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SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
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SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 14:43 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]
This gives me an idea. Is there any way to find (or buy) a patent on which the iPod infringes? The idea - not to make money, but to demand the withdrawal of the product. The "owner" of IP can offer to license it, but is perfectly allowed to refuse to license.
If it were possible to destroy the mp3 player market at a stroke, we might have a bargaining position: hold the elactorate to ransom ("sorry kids, no more music players") until the law is changed to abolish patents!
Pity it wouldn't work - but there has to be a way to destroy the patent system from inside. Patents are potentially even more "viral" than copyright, since you cannot code around them. Therefore a "Patent-GPL" would have even more teeth than the regular ("Copyright") GPL....
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 15:34 UTC (Tue) by zappy (guest, #38793) [Link]
Well, not exactly. Patents arent licenses. However if someone who holds several critical patents would start licensing out their patents with a very viral license, you could finally make a dent in the whole patent system.A more agressive variant osdls patent commons. Where if you would like to use any of the patents there, also would have to release ALL your patents to them.
Creating a sort of snowball effect, where nothing could be done without the patents herein. It would force the government finally to act and either dismantle the entire patent system, or declare all patents in the related fields null and void.
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 16:04 UTC (Tue) by miah (guest, #639) [Link]
I think they could easily release a patch which resolved the problem and just force the update via itunes.
This whole thing is yet another reason to not use mp3's. Stick of ogg, and flac and you'll be safe and wont have to deal with drm.
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 16:15 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
Pity it wouldn't work? Look at the Blackberry/NTP case, which got very close to a similar result. NTP eventually took the money instead of forcing the shutdown of the Blackberry system, but the prospect of losing Blackberry service did draw some inside-the-Beltway attention to the idea of patent reform, briefly.
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 22:23 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
Well, first you'd have to acquire a suitable patent somewhere, which is a pretty big first step...
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 5, 2006 15:09 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]
From the article:Mr de Sanctis said the fact that SanDisk players were able to play MP3 files meant the company was legally required to purchase a licence.
"It is just not possible to do it any other way," he said.
So, in other words, they've patented the format itself, not just the decoding or encoding. Frightening stuff, really...
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 6, 2006 7:19 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Or in other words, isn't the patent invalid? If there's no other way to do it, then it's a discovery not an invention, and therefore unpatentable. Or it's a monopoly, and anti-trust trumps patent.
Or, and what most people here don't seem to have noticed, IT'S IN GERMANY! In other words, this is a software patent, not permitted under the European Patent Treaty, and totally unenforceable! This could be a great chance to have software patents declared unambiguously illegal (only problem, it's in Germany, and isn't it a German institution that holds the patent?)
Cheers,
Wol
Has anyone mentioned a patent number?
Posted Sep 5, 2006 16:04 UTC (Tue) by edmundo (guest, #616) [Link]
Some people say that you should just ignore people who bluster on about patent portfolios without mentioning a particular patent.
I've not looked at any of the MP3 patents, and I don't intend to, but I've seen it claimed that it seems rather unlikely that they would be enforceable against MP3 decoders.
It would be interesting if this dispute went to court, but I would guess that it won't happen. Sisvel would probably prefer to give money to SanDisk in a secret out-of-court settlement rather than have their patent declared invalid.
Has anyone mentioned a patent number?
Posted Sep 5, 2006 16:31 UTC (Tue) by pbardet (subscriber, #22762) [Link]
"Sisvel would probably prefer to give money to SanDisk"
I thought they would prefer the other way.
Has anyone mentioned a patent number?
Posted Sep 5, 2006 16:36 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
mp3licensing.com has a list of patents as well as a price list. A decode-only license for MP3 costs US$0.75 per unit.
Total cost of the parts in an iPod Nano one year ago: $90.
Yes, the parts prices are coming down and the MP3 license is not, but does using an unlicensed MP3 implementation really save them that much?
Has anyone mentioned a patent number?
Posted Sep 5, 2006 18:43 UTC (Tue) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link]
Maybe they are a good company and are not paying the license out of principle?
Has anyone mentioned a patent number?
Posted Sep 5, 2006 23:22 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
I don't think willful infringement is the kind of thing good companies do. Lobbying and pushing for change in the laws would be great, but willful infringement just makes the legal penalites higher. As long as the laws are there, you're pretty much stuck with complying with the law or risking bankruptcy-grade penalties.
A lesson to learn
Posted Sep 5, 2006 21:06 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
Whether SanDisk can legally do what they did or not is an interesting question, but I think for open source software distributors a very important question has been answered here. Yes, MP3 patents are being actively enforced and people doing so aren't afraid to press charges and do publicity stunts in order to make sure they get their message across.
I don't think any open source distribution would want to be on the receiving end this kind of thing. And let's not forget that even if SanDisk are right, they will have a big lawyers' bill to pay before they can prove it.
