Garrett-Glaser: Patent skullduggery: Tandberg rips off x264 algorithm

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Technically, yes.

Got a few grand laying around so you can actually prove it to somebody that matters?

Although now that this is out it pretty much ruins the chances of successful lawsuit on the side of the patent holders. They can probably bundle it with a few similar type patents and charge licensing fees, of course. Since it would be cheaper to pay the fees rather then take them defeat the patents.

Yes.

Great. The fraud has been caught this time.

And how many times have patent frauders read changelogs of free software projects, filed patents for innovative ideas, and not gotten caught?

Patents don't work in fields where producers, with impact on financial markets, are sometimes individuals or small companies.

I'm sure I've seen more than one paper by an economist which rips patents to shreds as inefficient, and counter-productive.

(Apparent) sarcasm aside, it is clearly somebody at Tandberg that ought to be arrested.

Interestingly enough, I've actually heard ppl argue that indeed Free and Open Source developers are taking away company's and individual's opportunity to make money... Which is obviously true. And it is not the first time: the invention of the press has taken away huge amounts of work (and income!) from people copying books by hand. The train must've been horrible for many people working in other transporation branches. The phone has killed of the work of those doing telegraph work, and so on. And more recently, filesharing is killing the record companies, wikipedia is taking down companies writing encyclopedias etc etc.

It's all so horrible. We should have stopped progress in it's track back in the day someone came up with the idea to grow crops instead of hunt and gather. Maybe we shouldn't even have left the trees. Or get out of the see in the first place!

This whole evolution thing is a bummer for anyone who wants to earn a honest living by doing legacy things... Life's a bitch, ask the RIAA, Microsoft and countless others.

And that sums up the whole problem of patents.

There are 6.8 billion people and years of time to invent anything. Given those odds, re-inventing something existing happens all the time. Now if one of them is early enough and does the required paperwork, 6.8 billion minus one people are not allowed to do the same, even if they think of it themselves. This is totally ridiculous, even if the patent system would work perfectly, which it doesn't.

When will the patent madness end?

Independent invention is not accepted as a defence against patent infringement.

One of the nice thing about git is that it's distributed. So that while it may be easy to fake a git tree on one server, it's going to be very difficult to do it over everybody's. Especially ones that were pulled once and never pulled again. (yay Gentoo users)

I don't know about the US, but in France we have the "Agence de protection des programmes" (software protection agency) which is basically a trusted third party where you send for a small fee a copy of your software. It is kept afterwards so that you can, if needed, prove that you had already written a particular piece of code at a given time.

> It shows that, even for a large company, a truly systematic review of "prior art" is just infeasible. I very much doubt Tandberg did this on purpose, nor would I assume they nor Cisco would actively grep commit logs for ideas to patent - that would be such bad news for a legitimate company that I can't see that happening.

Most of the time patents are used for very innocuous reasons. The vast majority never get licensed and even a tiny percentage of that is ever litigated on.

For most companies patents are just something they can stick in their financial reports and advertisements for investors that they have X number of patents. It's to show how innovative they are and helps give comfort to investors that they can use the patents in a sale if the company was ever to fail. (it reduces risk)

Most patents end up just being feather's in some corporation's caps more or less.

This is why I've read studies were people said that so-called reforming the patent office is not a good thing. Increasing the number of patent officers or increasing the quality of patent officers is just going to be a waste of our money and time. Instead best bang for the buck is spent on the patents that people are actively litigating on. This allows you to focus on what matters.