Overture's patent infringement suit comes amid widespread criticism of so-called business method patents--a relatively new class of invention recognized by the U.S. Patent Office and the courts that has led to a flood of filings laying claim to nuts and bolts Internet activities.
This paragraph of the article is phrased badly. The concept of patenting a business method is not new. What's new is that USPTO and the courts are allowing these stupid things to stand.
The Supreme Court wrote a fabulous ruling about bad patents way back in 1950. I urge everyone to read the full ruling and see how utterly it applies to modern events. Here's a couple favorite quotes:
"The mere combination of a number of old parts or elements which, in combination, perform or produce no new or different function or operation than that theretofore performed or produced by them, is not patentable invention."
"The function of a patent is to add to the sum of useful knowledge. Patents cannot be sustained when, on the contrary, their effect is to subtract from former resources freely available to skilled artisans."
"The Patent Office, like most administrative agencies, has looked with favor on the opportunity which the exercise of discretion affords to expand its own jurisdiction. And so it has placed a host of gadgets under the armour of patents - gadgets that obviously have had no place in the constitutional scheme of advancing scientific knowledge."
For the 99% of you who didn't read the references:
Overture isn't suing about Google's page rank results, nor do they claim that the ad results are part of the main search. They're saying that the adwords results in and of themselves constitute a pay-for-play search that infringes the patent.
Personally, I think it sounds like a desperation play of a dying company.
But are you able to read Sharp's web site on it? They're still using that stupid browser detection script that blocks NN6, Moz, Opera, etc (anything except IE or NN4).
They should have an interesting read when they investigate why their http access error log is so large.
This is a great idea, but they won't be impressed if all of the requests are from the same IP address in a single "visit". That's why I think we should all join in. Ten thousand separate IPs all hitting this link ought to get their attention...
If we cooled the planet by say 20 degrees we'd have fewer weather events such as ice storms??? Excuse me?!?
Yes, as a matter of fact, there would be a LOT fewer ice storms if the entire planet were 20 degrees cooler. Colder air + water == less evaporation == less moisture falling out of the sky in any form.
Let's drive the point home: guess which continent has the lowest amount of annual precipitation?
"Sound travels well underwater, but sound is slow and can't handle the data transfer rate required for video."
I understand what they are trying to say, but they say it akwardly. How about, the speed of sound is slowed underwater
Apparently you don't understand, because you got it wrong. Sound is 5x faster in water than in air. Nevertheless, sound (even underwater) doesn't have the bandwidth to carry video signals (not to mention noise, transmission loss, etc). You need radio or cable or something. That was their point.
Our department site is piggybacked on a nice big Sun maintained by the university. It can handle a lot more (traffic|attacks|uptime|etc) than any little box we could set up. So I've been trying to find a CMS workflow that outputs to static pages and uploads them to the production box after the changes are accepted.
I checked out ArsDigita, SourceForge, and most recently HotScripts. They have a lot of stuff, much more than I have time to sort through. Love to hear specific suggestions.
No, connecting to a share is not the same as browsing all available shares on the LAN. Currently I use Sharity -- look at a screenshot and you'll see the difference.
One other thing you missed -- not only did Green Card Lottery post to every group available on their server, they also forged approval headers for moderated groups. The first place I saw their spam was in news.announce.important, since like any good netizen I placed it at the start of my.newsrc
Back in the days of netiquette, this was something you simply DID NOT DO (except for the occasional AFJ).
I'd never seen anything like it before, and I certainly didn't pick it as the thin end of the wedge.
There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:
1988: my first LAN download (10Mbps ether) instead of a 2400 modem.
1994: Green Card Lottery
1995: I typed in Yahoo's URL but it 301'ed to a new address.
I remember the feeling of epiphany each time -- "this is what the future will look like". The first one I was thrilled. The second one I was enraged. The third one I was mournful.
...but Apple really needs to get on the ball and put out their own 1U "RacMac" G4 line in the $1500 range. The G4 mobo already has on-board Gigabit ethernet. You don't need SuperDrives in a vector cluster.
