patent is obvious now. When I invented it, I had been told by the guy who ported Cinepak to the 3DO player that it was impossible to do. I did it. I proved that it was possible, by reducing it to a working prototype. At that time, PCs could barely play any sort of video. DVDs were years away. The closest thing were the big analog Video Disc players, which were severely limited in playback speeds with their analog format.
It's easy to invent things when they have already been done, when their time is ready and they are obvious. It's a lot harder when you are pushing the envelope of what is possible at the time.
The law does allow independent rediscovery, it just doesn't allow you to freely profit from it if the original inventor took steps to protect his invention.
Writing software is trivial? Most "normal" people I know have a hard enough time connecting to the Internet, let alone figuring out how to use a compiler. If you spend months writing something complex and useful, don't you have a choice of whether to give it away or ask people to pay for it?
No, it wasn't useless, it was just not possible with the technology of the time (1988). It is obvious now, but it wasn't at the time. Remember this is a long time ago. Plus, I didn't just think it up, I spent eight years, at first part-time and then full-time, reducing this idea to an actual working piece of software. Arthur C. Clarke did not build and launch a communications satellite, he just wrote about it, a very big difference.
All good ideas are thought of by many people-you ought to hear how many people tell me that they thought of my invention years ago-but very few persistently and diligently pursue an idea until it is reduced to a working invention. This is a requirement of getting a patent. Plus, the patent system does not defend you, it provides a way to defend yourself, at your own expense.
So, you are saying that myself, an very small-time inventor, should have no right to protect myself against someone with more money that comes up with the same idea long after myself?
I invented some software, and patented it, and I came up with the idea in 1988, about seven years before it was even physically possible to do it with the processors of the day. There was nothing like it, open source or closed, when I thought of it, and before I first wrote it, I was told by an expert in the field that it was impossible. Now it is becoming common, almost ten years after I filed the first patent application. I imagine that in a few more years virtually every new PC shipped will include infringing code. Right now, every PC with WinDVD does.
Is not the patent system meant to benefit people like me, who thought up something before it was possible to do, continued trying to realize it for years, and now, fifteen+ years after first writing down the psuedocode and eight since developing the first working demos and filing the original patents, finally stands to maybe make enough money to pay my bills, both through my own efforts at commercialization and by enforcing my patents?
I own most of a very tiny company with several patents that I'm trying to enforce. At the same time I am working on building more products with the basic technology and trying to make enough money to support myself, my wife and maybe even a child in the not too distant future. Right now I'm studying how to file a patent infringement suit against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to the point of having running demos, and they found a $3 million investment with which to create their product. My product was being sold through a $220 million company that almost went bankrupt and closed down the division we were working with. The guys I am going after actually visited my home office a year before they came out with their product, were going to license the patent, and then suddenly told me they did not infringe after they received their investment. I bought their product and reverse-engineered their software and can prove infringement.
So, do you think I should just fold up my tent and renege on the commitment I made to many friends and family that invested in me over the last ten years? As I am being outspent by someone not huge but bigger than me? Or should I just ignore their infringement and try to close a deal with another big company, which I am getting closer to right now? Or should I go after these guys who initially thought they came up with this idea themselves, then realized I was years ahead of them and came to pick my brain, and then reneged on a potential licensing deal? I was and am very willing to license the patents at industry standard rates. And what do I do about Intervideo's WinDVD, which was shipped with similar capabilities five+ years after I filed our first patents? I haven't worked so hard for so long just to live trying to pay the bills month to month, like I am right now....
FYI Links to the patents are on our website, look way down on the bottom right of the front page, here:Exerscape.com.
I invented some software, and patented it, and I came up with the idea in 1988, about seven years before it was even physically possible to do it with the processors of the day. There was nothing like it, open source or closed, when I thought of it, and before I first wrote it, I was told by an expert in the field that it was impossible. Now it is becoming common, almost ten years after I filed the first patent application. I imagine that in a few more years virtually every new PC shipped will include infringing code. Right now, every PC with WinDVD does.
