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Burst's $10 Million Patent Settlement: Quicktime, iTunes, ... DVR?
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Wow?! How old are you? 17?
You have quite a narrow view on the world..
I bet you think it is ok to leach films and music of the net too?
You know,"all information should be free",the theme of the cyberpunk era?
Clearly you are not working in the industry,be it engineering or design.Well,or working at all?
-If I work for 4 years in my basement and make a record it is ok you to take the material,promote it,claim it your own and go on a world tour earning 30m€ on my music?
-Or I run a team of 144 scientist,spend 1B$ to develop a chemical formula for curing menieres disease and it is OK for you to copy the formula and start selling the drug for 1/4 of price because "well,I dont have to cover the developement expenses because there are none! that dumb git did all the work,now I reap the rewards!"
-Or a manufacturer in china to start making some iMacs,because hey,they made their first 100.000 unit run for apple and now they have few weeks of spare time. Hell, lets copy the os x for the users too. AND lets put in some mp3s,Final cut pro and some music program,say logic8?
Because,hell,who cares about patents and copyrights??!
Cheap for Apple, and (many of) the patents are still active for Burst to use against competitors.
Not really
No really. If your great idea, on which you spent two hundred thousand (like my very small company) or two hundred million to create, was then made available for free or taken away by someone who can market it better, why would anyone waste the time and huge amounts of my money developing a new idea? It actually inhibits innovation if there is no patent protection.
Maybe some patents should not have been granted, but 97% are legit.
No really. If your great idea, on which you spent two hundred thousand (like my very small company) or two hundred million to create, was then made available for free or taken away by someone who can market it better, why would anyone waste the time and huge amounts of my money developing a new idea? It actually inhibits innovation if there is no patent protection.
Maybe some patents should not have been granted, but 97% are legit.
Too bad Apple just paid $10 million for a piece of junk. Quicktime streaming is horrible. They should have used that $10 million to create a good streaming solution.
Never gonna happen. There is NO DVR in Apple's future. Their model is pay to download.
Looks like they have some multimedia content delivery products...so in this case they do have something.
A couple things:
First, Burst did not sue Apple. Apple filed suit for Declaratory Judgment for non-infringement and invalidity of Burst's patents.
Second, to set the record straight (though no to comment on the validity or invalidity of Burst's portfolio), Burst was a company with an actual product. Microsoft settled with them because Microsoft incorporated Burst's technology and then turned around and hosed Burst at the same time Microsoft was being investigated for anti-trust violations. Since then, Burst has shrunk from a 100+ person company to a like 2 person company with its patent portfolio as its only assets. They are not a troll in the traditional sense because they didn't buy their patents and never made a product - rather they did make a product and it didn't work out.
Regarding the invalidity, I'd like to point out that the oldest patent was filed in 1988, which was way before the big pipes coming into our house that we all enjoy.
I'm not a fan of burst, quite the opposite in fact, but people here should know a little about the facts before flailing around and screaming troll.
First, Burst did not sue Apple. Apple filed suit for Declaratory Judgment for non-infringement and invalidity of Burst's patents.
Second, to set the record straight (though no to comment on the validity or invalidity of Burst's portfolio), Burst was a company with an actual product. Microsoft settled with them because Microsoft incorporated Burst's technology and then turned around and hosed Burst at the same time Microsoft was being investigated for anti-trust violations. Since then, Burst has shrunk from a 100+ person company to a like 2 person company with its patent portfolio as its only assets. They are not a troll in the traditional sense because they didn't buy their patents and never made a product - rather they did make a product and it didn't work out.
Regarding the invalidity, I'd like to point out that the oldest patent was filed in 1988, which was way before the big pipes coming into our house that we all enjoy.
I'm not a fan of burst, quite the opposite in fact, but people here should know a little about the facts before flailing around and screaming troll.
Well the thing is, most of these patent ideas are so obvious that many people can or might already have come up with it, thought it's totally obvious, and thus never thought to patent it.
It's similar to: Method for humans and other lifeforms to consume solid, liquid, and other types of food... Damn I should patent THAT =p
It's similar to: Method for humans and other lifeforms to consume solid, liquid, and other types of food... Damn I should patent THAT =p
Let me rephrase then: software patents ARE stupid and frivolous, apart from those select few that show real novelty/invention, have a component of industrial application and do NOT infringe on prior art.
Only in the U.S. you could imagine patenting something so generic, stupid and "priorartish" as "hierarchic menus", "faster than real time streaming" or "one-click shopping".
It's just criminal what the USPTO does nowadays, granting monopolies to corporations that have little more to do than suing others in order to get some precious money in their balance sheets. Apart from filling USPTO's coffers and protecting American industry in a disguised way, of course...
Do you believe that hardware is patentable? If so, what is the distinction because all hardware can be simulated in software and all software can be reduced to a hardware form? Seriously, I want to know.
Of course hardware is patentable; the same doesn't apply to software, especially when we talk of prior art, discoveries and things that have no industrial application at all. If you believe otherwise, you are just breaking a concept of patentable subjects that has been there since ever, for a good reason.