The market is there, if only Lord Steve wants to do it.
copy protection does not expire once the movie becomes public domain
While I agree with most of your points, this one is moot. Thanks to the Bono Act, no copyrighted work will fall into the public domain within our lifetimes (or at least until the revolution comes).
Reply from MPEG4 Licensing Association
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 4, Informative
After the previous/. article about MPEG4, I wrote to licensing@mpegla.com and said "if you want Windows Media to win the streaming war, then keep the per-use fee". Much to my amazement, they sent back a reply that was actually relevant to my concerns. It wasn't the answer I wanted, but at least they have good form letters.
Received: from massive.mpegla.com ([12.41.161.2]) by mx2del.umbc.edu
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.4417.0
Subject: Your Recent Email
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 10:41:04 -0700
From: "MPEG-4 Visual Licensing" <MPEG-4VisualLicensing@mpegla.com>
Thanks for sharing your views with us regarding the reported MPEG-4
Visual licensing terms and your interest in using the MPEG-4 Visual
Standard. I know this email may sound like a canned response, but since
you took the time to write to us and others who wrote us raised similar
concerns, we wanted to get back to you (and the others) to explain the
situation. We understand that you have strong feelings about the MPEG-4
Visual licensing terms based on what you've heard, and we welcome your
feedback. The license agreement is still in the process of being worked
out, your views are important to us, and they will be taken into
consideration. Similarly, I hope you will allow us this opportunity to
clarify a few things that may have been misunderstood and to explain
where this goes from here.
First, we would like to clarify the role of MPEG LA. MPEG LA's business
is to make it possible for new technologies (like MPEG-4 Video) to enter
the marketplace by making the essential intellectual property rights
owned by many patent owners accessible to everyone on fair, reasonable,
nondiscriminatory terms under a single license. If there were no MPEG
LA, the essential patent rights that made the MPEG-4 Visual technology
possible would still have to be dealt with, but instead of having the
opportunity to deal with one company for a single license that includes
those rights, users' only option would be to deal with each patent
holder individually. With MPEG LA, the marketplace is assured of ready
access to MPEG-4 Visual essential patents owned by 18 different
companies (soon there will be more, but our goal is to include as many
essential patents as possible in one license; therefore, royalty rates
will not increase during the term of the agreement even as new patent
owners and more patents are included). What you've seen is the first
step in that process.
We understand that the success of a licensing program relies on the
success of the underlying technology. Therefore, our goal, like yours,
is to promote the widest possible use of the MPEG-4 Visual standard, and
we are sensitive to the need to structure a reasonable license that is
consistent with marketplace conditions. To that end, we continue to
work with the patent owners to assure that the license is responsive.
Everything is in a state of constant review. If something isn't right,
every effort is made to fix it. Because of MPEG LA's role, you have the
opportunity to discuss your concerns with us, and we in turn can
communicate them to the patent owners. We note that there are many
different views to be considered, however, and that ultimately the
marketplace will decide. We note also that there may be many reasons
(having nothing to do with licensing terms) why someone may delay a
product introduction or choose among competing alternatives. And, it
would be a mistake to assume that any alternative is or will be free of
patent licensing obligations or without additional charges of its own.
Finally, we understand that you do not agree with the implementation of
a use fee. Given the nature of MPEG-4 Visual technology and the
importance of encouraging the wide availability of MPEG-4 Visual
decoders and encoders in the market, the patent owners' intention was
that reasonable royalties should be shared among industry participants
across the entire product chain and applies equally to both wired and
wireless services (especially as the ability to distinguish between them
disappears). The philosophy underlying the use fee was intended to be
consistent with the expected flow of MPEG-4 video transactions so that
those who can pay will and those who can't aren't expected to: thus, the
use royalties to be paid by service providers are tied to remuneration -
if service providers or content providers are paid for offering or
providing MPEG-4 video, then patent holders are paid for the use of
their patents; if service providers or content providers are not paid
for offering or providing MPEG-4 video, then patent owners are not paid
for the use of their patents. The entire license including the use fee,
its application to broadcast/cablecast/multichannel environments, etc.,
is under study and will be the subject of further discussion.