A lesson to learn
Posted Sep 5, 2006 23:50 UTC (Tue) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (subscriber, #39670) [Link]
Probably right. Most FOSS business models operate on a shoestring.
However, most "for profit" companies tend to look at a patent claim less on the merits of the
patent, and more in terms of the business case. If the cost of the legal fees exceed the patent
royalties claimed, most businesses would use the bottom line to decide what to do.
One of the refreshing things about the RIM case is that RIM started out fighting the patent claim
because in their view it was unwarranted. But, eventually the economics of the broken patent
system caused even RIM to cave.
My understanding of how the laws work is imperfect, though would note that people make no
shortage of claims about what their patents cover. Sometimes the courts disagree with the
patent holder, so the patent holder has a hollow claim before the courts decide in his favour.
Perhaps SanDisk made a conscious decision to challenge it in court based on their understanding
of the patents involved?
It might become a very interesting show yet.
A lesson to learn
Posted Sep 6, 2006 2:39 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Perhaps SanDisk made a conscious decision to challenge it in court based on their understanding of the patents involved?
Yeah, who knows. Anyhow, I'd say the publicity stunt alone is sufficient to scare off some SanDisk customers - at least until the whole thing is resolved. But who knows, maybe SanDisk are confident they will win this so they don't care about some revenue loss and legal fees. And you're right about the bottom line reasoning by most companies - whatever turns out to be cheaper goes.
In any event, I don't think distros like Debian, Fedora etc., that are based on 100% open source software should get involved with MP3 stuff at all. It's a hornet's nest, apparently. I think everyone here at LWN knows what I was referring to with that comment - some people's desire to include MP3 players in those distros. From my perspective, it's a big no-no.
We need a countdown
Posted Sep 7, 2006 2:08 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
Yes, avoiding mp3 support is essential for any US based distro... now. But we also need to be keeping an eye out for when these patents go away and be ready to drop packages the same day.
Take the Unisys patent and the whole libgif => libungif problem. The patent expired in the US, but it was still thought to be in effect in a couple of countries.... But that was several years ago now and I know I still have libungif on my machine and I'll bet everyone reading this does also. rpmfind no longer even goes back far enough to find a copy of libgif.
We need a project to locate the patents blocking important features and show when they expire in each of the major countries where legal problems would be likely. We have to do it because none of the holders want to even admit they have an expiration date, heck it is hard enough to get them to specify exactly which patents they claim over a topic.
We need this database because over the next five to ten years some really important patents are going to be expiring. MPEG1 Video and MPEG1 layer 1 audio patents should already be starting to expire and MPEG1 layer 3 audio should be clear around the end of the decade. Anyone know when the last MPEG 2 video patent was granted?
We need a countdown
Posted Sep 7, 2006 22:01 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link]
A general countdown would be a good idea.Tracking down the patent databases is really difficult, and it's often difficult to determine if a standard actually REQUIRES a given patent. There IS a simpler way to get an upper bound and probable estimate for standards. As noted here, MP3 was publicly spec'ed in 1991; patents last 20 years, so no patent could be valid after 2011. It's morely likely that patents were revealed at least a year before (because otherwise public discussions would have invalidated the patent filing), so it's probable that any VALID patents would expire by 2010. It's 2006, so it's probably about 4 years to MP3 freedom. It may even be less. So the upper bound would be 2011, and likely less. At least it's a partial answer.
We need a countdown
Posted Sep 12, 2006 3:13 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]
Take the Unisys patent and the whole libgif => libungif problem. The patent expired in the US, but it was still thought to be in effect in a couple of countries.... But that was several years ago now and I know I still have libungif on my machine and I'll bet everyone reading this does also. rpmfind no longer even goes back far enough to find a copy of libgif.That's not a clean example insofar as IBM managed to patent the same thing. Yes, yes, we all know you can't patent the same thing, but the examiners didn't notice, and are you going to pony up the couple of megabucks should IBM suffer a change in management and decide to get feisty? IIRC, there was some complication over who filed first; for all I know, IBM owned the real patent and let Unisys take the heat in exchange for some of the cash. Unlikely, yes, but pretty much any level of patent risk is too much if you're a FLOSS developer. And IBM's beneficence never extended far enough to clarify their opinion on the matter.
Anyway, the point is that IBM's version issued a few years later than Unisys's, so there's this ongoing gray area that may actually extend to the present day. (1989 sort of runs in mind as the year of issuance, but I'd have to go look it up to be sure. Check the comp.compression FAQ if you're curious.)
Greg
SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
Posted Sep 7, 2006 10:10 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
What would be really nice is a main distro that ships with all applications with software patents only for European users.
I don't care for software patents because it's not a concern for me (at least for now), so why should I have to go to pains just because americans have them?
Some years ago there was that problem with criptographic algorithms export and most affected software had two versions: one for american users and other for international users. Why can't this be done in Europe also?
If enough europeans rely on patented software there will be more incentive in Europe to fight software patents.