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SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)Posted Sep 5, 2006 14:43 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)Parent article: SanDisk faces MP3 licence dispute (BBC)
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....
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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 (subscriber, #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...
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