This is just the beginning. The licensing terms were just announced on
January 31, and the details of the MPEG-4 Visual license agreement are
still being worked out. Because of the challenge posed by the effort to
produce a joint licensing program requiring a consensus among at least 18 different patent owners and the yet undetermined future implementations and applications of the emerging MPEG-4 Visual technology, this may take several months to complete. There will be much discussion before all of this is sorted out, and changes may be expected. Again, we appreciate your contribution to this process and will keep you informed.
I installed Sharity last week. It has a variety of licensing options; I got it free since I'm dot-edu staff. Sharity has excellent SMB browsing.
Unfortunately it still couldn't access the one share I wanted -- maybe unhappy about a space in the share name. I had to use mount_smbfs in Terminal instead.
p.s. a quickie Google search revealed some interesting options. Remember: Google makes all computing simple!
Here's a bit of synchronicity. Just this morning I received a spam in my personal mailbox. I have 5 addresses: work, personal, and 3 spamtraps that go to trash by default. Whenever my 2 real addresses get spammed, I go medieval. Headers revealed the spam was sent through an open relay at... Naju Noan Elementary School of Chonnam Province, Korea.
What's the deal with the Korean school system? Did someone donate a few thousand default-setup NT servers to them after the dotcom bust?
According to NameSpace, the class-C block belongs to Soonhwa Cho (jeonnam3@soback.kornet.net), and the class-A belongs to Korea Network Information Center (hostmaster@nic.or.kr). I've written to KrNIC before, and they flatly disavow any and all responsibility for net abuse in their subdomains. They refer me to their WHOIS server.
Now, there are a few problems with that position. The most important is that NajuNoan's whois entry belongs to yang yeon ho (noan1@edunet4u.net), and that address bounces back as invalid.
So what to do? AFAICT, the only answer is for some off-white-hat hackers to 0WN the whole damn Korean edu network and secure those servers remotely whether they like it or not.
elliptic curve cryptosystems available? It is thought that these are more difficult to brute-force
Well, I know an easy example, but you're going to be disappointed. WEP encryption uses elliptic curve cryptography. However, WEP's weakness is due to bad implementation rather than a general failure of elliptic theory.
Its as if I had a bank account for 10 years at the local bank before I knocked it off instead of the guy who wandered into town one day and held it up
No, it's more crafty than that. It's as if he had a bank account for years and built up a rapport with the branch manager. One day, while being given a private after-hours tour of the vault, suddenly he pulls out an ether-soaked rag. BAM.
Alternate metaphor: cashing in his karma all at once for the biggest Goatse post ever.
An individual human creator may keep the copyright for as long as he or she wants
Which is no different than saying forever.
Last time I checked, human beings weren't immortal.
why should two authors working together only get 50 years while one author would get an unlimited amount of time
Where do you draw the line? Two? Ten? A thousand? What happens if a minority of the owners sell their stakes? etc?
Also, corporations will abuse your rule -- stuff would be copyrighted by a group consisting of: the actual creator, the CEO, the majority shareholder, and the majority shareholder's grandson.
Rather than create two classes of copyright, just create one standard that covers all cases:
An individual human creator may keep the copyright for as long as he or she wants
If the copyright is created by anyone other than an indvidual human, or if ownership is transferred in any way, a 50 (or 10 or whatever) year clock starts ticking
That way the creator is protected, and has a reasonable asset to sell or pass on to descendants.
Mozilla has been my primary browser ever since the anti-popup feature became a standard preference. There's only one bug left before I can declare it to be the "best" browser for OS X -- blocking images on a site-by-site basis gets hung up by Amazon ad banners.
Also, note that "native-looking" widgets are not the same as true native widgets. Mozilla's jellybeans are less responsive than real ones, and they don't "gray out" when you background the window. On the bright side, you can vote for it to be fixed.
Macromedia plug-ins are cool, they still don't seem as fast
That's because Macromedia's plugins aren't as fast on Mac as they are on Win. It gets discussed all the time on the forums.macromedia.com NNTP server. Macromedia doesn't bother to optimize their Mac code, and probably won't unless the cost/benefit ratio (for them, not for us) is good enough.