Simple as that.
Absolute baloney. By that argument, half the stuff that is currently patentable would not be since they are not technically a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter" (See 35 U.S.C. 101 for what is literal patentable subject matter). Hardware, i.e., any chip which you say should be patentable, is not a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." If you argue that it is something manufactured, I say computer code on a disc is just as manufactured. And software has dozens and dozens of industrial applications. What do you think drives half the machines that manufacture all of our toys and gadgets?
I appreciate that being from Switzerland you have a different perspective because the EU laws require, as I understand it, a technical effect, i.e., an effect that occurs outside the computer which is why software by itself is not patentable in the EU, but the same requirement is not laid out in US patent law.
And the technical effect itself is easy enough to overcome. Have the software flip a switch or turn something on and *bam* patentable subject matter in the EU.
You have yet to articulate a reason why software shouldn't be and hardware should other than "well hardware should be because it always has been."
-p-
Why?
This is what I would love to see on message boards - people make a statement like that above and actually articulate a reason for it. I may or may not disagree, but I have no way of knowing why you think they should be shortened. You think the monopoly is artificially long? You think for certain subject matters there should be a shorter time than others (e.g., some say software patents should only be for 5 years due to the rapidity of development and the time it takes to get anything through the patent office).
Why should copyright be shortened? Because it already compensates authors or their families? Should it be shortened for just corporations that publish the work?
Why why why?
except for the tv shows that are getting pulled.....
i think dvr would be a great idea, and would buy one for sure if the next gen. started coming w/ 'em.
Amen. Apple should stop paying the trolls.Let me rephrase then: software patents ARE stupid and frivolous, apart from those select few that show real novelty/invention, have a component of industrial application and do NOT infringe on prior art.
Only in the U.S. you could imagine patenting something so generic, stupid and "priorartish" as "hierarchic menus", "faster than real time streaming" or "one-click shopping".
It's just criminal what the USPTO does nowadays, granting monopolies to corporations that have little more to do than suing others in order to get some precious money in their balance sheets. Apart from filling USPTO's coffers and protecting American industry in a disguised way, of course...
Perhaps they did. From my reading for $10 million they got access to Burst's current patent portoflio along with;
So they got access to DVR patents as well. Not just Quicktime streaming.MR said:
OK, I'll bite. The copyright is used to spur creation of art by allowing the artist financial benefit of his/hers creation. When the copyright lasts 90 (or however many) years *after* the death of the artist as it does now, you have to know something is wrong. The copyright, as it is right now, is set to benefit the copyright owners (not the original artist) and has lost its original purpose. In effect, the copyright owners (big media) have legislated themselves into easy profit with this extremely long copyright term. This situation benefits nobody but them, not the artists and not the audience. The situation with patents is similar. And the matter is not helped by USPTO, which will patent absolutely anything (ridiculous patents like One-click by Amazon or e-mail over wireless by NTP come to mind).
OK, 1) the giving of protection after the life of the author was actually to benefit the author's family, i.e., author writes a book in his later years, dies, and then only the publisher got anything from the book because copyright died with the author. The extension past the author's life was to benefit the family so they got SOMEthing. I'll concede that corporations have had a big hand in extending the copyright length. I do not think you are necessarily wrong in saying copyright length should be shortened, but at least you articulated a reason which is 95% more than other people do. 2) The situation is not at all similar with patents though. If anything, patent term has been shortened in the last 12 years. Specifically, the patent is only good from its earliest priority date (usually the filing date, but may be earlier if it claims an earlier priority date from an earlier filing). It used to be that patents were enforceable for 17 years after it issued which is what caused people to keep filing application after application as the earlier one was about to issue because the patentee got a fresh set of 17 year protection from each application as it issued (these are the submarine patents). Now, however, and since 1995, no matter how many applications are filed, the term starts from the earliest filing date and only runs 20 years.
Lastly, people complain that it is too easy to get a patent. Do you have one? Have you gone through the process of getting one? Because I have - in fact it's what I do day in and day out and it is not nearly as easy as everyone thinks. In fact, the Supreme Court just made it harder than ever earlier this year with the KSR case. Yes, there are many patents out there that would get invalidated because the examiners in the late 90's and early 2000's were inundated and didn't have the tools to effectively conduct prior art searches, but the PTO has significantly cracked down on what is allowable and are pursuing peer review programs to put all available prior art in front of the Examiner.
In context of the Burst case, the judge invalidated some of the claims, but some of them survived, which means even what Apple could find that may have been prior art apparently wasn't enough. Sometimes, and I am not conceding that this is the case, hindsight is 20/20 and what seems obvious now, may not really have been.
People think that to get a patent that someone has to invent a completely revolutionary idea and that's simply not the case - the patent system is supposed to reward innovation by granting patents on improvements. Baby steps are patentable - they don't have to be for, and shouldn't be, giant leaps forward. If they were, no one would develop improvements since they couldn't assure protection of their invested time and energy.