Meanwhile, I own most of a very tiny company with several patents that I'm trying to enforce. At the same time I am working on building more products with the basic technology and trying to make enough money to support myself, my wife and maybe even a child in the not too distant future. Right now I'm studying how to file a patent infringement suit against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to the point of having running demos, and they found a $3 million investment with which to create their product. My product was being sold through a $220 million company that almost went bankrupt and closed down the division we were working with. The guys I am going after actually visited my home office a year before they came out with their product, were going to license the patent, and then suddenly told me they did not infringe after they received their investment. I bought their product and reverse-engineered their software and can prove infringement.
So, do you think I should just fold up my tent and renege on the commitment I made to many friends and family that invested in me over the last ten years? As I am being outspent by someone not huge but bigger than me? Or should I just ignore their infringement and try to close a deal with another big company, which I am getting closer to right now? Or should I go after these guys who initially thought they came up with this idea themselves, then realized I was years ahead of them and came to pick my brain, and then reneged on a potential licensing deal? I was and am very willing to license the patents at industry standard rates. And what do I do about Intervideo's WinDVD, which was shipped with similar capabilities five+ years after I filed our first patents? I haven't worked so hard for so long just to live trying to pay the bills month to month, like I am right now....
FYI Links to the patents are on our website, look on the bottom right of the front page, here:Exerscape.com.
Wait until someone manages to install a spamming root kit on your Linux box, then tell me again how you never see it. You just don't see as much of it, but its out there. Trust me, I just spent week of my life dealing with it...
For the EE's out there--could something like this be aimed at those extremely annoying giant bass speakers in the car beside at a stoplight, and have an effect like a "mute" button? A permanent mute button, if you get my drift : )
And it may not happen until the DirecTV ownership issues are straightened out. Hughes Corp. is being sold by GM, with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. the only buyer left standing. A few months from now a lot of things could change...
NY Times (free reg required) article on the latest on this subject here.
You sound like you have some experience with this issue : ) Want to talk more privately? My direct e-mail is on our website.
I've been reverse engineering suspect products and putting tegether claim-by-claim Powerpoint presentations, detailing the infringing code. The next step I figure is to set up my SoftICE remote debugger to show how it infinges while it is running, and then take this to 1) the company and, if necessary, 2) to a judge in our local Fed Circuit court.
Here is the overview of their Digital Media Transmission patents. The first one issued in the US has a priority date of Jan. 7, 1991. From a quick look they look pretty solid.
As an inventor and founder of a company that holds several patents, in the area of dynamically controlling digital video speed, I have some feelings on both sides of the issue. We have consistently tried to implement our inventions, and in fact had to scramble to get our first app in as we showed an early implementation at a trade show in 1994 to try to drum up interest. We are involved in several "discussions" over products that appeared several years later, and every single one has declared they do not infringe upon our patents. Time will tell... Plus, I am trying to figure out what to do about some much larger companies that have brought out features on products in the last 12-18 months that look like they infringe. My investors want us to do something, and we have to try, but when our pockets are shallow and others are deep, what is the solution?
On the other hand, when companies buy up patents and try to enforce them without ever creating products themselves, that kind of gets my goat. The whole patent thing was started to give little guys like us some sort of defensive weapon when fighting to build a product and a market.
It is a reference to the many Dept. of Defense photos being used by the media. In retrospect, I should have added one more sentence, such as "I've been thinking about this in the context of all those official DoD photos that are used, that are always so patriotic."
And yes, "Dark Side of the Moon" is my fav by far. I grew up on that album there for awhile : )
That was in reference to all those DoD pictures that are used by the various news media. If the LA Times guy did it and got caught, what about upstream of the media photogs? Could these "official" pics be doctored without anyone knowing about it? I think so.