In day to day life there is pull content and there is push content. For example a coworker walks into the office in 9/11 and says: "did you hear about what happened in New York?"
True, if something is really important, I rely on my friends/colleagues/relatives to tell me about it. But I would never Never NEVER want unsolicited news bulletins from corporations, even CNN.com had an exclusive live feed of Jesus Christ II, in an alien mothership, landing on the banks of the Euphrates, holding a railgun.
Slashdot Mirror
This paragraph of the article is phrased badly. The concept of patenting a business method is not new. What's new is that USPTO and the courts are allowing these stupid things to stand.
The Supreme Court wrote a fabulous ruling about bad patents way back in 1950. I urge everyone to read the full ruling and see how utterly it applies to modern events. Here's a couple favorite quotes:
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose
For the 99% of you who didn't read the references:
Overture isn't suing about Google's page rank results, nor do they claim that the ad results are part of the main search. They're saying that the adwords results in and of themselves constitute a pay-for-play search that infringes the patent.
Personally, I think it sounds like a desperation play of a dying company.
But are you able to read Sharp's web site on it? They're still using that stupid browser detection script that blocks NN6, Moz, Opera, etc (anything except IE or NN4).
They should have an interesting read when they investigate why their http access error log is so large.
This is a great idea, but they won't be impressed if all of the requests are from the same IP address in a single "visit". That's why I think we should all join in. Ten thousand separate IPs all hitting this link ought to get their attention...
If we cooled the planet by say 20 degrees we'd have fewer weather events such as ice storms??? Excuse me?!?
Yes, as a matter of fact, there would be a LOT fewer ice storms if the entire planet were 20 degrees cooler. Colder air + water == less evaporation == less moisture falling out of the sky in any form.
Let's drive the point home: guess which continent has the lowest amount of annual precipitation?
Apparently you don't understand, because you got it wrong. Sound is 5x faster in water than in air. Nevertheless, sound (even underwater) doesn't have the bandwidth to carry video signals (not to mention noise, transmission loss, etc). You need radio or cable or something. That was their point.
...that doesn't also want to be the web server?
Our department site is piggybacked on a nice big Sun maintained by the university. It can handle a lot more (traffic|attacks|uptime|etc) than any little box we could set up. So I've been trying to find a CMS workflow that outputs to static pages and uploads them to the production box after the changes are accepted.
I checked out ArsDigita, SourceForge, and most recently HotScripts. They have a lot of stuff, much more than I have time to sort through. Love to hear specific suggestions.
No, connecting to a share is not the same as browsing all available shares on the LAN. Currently I use Sharity -- look at a screenshot and you'll see the difference.
Usenet is definitely an Opt-in environment
.newsrc
One other thing you missed -- not only did Green Card Lottery post to every group available on their server, they also forged approval headers for moderated groups. The first place I saw their spam was in news.announce.important, since like any good netizen I placed it at the start of my
Back in the days of netiquette, this was something you simply DID NOT DO (except for the occasional AFJ).
There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:
I remember the feeling of epiphany each time -- "this is what the future will look like". The first one I was thrilled. The second one I was enraged. The third one I was mournful.
NetSol must have taken notice of this
It wouldn't be the first time. Interland and NetSol/Verisign are best buddies.
spent the weekend trying to compile PHP 4.1.2
Marc Liyanage has what you want, or you could try OpenOSX.
...but Apple really needs to get on the ball and put out their own 1U "RacMac" G4 line in the $1500 range. The G4 mobo already has on-board Gigabit ethernet. You don't need SuperDrives in a vector cluster.
The market is there, if only Lord Steve wants to do it.
copy protection does not expire once the movie becomes public domain
While I agree with most of your points, this one is moot. Thanks to the Bono Act, no copyrighted work will fall into the public domain within our lifetimes (or at least until the revolution comes).
After the previous /. article about MPEG4, I wrote to licensing@mpegla.com and said "if you want Windows Media to win the streaming war, then keep the per-use fee". Much to my amazement, they sent back a reply that was actually relevant to my concerns. It wasn't the answer I wanted, but at least they have good form letters.
