Juergen Weigert wrote:
On Feb 01, 07 07:02:00 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg#Ogg_codecs> So then those who preach ogg from the hill tops are still not necessarily any more free of patents until they prove that speex and vorbis are not violating someone's patent?
It is actually the other way round: Those who claim to have patents on speex or vorbis must prove that their claims are valid. Unless that is proven a patent isn't worth anything.
Yes and no. In theory, that's obviously true. But in practice, when patent trolls want to cash in, it doesn't really matter. Software patents are a ludicrous idea in the first place but the worst part is that the patent offices (both in the USA and in Europe) don't make the necessary verifications when they validate a patent. It has to be proved (or not) in court, even for prior art. That's also _almost- acceptable in theory but again, in practice, such cases can last for months or years, and it gets really, really expensive (which is why the software patents don't "protect David from Goliath", unlike what the pro-software-patents lobbying politicians from UK/Ireland say again and again, thank gawd their EU presidency is over). I don't know for the US, but the EPO (European Patent Office) only makes money from the patents that are filed and accepted, they don't have any other source of revenue (and no, they're actually not an official body of European Union). Hence, it's pretty obvious why they accept anything without properly validating.
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { std::cout << i << std::endl; }
I'm sure this violates a software patent as well.
not so sure...
Oh really ;) http://news.com.com/2100-1001-836322.html http://news.com.com/Kodak+wins+Java+patent+suit/2100-1014_3-5394765.html http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39168864,00.htm "Kodak's case centred on three patents that it bought from Wang Laboratories in 1997, several years after Java was created. These patents -- numbers 5,206,951; 5,421,012; and 5,226,161 -- referred to the integration of data between object managers, and between data managers, and to the integration of different programs that were manipulating data of different types. Kodak argued in court that these patents covered the method where an application "asked for help" from another application -- such as in Java's object-oriented programming." Great example of a patent rip-off.
umm... hang on for a minute... /me checks... /me files a patent for the for loop and gets rich !!!
That may get accepted, but it will be most definitly an invalid patent.
Sure, prior art all the way. But still, it could potentially be accepted (I mean, Amazon's one-click-buy patent [1] isn't any better) and if I was a business with lots of cash and lawyers, I could sue <smaller company that eats a little of my market share> and suck out their cash reserves on law suite costs. Oh, and as that smaller company is probably filed at some stock market, it would cause fear and loathing and their shares would drop really hard. [1]http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00/software-patents/amazon.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Patent_controversies http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/amazon_patent.html And yes, it has been patented in Europe too: http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/amaz0818/
No, seriously, Vorbis, FLAC and Theora probably violate patents.
Here We can assume that these 'probably violated patents' are invalid. Can't we?
Sure, we can ;) Unless someone proves in court that they do violate some patent, they don't. But given that Frauenhofer & friends have filed a lot of patents in that area, it is quite possible that there is room for a law suit. From them or from others. MS has some proprietary codecs too, no doubt they've filed patents on these. Note that I'm _not_ saying: don't use Vorbis/FLAC/Theora because they probably violate patents. I'm just saying that software patents are an absurd and dangerous Damocles sword over the head of software development (both closed source and open source).
[...]
That's exactly why software patents are a ridiculous (but extremely dangerous) idea in the first place.
No doubt about the 'ridiculous', but dangerousness becomes relative, once you strip the FUD off.
Not so sure. It only got a little more quiet now because we entered the "cold war of software patents", where larger businesses file patents like crazy just to have a retaliation weapon -- IBM (they have the largest software patent portfolio of them all), Microsoft (I sure don't like them but they're not patent trolls, fortunately), Oracle, Amazon (*g*), etc etc... E.g. if MS or whoever was to file a lawsuit for software patent violation against Novell or Redhat, there would be a lot of IBM and Sun and others to step up against MS, waving the threat of a few lawsuits against them using their own patent portfolio. That's what is currently sort of balancing the situation out, but for how long... And btw, they wouldn't step up because of their love for OpenSource or Linux, but because they have large investments and partnerships.
Still, with MP3, the question isn't even open. It's pretty clear, and it's damn restrictive.
Right. Thomson and Fraunhofer have tried hard to demonstrate the validity of their patents...
Indeed http://bladeenc.mp3.no/ http://www.northcode.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-5393.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5312696.stm And Jürgen, I know you know all that, it's more meant as a piece of information for those how haven't had the joy (?) of taking a dive into the topic of software patents ;) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v http://www.fosdem.org http://opensuse.org