PS I called it a paraphrase because I wasn't sure of the original lyrics. I have a great old poster of this phrase on part of the Berlin Wall as it was being torn down, which is what made me think about it. One of my fav albums : )
Re:"I believe Microsoft didn't go public for a long time until internal pressure forced the issue because the employees wanted their stock to be worth something."
Actually, I think it was the securities regulators--they were getting so much private stock issued, which was starting to get sold between employees and their families more and more, that the regulators stepped in.
I agree--Google, stay private! There's nothing like a 3-month reporting horizon to mess your long term strategies up, especially if your stock starts diving from entirely unrelated matters. For instance, a war over oil (oops, I mean freedom!), with virtually no allies to help pay for it, that suddenly seems to be a bit of a bigger job than planned by the geniuses in the Defense Department...
My concept is similar, except it uses helmet cam video. I first wrote it down in in 1988, have patented and produced it, and am looking forward to producing more. See exerscape.com for more info. My users say it definitely makes exercise less boring, and an independent study has shown that unfit subjects burned more calories with no increase in percieved effort. We are in the process of securing an NIH grant to port the software engine to the PS2 and enlarge this study.
I've been doing that forever, from doing a startup and exhibiting at my first COMDEX in 1985, through most of a decade working on the Alta Ski Patrol, doing emergency medicine, avalanche control and rescue dog training, to what I'm doing now, trying to bring my vision of exercising in God's most beautiful places while right in your living room, and doing it in such way that it will have an effect on what is becoming the epidemic of our time: obesity. See more about it at http://www.exerscape.com
And hopefully making enough money to be warm, fed, and comfortable in my old age, and show my children the world in the future.
The one continuing theme has been following my passions, from computers through the outdoors, from bike racing through digital media, from playing with explosives to create avalanches to my current obsession, the Palestinian conflict and its ongoing effect on the world's view of the US. When a you are consistently on the losing end of UN resolutions 160-4, something is wrong with your position, but the Bushies just don't seem to get it....
Anyway, follow your passions, follow the path of your curiosity, and go through the doors that naturally open when you do so. The tough times seem easier, the good times seem sublimley happy, inner satisfaction is assured, and you will almost assuredly see enough financial success to survive, if not prosper.
This thing could save your ass in a big avalanche. Fifty percent of fatalities are from trauma, which this would help prevent, and the other 50% are from burial and suffocation. This this is like big bobber and would float you to the top to be found be your buds. It's potantially a pretty incredibly useful device in this situation in the mountains.
I too have been going through an experience straight out of Kafka trying to get my domain name transferred to another registrar. Did you know it takes three to six weeks to process a transfer request, unless you pay $199 for an "expedited process"? No, of course you wouldn't, since NSI's page about Registrar transfers only covers transferring your registration to NSI, with no information about transferring it from NSI. And the page with the "expedited process "info about the expedited processing is so buried that I can not even find it again...
So, since the US Government gave them the monopoly and then took it away, write to you Senators. You can find them at www.senate.gov
And be sure to include a link to this entire message thread!!
There _is_ a solution to this very problem, which I was blown away by when I saw it at NAB last spring: the Digital Fountain
This technology is truly cool. Invented by Michael Luby, it addresses this very paradox, that the more popular the content is the more it costs to deliver with a one viewer per stream approach. The demo showed a server pushing an MPEG2 stream to about 20 different clients with different starting times. Watching the load on the server showed a negligible increase for each new client. It was astounding, so much so that I felt kind of sorry for all the folks pushing their one stream/one viewer media servers. I want one for delivering more riding and running videos...
This is s great example of the usefulness of a little known invention called Hemopure. See
http://www.biopure.com/oxy_therapeutics/home_oxyth er.html
It is a blood replacement made from bovine hemoglobin and saline solution. I know about it because it is rumored to currently be a very popular "blood doping" product, and I'm a bike racer. I spent over 10 years as an emergency responder, so the stability and lack of blood typing needed caught my eye--we could have really used this stuff at times!