Received: from massive.mpegla.com ([12.41.161.2]) by mx2del.umbc.eduX-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.4417.0
Subject: Your Recent Email
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 10:41:04 -0700
From: "MPEG-4 Visual Licensing" <MPEG-4VisualLicensing@mpegla.com>
Thanks for sharing your views with us regarding the reported MPEG-4 Visual licensing terms and your interest in using the MPEG-4 Visual Standard. I know this email may sound like a canned response, but since you took the time to write to us and others who wrote us raised similar concerns, we wanted to get back to you (and the others) to explain the situation. We understand that you have strong feelings about the MPEG-4 Visual licensing terms based on what you've heard, and we welcome your feedback. The license agreement is still in the process of being worked out, your views are important to us, and they will be taken into consideration. Similarly, I hope you will allow us this opportunity to clarify a few things that may have been misunderstood and to explain where this goes from here.
First, we would like to clarify the role of MPEG LA. MPEG LA's business is to make it possible for new technologies (like MPEG-4 Video) to enter the marketplace by making the essential intellectual property rights owned by many patent owners accessible to everyone on fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms under a single license. If there were no MPEG LA, the essential patent rights that made the MPEG-4 Visual technology possible would still have to be dealt with, but instead of having the opportunity to deal with one company for a single license that includes those rights, users' only option would be to deal with each patent holder individually. With MPEG LA, the marketplace is assured of ready access to MPEG-4 Visual essential patents owned by 18 different companies (soon there will be more, but our goal is to include as many essential patents as possible in one license; therefore, royalty rates will not increase during the term of the agreement even as new patent owners and more patents are included). What you've seen is the first step in that process.
We understand that the success of a licensing program relies on the success of the underlying technology. Therefore, our goal, like yours, is to promote the widest possible use of the MPEG-4 Visual standard, and we are sensitive to the need to structure a reasonable license that is consistent with marketplace conditions. To that end, we continue to work with the patent owners to assure that the license is responsive. Everything is in a state of constant review. If something isn't right, every effort is made to fix it. Because of MPEG LA's role, you have the opportunity to discuss your concerns with us, and we in turn can communicate them to the patent owners. We note that there are many different views to be considered, however, and that ultimately the marketplace will decide. We note also that there may be many reasons (having nothing to do with licensing terms) why someone may delay a product introduction or choose among competing alternatives. And, it would be a mistake to assume that any alternative is or will be free of patent licensing obligations or without additional charges of its own.
Finally, we understand that you do not agree with the implementation of a use fee. Given the nature of MPEG-4 Visual technology and the importance of encouraging the wide availability of MPEG-4 Visual decoders and encoders in the market, the patent owners' intention was that reasonable royalties should be shared among industry participants across the entire product chain and applies equally to both wired and wireless services (especially as the ability to distinguish between them disappears). The philosophy underlying the use fee was intended to be consistent with the expected flow of MPEG-4 video transactions so that those who can pay will and those who can't aren't expected to: thus, the use royalties to be paid by service providers are tied to remuneration - if service providers or content providers are paid for offering or providing MPEG-4 video, then patent holders are paid for the use of their patents; if service providers or content providers are not paid for offering or providing MPEG-4 video, then patent owners are not paid for the use of their patents. The entire license including the use fee, its application to broadcast/cablecast/multichannel environments, etc., is under study and will be the subject of further discussion.
This is just the beginning. The licensing terms were just announced on January 31, and the details of the MPEG-4 Visual license agreement are still being worked out. Because of the challenge posed by the effort to produce a joint licensing program requiring a consensus among at least 18 different patent owners and the yet undetermined future implementations and applications of the emerging MPEG-4 Visual technology, this may take several months to complete. There will be much discussion before all of this is sorted out, and changes may be expected. Again, we appreciate your contribution to this process and will keep you informed.
Sincerely, Larry Horn Vice President, Licensingsomething that will let you browse windows shares
I installed Sharity last week. It has a variety of licensing options; I got it free since I'm dot-edu staff. Sharity has excellent SMB browsing.