"In addition, Hemopure is compatible with all blood types and is approved in South Africa as stable over a broad temperature range, including room temperature, for two years. In contrast, refrigerated red blood cells are type specific and have a maximum shelf life of 42 days."
700 Mhz should be fast enough to simultaneously encode and decode MPEG2, especially with the NVidia card helping out with motion comp on the decode end. Why add hardware?
Business-wise, this makes obvious sense. Why have more than one box cluttering up your entertainment console? If X-Box plays games, DVDs, and acts as a DVR, at $299, it's hard to argue against it, especially if the games are good. M$ can make up some of the hardware cost by forcing users onto MSN, and thus into Expedia, Carpoint, etc. A brilliant piece of manuevering, especially looking forward to HDTV over the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Every line in F9/11 is backed up with facts here:r /
http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/f911reade
Those are not valid sources that he uses? Which ones do you disagree with?
I don't want to RTFM--I want it to work like POTS. I pick the fucking thing up, if it has a tone, I can enter a user ID and reach someone.
Period.
That's what Gates&Co. is offering at Costco today....just turn it on and plug it in, with pictures of the plugs...
Huh? Who was before me?
I'm not trying to be obstinate, I'm just curious as to how DD protects its investment in Nuke.
So does Digital Domain give Nuke away to its competitors?
The '913 patent is obvious now. When I invented it, I had been told by the guy who ported Cinepak to the 3DO player that it was impossible to do. I did it. I proved that it was possible, by reducing it to a working prototype. At that time, PCs could barely play any sort of video. DVDs were years away. The closest thing were the big analog Video Disc players, which were severely limited in playback speeds with their analog format.
It's easy to invent things when they have already been done, when their time is ready and they are obvious. It's a lot harder when you are pushing the envelope of what is possible at the time.
The law does allow independent rediscovery, it just doesn't allow you to freely profit from it if the original inventor took steps to protect his invention.
Writing software is trivial? Most "normal" people I know have a hard enough time connecting to the Internet, let alone figuring out how to use a compiler. If you spend months writing something complex and useful, don't you have a choice of whether to give it away or ask people to pay for it?
All good ideas are thought of by many people-you ought to hear how many people tell me that they thought of my invention years ago-but very few persistently and diligently pursue an idea until it is reduced to a working invention. This is a requirement of getting a patent. Plus, the patent system does not defend you, it provides a way to defend yourself, at your own expense.
So, you are saying that myself, an very small-time inventor, should have no right to protect myself against someone with more money that comes up with the same idea long after myself?
Is not the patent system meant to benefit people like me, who thought up something before it was possible to do, continued trying to realize it for years, and now, fifteen+ years after first writing down the psuedocode and eight since developing the first working demos and filing the original patents, finally stands to maybe make enough money to pay my bills, both through my own efforts at commercialization and by enforcing my patents?
I own most of a very tiny company with several patents that I'm trying to enforce. At the same time I am working on building more products with the basic technology and trying to make enough money to support myself, my wife and maybe even a child in the not too distant future. Right now I'm studying how to file a patent infringement suit against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to the point of having running demos, and they found a $3 million investment with which to create their product. My product was being sold through a $220 million company that almost went bankrupt and closed down the division we were working with. The guys I am going after actually visited my home office a year before they came out with their product, were going to license the patent, and then suddenly told me they did not infringe after they received their investment. I bought their product and reverse-engineered their software and can prove infringement.
So, do you think I should just fold up my tent and renege on the commitment I made to many friends and family that invested in me over the last ten years? As I am being outspent by someone not huge but bigger than me? Or should I just ignore their infringement and try to close a deal with another big company, which I am getting closer to right now? Or should I go after these guys who initially thought they came up with this idea themselves, then realized I was years ahead of them and came to pick my brain, and then reneged on a potential licensing deal? I was and am very willing to license the patents at industry standard rates. And what do I do about Intervideo's WinDVD, which was shipped with similar capabilities five+ years after I filed our first patents? I haven't worked so hard for so long just to live trying to pay the bills month to month, like I am right now....