Unfortunately it still couldn't access the one share I wanted -- maybe unhappy about a space in the share name. I had to use mount_smbfs in Terminal instead.
p.s. a quickie Google search revealed some interesting options. Remember: Google makes all computing simple!
Here's a bit of synchronicity. Just this morning I received a spam in my personal mailbox. I have 5 addresses: work, personal, and 3 spamtraps that go to trash by default. Whenever my 2 real addresses get spammed, I go medieval. Headers revealed the spam was sent through an open relay at ... Naju Noan Elementary School of Chonnam Province, Korea.
What's the deal with the Korean school system? Did someone donate a few thousand default-setup NT servers to them after the dotcom bust?
According to NameSpace, the class-C block belongs to Soonhwa Cho (jeonnam3@soback.kornet.net), and the class-A belongs to Korea Network Information Center (hostmaster@nic.or.kr). I've written to KrNIC before, and they flatly disavow any and all responsibility for net abuse in their subdomains. They refer me to their WHOIS server.
Now, there are a few problems with that position. The most important is that NajuNoan's whois entry belongs to yang yeon ho (noan1@edunet4u.net), and that address bounces back as invalid.
So what to do? AFAICT, the only answer is for some off-white-hat hackers to 0WN the whole damn Korean edu network and secure those servers remotely whether they like it or not.
elliptic curve cryptosystems available? It is thought that these are more difficult to brute-force
Well, I know an easy example, but you're going to be disappointed. WEP encryption uses elliptic curve cryptography. However, WEP's weakness is due to bad implementation rather than a general failure of elliptic theory.
Its as if I had a bank account for 10 years at the local bank before I knocked it off instead of the guy who wandered into town one day and held it up
No, it's more crafty than that. It's as if he had a bank account for years and built up a rapport with the branch manager. One day, while being given a private after-hours tour of the vault, suddenly he pulls out an ether-soaked rag. BAM.
Alternate metaphor: cashing in his karma all at once for the biggest Goatse post ever.
There are UI guidelines for most OS's/Windowing systems. Some are fairly strict (MacOS)
Unless you are Steve Jobs, in which case you may throw your own rulebook right out the window. Damn do I hate QT Player.
Last time I checked, human beings weren't immortal.
why should two authors working together only get 50 years while one author would get an unlimited amount of timeWhere do you draw the line? Two? Ten? A thousand? What happens if a minority of the owners sell their stakes? etc?
Also, corporations will abuse your rule -- stuff would be copyrighted by a group consisting of: the actual creator, the CEO, the majority shareholder, and the majority shareholder's grandson.
- An individual human creator may keep the copyright for as long as he or she wants
- If the copyright is created by anyone other than an indvidual human, or if ownership is transferred in any way, a 50 (or 10 or whatever) year clock starts ticking
That way the creator is protected, and has a reasonable asset to sell or pass on to descendants.Casio has a whole catalog section for geek watches. My brother got the Wrist Camera and I have to admit it's pretty neat.
As a minor eco-freak, I prefer the Seiko Kinetic. No more watch batteries for me.
Mozilla has been my primary browser ever since the anti-popup feature became a standard preference. There's only one bug left before I can declare it to be the "best" browser for OS X -- blocking images on a site-by-site basis gets hung up by Amazon ad banners.
Also, note that "native-looking" widgets are not the same as true native widgets. Mozilla's jellybeans are less responsive than real ones, and they don't "gray out" when you background the window. On the bright side, you can vote for it to be fixed.
Macromedia plug-ins are cool, they still don't seem as fast
That's because Macromedia's plugins aren't as fast on Mac as they are on Win. It gets discussed all the time on the forums.macromedia.com NNTP server. Macromedia doesn't bother to optimize their Mac code, and probably won't unless the cost/benefit ratio (for them, not for us) is good enough.
In day to day life there is pull content and there is push content. For example a coworker walks into the office in 9/11 and says: "did you hear about what happened in New York?"
True, if something is really important, I rely on my friends/colleagues/relatives to tell me about it. But I would never Never NEVER want unsolicited news bulletins from corporations, even CNN.com had an exclusive live feed of Jesus Christ II, in an alien mothership, landing on the banks of the Euphrates, holding a railgun.