FYI Links to the patents are on our website, look way down on the bottom right of the front page, here:Exerscape.com.
Meanwhile, I own most of a very tiny company with several patents that I'm trying to enforce. At the same time I am working on building more products with the basic technology and trying to make enough money to support myself, my wife and maybe even a child in the not too distant future. Right now I'm studying how to file a patent infringement suit against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to the point of having running demos, and they found a $3 million investment with which to create their product. My product was being sold through a $220 million company that almost went bankrupt and closed down the division we were working with. The guys I am going after actually visited my home office a year before they came out with their product, were going to license the patent, and then suddenly told me they did not infringe after they received their investment. I bought their product and reverse-engineered their software and can prove infringement.
So, do you think I should just fold up my tent and renege on the commitment I made to many friends and family that invested in me over the last ten years? As I am being outspent by someone not huge but bigger than me? Or should I just ignore their infringement and try to close a deal with another big company, which I am getting closer to right now? Or should I go after these guys who initially thought they came up with this idea themselves, then realized I was years ahead of them and came to pick my brain, and then reneged on a potential licensing deal? I was and am very willing to license the patents at industry standard rates. And what do I do about Intervideo's WinDVD, which was shipped with similar capabilities five+ years after I filed our first patents? I haven't worked so hard for so long just to live trying to pay the bills month to month, like I am right now....
FYI Links to the patents are on our website, look on the bottom right of the front page, here:Exerscape.com.
Wait until someone manages to install a spamming root kit on your Linux box, then tell me again how you never see it. You just don't see as much of it, but its out there. Trust me, I just spent week of my life dealing with it...
For the EE's out there--could something like this be aimed at those extremely annoying giant bass speakers in the car beside at a stoplight, and have an effect like a "mute" button? A permanent mute button, if you get my drift : )
NY Times (free reg required) article on the latest on this subject
here.
I've been reverse engineering suspect products and putting tegether claim-by-claim Powerpoint presentations, detailing the infringing code. The next step I figure is to set up my SoftICE remote debugger to show how it infinges while it is running, and then take this to 1) the company and, if necessary, 2) to a judge in our local Fed Circuit court.
As an inventor and founder of a company that holds several patents, in the area of dynamically controlling digital video speed, I have some feelings on both sides of the issue. We have consistently tried to implement our inventions, and in fact had to scramble to get our first app in as we showed an early implementation at a trade show in 1994 to try to drum up interest. We are involved in several "discussions" over products that appeared several years later, and every single one has declared they do not infringe upon our patents. Time will tell... Plus, I am trying to figure out what to do about some much larger companies that have brought out features on products in the last 12-18 months that look like they infringe. My investors want us to do something, and we have to try, but when our pockets are shallow and others are deep, what is the solution?
On the other hand, when companies buy up patents and try to enforce them without ever creating products themselves, that kind of gets my goat. The whole patent thing was started to give little guys like us some sort of defensive weapon when fighting to build a product and a market.
And yes, "Dark Side of the Moon" is my fav by far. I grew up on that album there for awhile : )
PS I called it a paraphrase because I wasn't sure of the original lyrics. I have a great old poster of this phrase on part of the Berlin Wall as it was being torn down, which is what made me think about it. One of my fav albums : )
Actually, I think it was the securities regulators--they were getting so much private stock issued, which was starting to get sold between employees and their families more and more, that the regulators stepped in.
I agree--Google, stay private! There's nothing like a 3-month reporting horizon to mess your long term strategies up, especially if your stock starts diving from entirely unrelated matters. For instance, a war over oil (oops, I mean freedom!), with virtually no allies to help pay for it, that suddenly seems to be a bit of a bigger job than planned by the geniuses in the Defense Department...
My concept is similar, except it uses helmet cam video. I first wrote it down in in 1988, have patented and produced it, and am looking forward to producing more. See exerscape.com for more info. My users say it definitely makes exercise less boring, and an independent study has shown that unfit subjects burned more calories with no increase in percieved effort. We are in the process of securing an NIH grant to port the software engine to the PS2 and enlarge this study.
I've been doing that forever, from doing a startup and exhibiting at my first COMDEX in 1985, through most of a decade working on the Alta Ski Patrol, doing emergency medicine, avalanche control and rescue dog training, to what I'm doing now, trying to bring my vision of exercising in God's most beautiful places while right in your living room, and doing it in such way that it will have an effect on what is becoming the epidemic of our time: obesity. See more about it at http://www.exerscape.com
And hopefully making enough money to be warm, fed, and comfortable in my old age, and show my children the world in the future.
The one continuing theme has been following my passions, from computers through the outdoors, from bike racing through digital media, from playing with explosives to create avalanches to my current obsession, the Palestinian conflict and its ongoing effect on the world's view of the US. When a you are consistently on the losing end of UN resolutions 160-4, something is wrong with your position, but the Bushies just don't seem to get it....
Anyway, follow your passions, follow the path of your curiosity, and go through the doors that naturally open when you do so. The tough times seem easier, the good times seem sublimley happy, inner satisfaction is assured, and you will almost assuredly see enough financial success to survive, if not prosper.
Just my 2 cents : )
This thing could save your ass in a big avalanche. Fifty percent of fatalities are from trauma, which this would help prevent, and the other 50% are from burial and suffocation. This this is like big bobber and would float you to the top to be found be your buds. It's potantially a pretty incredibly useful device in this situation in the mountains.
I too have been going through an experience straight out of Kafka trying to get my domain name transferred to another registrar. Did you know it takes three to six weeks to process a transfer request, unless you pay $199 for an "expedited process"? No, of course you wouldn't, since NSI's page about Registrar transfers only covers transferring your registration to NSI, with no information about transferring it from NSI. And the page with the "expedited process "info about the expedited processing is so buried that I can not even find it again...
So, since the US Government gave them the monopoly and then took it away, write to you Senators. You can find them at www.senate.gov
And be sure to include a link to this entire message thread!!
This technology is truly cool. Invented by Michael Luby, it addresses this very paradox, that the more popular the content is the more it costs to deliver with a one viewer per stream approach. The demo showed a server pushing an MPEG2 stream to about 20 different clients with different starting times. Watching the load on the server showed a negligible increase for each new client. It was astounding, so much so that I felt kind of sorry for all the folks pushing their one stream/one viewer media servers. I want one for delivering more riding and running videos...
This is s great example of the usefulness of a little known invention called Hemopure. See http://www.biopure.com/oxy_therapeutics/home_oxyth er.html
It is a blood replacement made from bovine hemoglobin and saline solution. I know about it because it is rumored to currently be a very popular "blood doping" product, and I'm a bike racer. I spent over 10 years as an emergency responder, so the stability and lack of blood typing needed caught my eye--we could have really used this stuff at times!
"In addition, Hemopure is compatible with all blood types and is approved in South Africa as stable over a broad temperature range, including room temperature, for two years. In contrast, refrigerated red blood cells are type specific and have a maximum shelf life of 42 days."
700 Mhz should be fast enough to simultaneously encode and decode MPEG2, especially with the NVidia card helping out with motion comp on the decode end. Why add hardware?
Business-wise, this makes obvious sense. Why have more than one box cluttering up your entertainment console? If X-Box plays games, DVDs, and acts as a DVR, at $299, it's hard to argue against it, especially if the games are good. M$ can make up some of the hardware cost by forcing users onto MSN, and thus into Expedia, Carpoint, etc. A brilliant piece of manuevering, especially looking forward to HDTV over the next few years.